Monographs

In the early work of John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Henry James saw “the slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.” Sargent’s talent, nay, genius was indeed uncanny, sustained with equal...

The first and only monograph on the extraordinary work of multidisciplinary and experiential Dutch artist duo DRIFT DRIFT  was established in Amsterdam in 2007 by Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph  Nauta. In their installations and interactive...

Exploring the art and life of this important American artist whose work bridged the gaps between abstraction, feminism, and Blackness Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction is a fascinating examination of the multifaceted career of artist, activist,...

As F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed the mad glories of the 1920s on the printed page, Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) captured them on canvas. A seductive Garbo-esque beauty with an irresistible force of personality, this refugee of the Russian Revolution...

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters...

'Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.' Vincent van Gogh saw nature and art as inseparably linked. In The Healing Power...

With Vladimir Kagan’s death in 2016, the world of design lost one of its most celebrated practitioners. Pointed Leaf Press is honored to be reissuing, in its third edition: Vladimir Kagan: A Lifetime of Avant Garde Design. The new book, in addition to...

American Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation and writing over the course of seven decades, producing one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic oeuvres. Tanning’s work conjures...

The first book to feature Jacob Lawrence’s Nigeria series, this richly illustrated volume also highlights Africa’s place as a global center of modernist art and culture. This revelatory book shines a light on the understudied but important influence of...

Bringing together a range of unconventional painted supports and found-object sculptures, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood provides an innovative, in-depth look into the artist’s sculptural practice. In addition to painting and drawing on...

This XL edition traces the extraordinary depth and breadth of Michelangelo’s work and his ascent to the elite of the Renaissance and art history. Ten richly illustrated chapters cover the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and architecture, with special...

A deeply moving and brilliantly idiosyncratic visual book of days by the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids and M Train. More than 365 images chart Smith’s singular aesthetic -- inspired by her wildly popular Instagram. In 2018, without any...

In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to  metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a  visit...

The definitive volume on the ever-evolving and shape-shifting work of the Chicago-based artist, Nick Cave: Forothermore highlights the way Cave’s practice has shifted and continues to shift in response to our history and current moment of cultural crisis...

This book provides a material and social history of the art of Giuseppe Penone, a leading protagonist of Arte Povera, whose work explores the interconnectedness of humans and the phenomenal world. Can a work of art help us know our world differently? In...

Henri Matisse is one of the masters of twentieth-century art and a household word to millions of people who find joy and meaning in his light-filled, colorful images--yet, despite all the books devoted to his work, the man himself has remained a mystery...

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and...

These stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and...

From his earliest pointillist-influenced paintings to this mature and playful paper cut-outs; from enormous, ebullient murals to reverent stained glass--Henri Matisse was renowned for his dramatic use of color and fluid draftsmanship. Thirty of Matisse's...

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived  variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen until she died in  1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet,  painter, novelist, essayist,...

A fresh perspective on the influential critic, offering new ways of understanding the art of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke (1885-1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an...

Discover one of the most admired artists in history: Johannes Vermeer. Complete with crisp reproductions, details, and insightful essays, this monograph spans his entire repertoire, illuminating the artist’s outstanding ability not only to bear witness...

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the...

Bringing together all the greats—from Air Jordan 1 to Air Presto—Nike  and Virgil Abloh reinvent sneaker culture with the collaborative project  The Ten and redesign 10 sneaker icons. Experience engineering ingenuity and...

Ringgold's most formative and influential political works are gathered in this beautifully designed clothbound volume. Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's...

Pettibon is known for his characteristically enigmatic aesthetic and sharply satirical critiques of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low...

Intricate patterns and mind-boggling graphics are trademarks of the fascinating creations of M.C. Escher.  Mysterious and mathematical at once, the magical visual world of Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898–1972) has captivated scientists and scholars...

“A woman once rang me up and said, ‘Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print Reptiles, you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.’ I replied, ‘Madame, if that’s the way you see it, so be it.’” A fittingly sly...

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial...

Edward Hicks (1780–1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks...

Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kruger (born 1945) has been interrogating  consumer culture in works that often combine visual and written language. In her singular graphic style, Kruger probes aspects of identity, desire and consumerism that are...

An  intimate look at the life and career of the Dada hero known for the  unique joy of her work across mediums, authored by her great-niece and  buttressed with archival material.  Even when  performing at Zurich’s Cabaret...

An exploration of nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole and the influential role of his studio for other artists of the Hudson River School. In December 1846, Thomas Cole excitedly began work in his new studio, but his early death...

Presenting recently rediscovered drawings, Life and Death explores what it means for an artist to picture their own death, in both the context of Wyeth’s late career and contemporary American art. This volume presents for the first time a recently...

The adventures, mysteries and many lives of a Matisse masterpiece. Created in 1911, Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio would go on to become one of the most influential works in the history of modern art. The painting, which has hung in MoMA’s galleries...

A groundbreaking insight into Gustave Courbet and his bold experiments in landscape painting. Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne...

Faith Ringgold is a critically acclaimed and key figure of postwar American art, whose unique methods of visual storytelling have documented and advanced art historical, feminist, and civil rights  movements for more than half a century...

Until the early 2000s, little had been written about eye miniatures or  “Lover's Eyes”, and their short-lived popularity at the end of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, when hand-painted portraits  of single human eyes were set in...

 Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe...

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) was a radical sculptor whose unorthodox approach to multiplication, assemblage, industrial production, and serial repetition challenged classical sculptural traditions and provided a definitive break in the history of art...

One of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century, Alice Neel's vibrant, expressionistic paintings revealed a breath-taking depth of emotion within her subjects. From works exploring loss and grief, to communist political art, Neel's work pushed...

Marcel Duchamp, the artist’s first legendary monograph and draft catalogue raisonné, was written by art historian and novelist Robert  Lebel and published in French in 1959; later that same year, it was  translated into English by George Heard...

Street  photography may look like luck, but you have to get out there and hone your craft if you want to shake up those luck vibes. Matt Stuart never goes out without his trusty Leica and, in a career spanning twenty years, has taken some of the...

A wide-ranging retrospective that reveals a master printer’s own photographs to be technically brilliant work of remarkable breadth and complexity.This book presents the first in-depth survey of photographs by Richard Benson (1943–2017), who...

A revised edition of the classic little book, which has over 500,000  copies in print. New material and illustrations make the book even more  accessible to readers who are interested in mindfulness, in seizing the moment, in staying steady in...

Philadelphia—where more than three centuries of history come alive—is not one but several cities and you can experience all of them if you know where to look. Tucked amid the glass-and-steel skyscrapers stand the brick-and-mortar buildings of the...

In the fascinating Encyclopedia of Witchcraft folklore expert Judika Illes introduces readers to the mystical world of witchcraft.  Here are mythic witches, modern witches, sacred goddess witches, even  demon witches, male and female witches,...

For serious readers and dabblers alike, the acclaimed author of the Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells offers the essential book for working with supernatural beings. Spirits permeate every corner of our culture, and the Encyclopedia of Spirits explains who...

Once dismissed as a rusting industrial has-been—the “Next  Detroit”—Philadelphia has enjoyed an astonishing comeback in the 21st century. Over the past two decades, Inga Saffron has served as the  premier chronicler of the city’s physical...

AMC's Best Day Hikes Near Philadelphia offers 50 of the region's best hikes for all levels. Ideal for families, tourists, and locals alike, this easy-to-use guide will help hikers explore Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware year-round, from...

Polaroid Now celebrates new work created by contemporary artists working with Polaroid cameras and film today, and discusses the history, and evolution of the first instant imaging camera system that became a household name.This curated selection of...

With special emphasis on Berks and Lehigh Counties, PA, this groundbreaking work is an unparalleled presentation of the area's most publically-acclaimed regional folk art, known as Hex Signs or Barn Stars. This valuable collection offers the rare...

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s...

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in...

This series of paintings seamlessly fuses contemporary basketball  imagery with Edo-period Japanese art and culture, with captivating results. Each image riffs on a classic Japanese painting or subject, adding a surprisingly weighty visual twist as...

For Marc Chagall (1887–1985), painting was an intricate tapestry of dreams, tales, and traditions. His instantly recognizable visual language carved out a unique early 20th-century niche, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of psychic...

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most influential artists living today . Over the past 65 years, he has produced a radical and varied body of work marked by constant reinvention. Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and...

Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative career handbook for designers that we've all been waiting for. Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, the book opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices...

The 'Masters of Photography' series is a new approach to photography how-to. Each volume is dedicated to the work of one key photographer who, through a series of bite-sized lessons and ideas, tells you everything you always wanted to know about their...

Good design, like good storytelling, brings ideas to life. The latest book from award-winning writer Ellen Lupton is a playbook for creative thinking, showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to create satisfying graphics, products, services...

Inspiring Young Minds to Love and Enjoy Art Everyone tells children that art matters— but the truth is that very often it's hard to know why it really does. Museum visits can feel like a chore as does having to learn the names of the big artists we're...

Offers a unique personal perspective on the journey of collecting  American art and antiques Start with House, Finish with a Collection is the story of how a couple's use of American art and antiques evolved  from furnishing a house into a...

Few product designs have the staying power of creations by Dieter Rams.  Almost everything produced by the most influential designer of the twentieth century is today considered a classic. This new and revised edition...

Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising...

Today, people carry powerful computers in our pockets and call them “phones.” A generation ago, people were amazed that the processing power of a mainframe computer could be contained in a beige box on a desk. This book is a celebration of...

How to Rule at Photography features 50 bite-size tips and tricks to help you improve your photo skills with your phone's camera. Creating brilliant photos with your phone isn't as hard as you might think, and the easy-to-follow advice in this book goes...

YES!! That poet and that poem!  This is a special edition of the poem "The Hill We Climb," read at the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, on January 20, 2021.On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and...

From the paperclip to the Eames Lounge Chair, the hundreds of everyday  objects included in The Design Book span the last five centuries and  shape our society in indelible ways. This extraordinary collection  includes classic pieces by...

Famed sociologist, writer, and Black rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois fundamentally changed the representation of Black Americans with his exhibition of data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition.  Beautiful in design and powerful in content,...

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , one of the best  known and immediately recognizable paintings in the history of 20th century art,  "is famous," as the critic Robert Hughes astutely observed, "for being famous." Indeed,...

Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women...

Whirr, buzz, hum. Before busy machines in factories turned out most of what we need and use, people crafted these  items by hand. From a globe to a pie crimper, a butter churn to a rocking horse, this unique collection highlights fourteen...

The Backyard Birdwatcher’s Bible is that rare type of book, one that is as packed with information as it is pleasing to look at. An elegant aesthetic is paired with practical tips on identifying, attracting, and caring for backyard birds, as well as...

Spanning over 60 years of Jasper Johns’s (b. 1930) prolific career, this spectacular publication is the most comprehensive and definitive study of the artist’s work to date. Written by noted Johns expert Roberta Bernstein, the book explores...

Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) was the last great woodblock print master of the Ukiyo-e tradition, and One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is regarded as his greatest achievement. The only complete set of the series, in the collection of the Museum of International...

The Rookwood Pottery was probably the most famous company making art pottery in the United States in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century, achieving an international reputation and consistently promoting artistic innovation. Proud that...

For almost fifty years, Senga Nengudi has shaped an œuvre that  inhabits a specific and unique place between sculpture, dance, and  performance. And that work has been widely recognized as groundbreaking.  Her iconic R.S.V.P...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is fortunate to have a collection of Italian drawings that encompasses a broad sweep of Italy’s art history, from the Renaissance to Futurism to the contemporary, and includes works by such famed artists as Batoni,...

This text accompanies the first museum survey of the mature work of Warren Rohrer, one of the premiere abstract artists to work in Philadelphia in the 20th century, bringing together 32 large-scale paintings from the years 1972 to 1993. This selection...

In the late eighteenth century, mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner devised a standardized color scheme that allowed him to describe even the subtlest of chromatic differences with consistent terminology. His scheme was then adapted by an Edinburgh...

Ever since his self-proclamation as part of the “New York Five,”  Richard Meier has risen through one top commission after another to the dizzy heights of architectural stardom. From Madison Square Garden to Shenzhen, China, his sleek, luminously...

Discover the audacious futurism of Zaha Hadid. As the first woman to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal,  Hadid broke the rules and re-defined the game, despite some saying her  designs were unbuildable...

Acclaimed as the “father of skyscrapers,” the quintessentially American icon Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect of aspiration. He believed in giving cultivated American life its fitting architectural equivalent and applied his idealism to structures...

Even in his unrealized projects, Le Corbusier redefined modern living, synthesizing functionalism, expressionism, and expansive urban thinking  from Switzerland to Chandigarh, India. This book provides a succinct  introduction to his...

Over the course of his artistic career, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) transformed not only his own style, but the course of art history. From early figurative and landscape painting, he went on to pioneer a  spiritual, emotive, rhythmic use of color...

Shimmering, pulsating color masses characterize the Abstract Expressionist masterpieces of Mark Rothko. Like no other artist in his generation, Rothko developed his own stylistic vocabulary, creating ceiling-high canvases that were to be experienced as...

Painter, and Marxist activist, Diego Rivera was not just the husband of Frida Kahlo.  He is renowned as much for his active politics as for his monumental mural paintings. This introduction explores his unique and visionary renderings of a modern...

Few artists tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840–1926) to capture light itself on canvas. The painter of whom Cézanne said “only  an eye, but my God what an eye!” he stayed true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting...

More than 300 photographs by Lewis W. Hine, whose trailblazing documentary images of early 20th-century working conditions helped to transform United States labor laws.  This book covers all eras of Hine’s work, including his pictures of  child...

It was a dappled and daubed harbor scene that gave Impressionism its  name. When Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet was exhibited in April  1874, critics seized upon the work’s title and its loose stylistic  rendering of light and motion...

Artist and prominent early American Charles Willson Peale  (1741-1827) willed his passions to his equally remarkable children, nieces, and nephew. This engaging pictorial study reveals in-depth these two generations of artists, naturalists, and...

The Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon with no Western equivalent,  one where breathtaking landscapes exist alongside blush-inducing  erotica; where demons and otherworldly creatures torment the living; and  where sumo wrestlers,...

Eliot Porter masterfully created color photographs of the New England woods to pair with the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Both Porter and Thoreau, although they lived a century apart, worked endlessly to  preserve nature and protect it from man...

The beloved classic fantasy adventure PETER PAN has been adapted countless times for film, stage, and spin-offs -- but it's never been seen as depicted by the  brushwork of celebrated Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens. This  elaborately...

The traditional “knight in shining armor” has become a staple figure in popular culture and the images of bloody battlefields, bustling feasting halls, and courtly tournaments have been creatively interpreted many times in film and fiction...

Meet Vincent van Gogh, one of the most famed tragic figures of 19th‑century art. This lush tome collects all his 871 paintings, alongside writings and essays, charting the life and work of a master who continues to tower over art. Today, the works of...

Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photo-lithographs, prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political...

While it is considered by many artists to be a pure and simplistic form of expression, abstract art is also often thought of as vague or exceedingly theoretical. This new installment in the Art Essentials  series demystifies the concept and history...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir put people into the center of his painting. His compositions showed people embracing the pleasures of life, dancing, and  enjoying outings in Paris. He created special atmospheres full of  summer warmth and lightness,...

Street art is a phenomenon and subculture movement that reaches from the darkest urban backstreets to the most glamorous international art  fairs. Despite having earned a place in the canon of twentieth-century  art history, its qualifications...