art france

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 324 pages. Surreal, the long-awaited, definitive biography of Gala Dali, unmasks this famous yet little-known queen of the twentieth-century art world, who graced the canvases, inspired the poetry, and influenced the careers of her illustrious lovers and husbands with tenderness, courage, and agency. Using previously undiscovered material, Surreal tells the riveting story of Gala Dali, (1894-1982) who broke away from her cultured but penurious background in pre-Revolutionary Russia to live in Paris with both France's most famous poet Paul Eluard and Max Ernst. By the time she met the budding artist Salvador Dali in 1929, Gala was known as the Mother of Surrealism. She rapidly became his mentor, muse, and protector, marrying him in 1934 and subsequently engineering their vast fortune. At a time when artists were celebrities, Gala acted as the ambassador of the Surrealist movement, spreading its popularity across the globe. Remainder mark to top edge otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. London, M Q Publications, 1st, 2006, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Like new. An exclusive collection of drawings that reveal the tender side of R. Crumb. Evocative haunting images of people and places such as Aline, his daughter Sophie, scenes from the village and region he lives in the South of France, Jesse Crumb, his first wife Dana and their son Jesse and of course the Blues musicians he treasures from his 78rpm record collection. Unpaginated, but about 120 pages.

Hardcover. London, Frances Lincoln Children's Bks, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 72 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to boards. Color and Black and white pictures throughout by Blake.

Softcover. NY, New York Review Books, 1st US., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 488 pages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, French aristocratic society developed an art of living based on a refined code of good manners. Conversation, which began as a way of passing time, eventually became the central ritual of social life. In the salons, freed from the rigidity of court life, it was women who dictated the rules and presided over exchanges among socialites, writers, theologians, and statesmen. They contributed decisively to the development of the modern French language, new literary forms, and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas. With a cast of characters both famous and unknown, ranging from the Marquise de Rambouillet to Madame De Stael was a, and including figures like Ninon de Lenclos, the Marquise de Sevigne, and Madame de Lafayette, as well as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Diderot, and Voltaire, Benedetta Craveri traces the history of this worldly society that carried the art of sociability to its supreme perfection-and ultimately helped bring on the Revolution that swept it all away. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, Tate Gallery, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Wonderfully written and illustrated account of the work of the Bloomsbury artists, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. Contains detailed chronologies of their lives. Catalogue entries on two hundred works, all illustrated in color, bring out the chief characteristics of Bloomsbury painting--domestic, contemplative, sensuous, and essentially pacific. These are seen in landscapes, portraits, and still lifes set in London, Sussex, and the South of France, as well as in the abstract painting and applied art that placed these artists at the forefront of the avant-garde before the First World War. Portraits of family and friends--from Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes to Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell--highlight the cultural and social setting of the group. Essays by leading scholars provide further insights into the works and the changing critical reaction to them, exploring friendships and relationships both within and outside of Bloomsbury, as well as the movement's wider social, economic, and political. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages. A landmark work by English historian Frances A. Yates (1899-1981); an examination of the mnemonic systems developed by the ancient Greeks, and their impact on the Renaissance thought of Giordano Bruno and others. Named one of the top 100 nonfiction books of the century by the Modern Library in 1999. One large fold-out plate, clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Clean, bright copy, 467 pages. Illustrated with 36 pages of historic Plates, b/w, on coated paper. One of the most famous works of history, Johan Huizinga presents a brilliant portrait of life, thought, and art in 14th and 15th century France and the Netherlands.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Clean, bright copy, 467 pages. Illustrated with 36 pages of historic Plates, b/w, on coated paper. One of the most famous works of history, Johan Huizinga presents a brilliant portrait of life, thought, and art in 14th and 15th century France and the Netherlands.

Hardcover. NY, Narry H. Abrams, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in pictorial boards with acetate dust jacket. 112 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Presents all the existing work of Piero della Francesca. Includes 64 color plates and 111 black-and-white illustrations. Introduction by Peter Murray. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Curt Valentin, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, textured beige boards with a green cloth spine. 94 pages of text and 58 black & white plates. Limited to 1,000 copies. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The daguerreotype, invented in France, came to America in 1839. By 1851, this early photographic method had been improved by American daguerreotypists to such a degree that it was often referred to as "the American process." The daguerreotype-now perhaps mostly associated with stiffly posed portraits of serious-visaged nineteenth-century personages-was an extremely detailed photographic image, produced though a complicated process involving a copper plate, light-sensitive chemicals, and mercury fumes. It was, as Sarah Kate Gillespie shows in this generously illustrated history, something wholly and remarkably new: a product of science and innovative technology that resulted in a visual object. It was a hybrid, with roots in both fine art and science, and it interacted in reciprocally formative ways with fine art, science, and technology. Gillespie maps the evolution of the daguerreotype, as medium and as profession, from its introduction to the ascendancy of the "American process," tracing its relationship to other fields and the professionalization of those fields. She does so by recounting the activities of a series of American daguerreotypists, including fine artists, scientists, and mechanical tinkerers. She describes, for example, experiments undertaken by Samuel F. B. Morse as he made the transition from artist to inventor; how artists made use of the daguerreotype, both borrowing conventions from fine art and establishing new ones for a new medium; the use of the daguerreotype in various sciences, particularly astronomy; and technological innovators who drew on their work in the mechanical arts.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2nd pr, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 312 pages, color and b&w illustrations. A bristling and brilliant memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York School of painters and their times by the renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss, who, from the early years, was a member of the group that shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. Schloss was born in Germany and moved to New York City during World War II. She became part of a thriving community of artists and intellectuals that included Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, John Cage, and Frank O'Hara. She married the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. She was both a working artist and an incisive critic, and was a candid and gimlet-eyed witness of the close-knit community that was redefining the world of art. In Italy she spent time with Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly, Meret Oppenheim, and Francesca Woodman. Remainder dot to top edge otherwise clean.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 199 pages illustrated in color. This book provides a new way of thinking about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture by prioritizing production over reception. Abandoning the ideologically driven discourse that distinguished fine from decorative art between the 1690s and 1770s, The Mobile Image reveals how the two have been inextricably bound from the earliest stages of artistic instruction through the daily life of painters' workshops. In this study, author David Pullins defines artisanal and artistic means of learning, seeing, and making through a system of "mobile images": motifs that were effectively engineered for mobility and designed never to be definitive, always awaiting replication and circulation. He examines the careers of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and Francois Boucher, situating them against a much broader cast of actors--such as printmakers, publishers, anonymous studio assistants, and architects, among others--to place eighteenth-century painting within a wider context of media and making. clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Algonquin Books, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. When Alizee Benoit, a young American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her arts patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends and fellow WPA painters, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. And, some seventy years later, not her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, who, while working at Christie's auction house, uncovers enigmatic paintings hidden behind works by those now famous Abstract Expressionist artists. Do they hold answers to the questions surrounding her missing aunt? Entwining the lives of both historical and fictional characters, and moving between the past and the present, The Muralist plunges readers into the divisiveness of prewar politics and the largely forgotten plight of European refugees refused entrance to the United States. It captures both the inner workings of New York's art scene and the beginnings of the vibrant and quintessentially American school of Abstract Expressionism.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century.

Hardcover. NY, BlueBridge, 1st US, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 246 pages. This narrative history masterfully weaves together the sweeping events surrounding what has become known as the "Babylonian captivity" of the popes into the broader story of 14th-Century Europe?one of the most turbulent times in the continent's history. It was a time of fear, ferocity, and religious agony, which saw the suppression of the Knights Templar and the Cathars, the first onslaught of the plague, and the beginning of the Hundred Years' War. The century also produced some of the greatest writers and artists in the western tradition, including Giotto, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer. Central to this period was the movement of the papal seat from Rome to Avignon in the south of France, where seven successive popes held power from 1309 to 1377. The drama, intrigue, and tumult associated with the papacy in exile forms the perfect lens through which to clearly see a Europe making the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Stockport, UK, Dewi Lewis, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket, 55 pages. 26 black & white photos. Life, Love, Death and Decay are the elements that Reverdot, one of France's leading photographers, carefully shapes using a sequence of extraordinary single images to create a flow thatechoes the unrelenting progress of Life Towards Decay. Reverdot's sixth book to date.

Softcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 408 pages. Makes accessible to modern readers the 17th-century rhetorics of Thomas Hob-bes (1588-1677) and Bernard Lamy (1640-1715) Hobbes' A Briefe of the Art of Rhet-orique, the first English translation of Aristotle's rhetoric, reflects Hobbes' sense of rhetoric as a central instrument of self-defense in an increasingly frac-tious Commonwealth. In its approach to rhetoric, which Hobbes defines as "that Faculty by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer," the Briefe looks forward to Hobbes' great political works De Cive and Leviathan. Published anonymously in France as De l'art de parler, Lamy's rhetoric was translated immediately into English as The Art of Speaking. Lamy's long associa-tion with the Port Royalists made his works especially attractive to English readers because Port Royalists were en-gaged in a vicious quarrel with the Jesuits during the last half of the 17th century. Name at top of front cover and front fly leaf.

Hardcover. Greenwich CT, New York Graphic Society, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, dark red cloth/dark red DJ. 144 pp. 108 bw plates. All of Falconet's major works and attributions are illustrated in gravure, with many details. Includes a translation from the French of Falconet's Reflections sur la sculpture by Eda Mezer Levitine.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 120 pages illustrated in color. Since the first report of cave art (at Altamira in 1879), attempts have been made to explain the purpose of the mysterious drawings. Art for art's sake; totemism; hunting, destructive, or fertility magic; and modern structuralist theories have all been proposed. Clottes and Lewis-Williams propose a new theory emphasizing the shamanic aspects of Paleolithic cave paintings. After an unavoidably technical chapter providing the basics of shamanism, the authors examine Paleolithic paintings from across France and Spain, noting the use of animal figures, composite figures combining both human and animal characteristics, and geometric designs that are all common elements of shamanism. The bulk of the book is both fascinating and thought-provoking, and while it is not likely to be the last word on the subject, it is an important contribution to the field. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 275 pages. Translated from the French by Olivier Bernier. Preface by Virgil Thomson. The autobiography of a Jewish painter who fled from Bolshevik Russia to Spain, moved to France and who was imprisoned during WWWII by the Germans and who moved eventually to the U.S.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket. Autobiography of the owner of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres in Paris, a center, between the World Wars, for the best contemporary French writing and for its authors. 536 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 391 pages. How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s. Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who's who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China's Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless expose of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Hardcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art , 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Volume Two Only. First Edition. Photographs by Eugene Atget. Essay and notes to the plates by Maria Morris Hambourg. Appendixes include Berenice Abbott's typewritten copy of Andre Calmette's handwritten letter to her (late 1928). Maroon cloth with debossed title blind-stamped on cover and in gilt on spine, with dust jacket. 192 pp. with 116 plates and 84 black and white reference illustrations. Printed by The Meriden Gravure Company from halftone negatives made by Richard Benson. Clean, tight copy.