The first reference work devoted to their lives and roles, this book provides information on some 200 artists' models from the Renaissance to the present day. Most entries are illustrated and consist of a brief biography, selected works in which the model appears (with location), a list of further reading. This will prove an invaluable reference work for art historians, librarians, museum and gallery curators, as well as students and researchers.

With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem - or thinks it does. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food - enough to feed all the world's hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and nearly one tenth of the West's greenhouse gas emissions are released growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market. But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has become one of the world's most pressing environmental and social problems. Travelling from Yorkshire to China, from Pakistan to Japan, and introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers, freegans and food industry directors, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most of what we have. Combining front-line investigation with startling new data, Waste shows how the way we live now has created a global food crisis - and what we can do to fix it.

This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book demonstrates the particular importance of the museum as a cultural site that is both inspiration and provocation for poets. The study uniquely bridges the dual canon in contemporary poetry (and calls the lyric/avant-garde distinction into question) by analyzing museum-sponsored anthologies as well as poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and others. Through these case studies of poets with diverse affiliations, the author shows that the boom in ekphrasis in the past 20 years is not only an aesthetic but a critical phenomenon, a way that poets have come to terms with the critical dilemmas of our moment. Highlighting the importance of poets' peripheral vision-awareness of the institutional conditions that frame encounters with art-the author contend that a museum visit becomes a forum for questioning oppositions that have preoccupied literary criticism for the past 50 years: homage and innovation, modernism and postmodernism, subjectivity and collectivity. The study shows that ekphrasis becomes a strategy for negotiating these impasses-a mode of political inquiry, a meditation on canonization, a venue for comic appraisal of institutionalization, and a means of site-specific feminist revision-in a vital synthesis of critique, perspicacity, and pleasure.

This title was first published in 2003. Drawing on literary, art historical and historical studies, this essay collection explores the complex encounter between culture and politics within Surrealism. The Surrealist movement was one of the first cultural movements to question explicitly the relation between culture and politics, and its attempt to fuse social and cultural revolution has been a critical factor in shaping our sense of modernity. This anthology addresses not only the contested ground between culture and politics within Surrealism itself, and within the subsequent historical accounts of the movement, but also the broader implications of this encounter on our own sense of modernity. Its goal is to delineate the role of radical politics in shaping the historical trajectory of Surrealism.

The Art of Discovery. The Discovery of Art. The History of Art! Warhol, Michelangelo, and da Vinci. Picasso, Monet, and Rembrandt, Ai WeiWei and Jenny Holzer. What were they thinking when they created their masterworks? While we can't always know an artist's exact thoughts, The Handy Art History Answer Book examines their benefactors, their wealth or poverty, their passions, the politics, and the world events that inspired and influenced them. Explore their techniques and materials, the forms, colors and styles, the movements and schools of thoughts, and discover the varied forms and nature of artistic expression. Tracing art history from cave paintings to contemporary installations, along with Romanticism, Impressionism and the numerous “isms” in-between, The Handy Art History Answer Book guides you through the major art movements, artists, and important art pieces from 35,000 B.C.E. to today. This fascinating book provides an overview of art from its history and basic principles to its evolution, philosophy, and the masters who created groundbreaking works that changed its course forever. Accessible and entertaining, this captivating book answers over 600 questions, such as ... What is beauty? What tools did Paleolithic artists use? Why do Egyptian figures have two left feet? What is the difference between weaving and tapestry? What happened to the Venus de Milo's arms? Why is Emperor Comoodus dressed as Hercules? What are the Classical Greek Orders of Architecture? What do the Yoruba consider beautiful? What was the first Gothic cathedral? How was single-point perspective invented? What makes the Mona Lisa such a great work of art? What is the difference between Art Nouveau and Art Deco? What is a Zen garden? Why wasn’t photography considered art in the 19th century? How did Cezanne “astonish Paris with apples”? Why did Jackson Pollock splatter paint all over his canvases? Why do Jeff Koons’ balloon animals sell for millions of dollars? Who is Ai Weiwei? The Handy Art History Answer Book covers not only paintings, but every medium imaginable, including sculpture, architecture, pottery, photography, installation art, and even video games. The concise and clearly written text is enhanced by nearly 150 color images illustrating artistic concepts and highlighting important and memorable artworks. Its helpful bibliography and extensive index add to its usefulness.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

* 'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...' * With the same disarming force, Power of Art jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. * The embattled heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain. * Most compelling of all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript... "OK, OK, but what's art really for?"'