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Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature

Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy uses a seemingly infinite array of purely natural materials, from snow and ice to leaves, stone, and twigs in the creation of his one-of-a-kind sculptures. Unlike such artists as Christo and Michael Hiezer, whose works leave definite marks on the landscape, Goldsworthy's approach is to interrupt, shape, or in some other way temporarily alter or work with nature to produce his fragile, mutable pieces. To create "Broken Icicle," for example, Goldsworthy was only able to work on the sculpture in the early morning, when temperatures were below freezing. As with most of his works, ultimately, the materials used to create this piece returned to their natural state, leaving no trace of the artwork's existence save for the stunning photos in this book.

Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light (Art Institute of Chicago)

Labor of Love: An Autobiography

Anne Geddes' A Labor of Love: Anne Geddes A Biography reveals the events, emotions, and images that have shaped Anne's life. Her personal story melds with her extraordinary body of work to reinforce the inherent message behind her imagery: PROTECT, NURTURE, LOVE.

· Beginning with early childhood memories and continuing through her remarkable 25-year career, A Labor of Love: Anne Geddes A Biography is part autobiography, part retrospective—and entirely captivating.

· Anne reflects, through anecdotes and observations, on some of her most recognized images: how she painstakingly set the elaborate scenes, carefully selected the props, and ultimately, created magic. A Labor of Love: Anne Geddes A Biography also includes interesting follow-ups with the subjects of some of her iconic photographs and images from her best-selling works, Down in the Garden, Until Now, Pure, and Miracle.

Author's web site: www.annegeddes.com/

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Penguin Classics)

This thorough collection of van Gogh's letters has been assembled with an artful eye and sensitivity to the artist's thinking. The result is an atypical take on Vincent van Gogh that avoids putting too much stress on his troubled mental state and too much straining by the editor to shape a narrative out of van Gogh's epistolary clues. Instead, we see the thoughtful and contemplative side of this creative genius, as well as his concern for the impact his art and life had on those people closest to him.

Philip Guston Works on Paper

Painter Philip Guston's return to figuration in the late 1960s was plotted and rehearsed in his drawing practice, in which he veered between what he referred to as "pure drawing" (abstract) and figurative drawing (a shoe, a chair, a nail, an open book, a hooded head). As he groped his way into this strange and clunky vocabulary, Guston discovered an incredible world awaiting him, and realized, as he put it, that "I wanted to tell stories!"
Guston's drawing was also a vehicle for collaboration--with poets such as Clark Coolidge and Bill Berkson--and for satire--the Poor Richard series. His draftsmanship betrays such early influences as the cartoons of Frink and George Herriman, perhaps instances of the "impure" art that flooded back into his practice after he abandoned abstraction. With a selection of about 100 drawings, mostly from the artist's estate, Philip Guston: Works on Paper tracks the evolution of this major American artist's drawing from the 1940s to 1980.

Edward Hopper

One of the most enduringly popular painters of the twentieth century, Edward Hopper produced many works now considered icons of Modern art. Canvases such as Drugstore, New York Movie, and the universally recognized (and often parodied) Nighthawks not only reshaped what painting looked like in America, but created a visual language for middle-class life and its discontents. This extensive new assessment of Hopper, which accompanies a major traveling exhibition, examines the dynamics of the artist's creative process and discusses his work within the cultural currents of his day--examining the influence not only of other painters, but also of such media as literature and film. And while most studies have tended to see Hopper as the great painter of alienation, this one takes a much broader, more nuanced, and ultimately more representative view. Spanning the entirety of Hopper's career, but with particular emphasis on his heyday in the 30s and 40s, Edward Hopper highlights the artist's greatest achievements while discussing such topics as his absorption of European influences, critical reactions to his work, the relation of Realism to Modernism, the artist's fascination with architecture, his depiction of women, and the struggle in his last years to produce original works. Illustrated with over 150 oils, watercolors and prints, and including essays by several noted scholars in the field and an extensive chronology and bibliography, this is the most comprehensive volume on Hopper produced in the last decade.

Passage

To achieve the quiet beauty of his art, Andy Goldsworthy spends long hours in rough weather, engaged in a tug-of-war with nature. He wrestles heavy stones on top of one another to form tall, egg-shaped landmarks known as cairns. He painstakingly covers fallen logs with bright golden bands of Dutch elm leaves—a last hurrah for a proud species decimated by disease. He pulverizes white chalk to lay a long, wandering path in the woods that gleams in the moonlight. Works like these are as much about the transience of life as they are about a sense of place and the pleasures of color, light and form. In Passage, the British artist's latest book, he once again provides diary excerpts that chronicle his daily successes and failures. The lush color photographs he takes to document peak moments of the birth, glory and decay of his art are as beautiful as ever. Unlike the other books, however, Passage--which begins in 2000 and darts back and forth over the next few years--is shadowed by a more urgent sense of mortality. Goldworthy's recently deceased father is in his thoughts, and a major project he tackles is the memorial Garden of Stones for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The garden's giant boulders pose many difficulties--finding the right ones, acquiring them, moving them, experimenting with cutting processes and coping with the elderly stonecutter's frequent tantrums. Hollowed out, the stones will be filled with trowels of earth (a ritual recalling burial) and tiny oak saplings, symbolic of life. "The partnership between tree and stone will be stronger for the tree having grown from the stone, rather than being stuck into it," Goldsworthy writes in his straightforward style. (An essay about this project by the historian Simon Schama, previously published in The New Yorker, is one of several pieces by other writers included in the book.) Once again, Goldsworthy succeeds in showing how seemingly simple ideas and actions can deeply engage both natural forces and human emotions. —Cathy Curtis

Andy Goldsworthy's Passage focuses on the journeys that people, rivers, landscapes, and even stones take through space and time. A cairn made by the renowned sculptor in the Scottish village where he lives reveals the influence that his work close to home has on projects he creates elsewhere. A series involving elm trees, from glowing yellow leaves to dead branches, exemplifies his work's vigorous beauty as well as its association with death and decay. Creations on the beach and in rivers explore the passage of time, while a white chalk path investigates the passing from day into night.

Passage also includes the Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where the artist planted 18 oak trees through holes in hollowed-out, earth-filled boulders. Documenting these and other recent works, this beautiful book is an eloquent testament to Goldsworthy's determination to deepen his understanding of the world around him, and his relationship with it, through his art. AUTHOR BIO: Andy Goldsworthy's work is regularly exhibited in Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. Although commissions take him all over the world, the landscape around his home in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, remains at the heart of his work. Goldsworthy's best-selling books for Abrams include A Collaboration with Nature, Time, Stone, Wall, and Wood. Terry Friedman is an architectural historian and former principal keeper of Leeds City Art Gallery and Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture in Leeds, England. He curated the first major retrospective of Goldsworthy's work, in 1990.

Enclosure

Since 1995, Andy Goldsworthy has created a series of artworks in Northwest England in sheepfolds: stone enclosures found across the countryside that have been used for assembling, sheltering, and washing sheep for hundreds of years. After working on and off for more than a decade, he completed thirty-five folds, often rebuilding them in the process; many of them can now once again serve their intended purpose. These form the core of Enclosure: they reflect Goldsworthy’s lifelong interest in the land, its history, and the people who work on it. They are accompanied by a rich collection of ephemeral work related in various ways to sheep, including a spectacular series of large sheep paintings—paintings made by the hoof-prints of sheep.

Enclosure, which joins the sublime tradition of the art and literature of the landscape of the British Isles, is an exciting addition to the series of eight bestselling books that Goldsworthy has already produced for Abrams.

Until Now

Sleeping angels. Flower fairies. Woodland nymphs and watermelon seeds. Anne Geddes's magical world is populated by hundreds of beautiful, chubby babies and gorgeous children dressed as peapods, pansies, peonies, and pearls. Geddes fans will be thrilled by Until Now, a lush, coffee-table-sized, 10-year retrospective of Geddes's work, including 1991's crowd-pleasing "Cabbage Kids," featured on calendars and coffee mugs everywhere, as well as many previously uncollected shots from Geddes's New Zealand studio.

It's not all costumes, though--the 1997 portrait of Caleb, 3 weeks old, is a beautiful, unretouched close-up of the sweetly sleeping newborn, belly-button still poking out and skin peeling. A portrait only a mother could love? Hardly. Caleb's perfect little sleeping face would evoke maternal feelings from a stone. Particularly fun and often touching are Geddes's notes at the back of the book. For example, of "Rebecca," she writes, "How do you get a 14-month-old to sit still? Show her the jelly bean, and then put it down her trousers." The resulting photograph is of a lovely, mop-headed, tummy-grabbing toddler peering intently at her own navel. Incorporating both rich color and black-and-white photographs, Until Now will delight parents, grandparents, and baby-lovers of all sizes. --Rebecca A. Staffel

Anne Geddes' photographs of babies have charmed countless fans for many years. In Until Now, Geddes takes us behind the scenes to find out what she was thinking when she captured these images, her 113 most-favorite photographs. Her text also provides a background to each photograph and helps readers understand how this artist and her subjects work together.Consider, for example, Geddes' comments about the shot she captured in 1991, which she titled "Rebecca": "She didn't want to hold the tulips, and she didn't want to sit on the chair-there were too many other things to be done. How do you get a 14-month-old to sit still' Show her the jelly bean, and then put it down her trousers."From signature photos of newborns to touching interactions between parent and child to enthusiastic poses from older children, this gift-size hardcover edition of Until Now gathers together Geddes' most revealing and compelling work. Whether she's posing babies in the garden or in the studio, Anne Geddes' deep affection for babies and children is obvious in the award-winning images she creates.

Wood