Museum of Fine Arts,Boston

Francisco Goya has been widely celebrated as the most important Spanish artist of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns, and an astute observer of the human condition in all its complexity. The many-layered and shifting meanings of his work have made him one of the most studied artists in the world. Few, however, have made the ambitious attempt to explore his work as a painter, printmaker and draftsman across media and the timeline of his life. This book does just that, presenting a comprehensive and integrated view of Goya's most important paintings, prints, and drawings through the themes and imagery that continually challenged or preoccupied the artist. They reveal how he strove relentlessly to understand and describe human behavior and emotional states, even at their most orderly or disorderly extremes, in elegant and incisive portraits, dramatic and monumental history paintings, and series of prints and drawings of a satirical, disturbing and surreal nature. Derived from the research for the largest Goya art exhibition in North America in a quarter-century, this book takes a fresh look at one of the greatest artists in history by examining the fertile territory between the two poles that defined the range of his boundlessly creative personality. Francisco José Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was born in Fuendetodos, Aragón, in the northeast of Spain. Goya was court painter to the Spanish Crown, and famously documented the Peninsular War (1807-1814) between France and Spain in his harrowing "Disasters of War" series. An important bridge to the modernist era, Goya's oeuvre provided a crucial precedent for artists such as Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon.

Katsushika Hokusai remains one of Japan's most popular and influential artists. This handy volume presents the wide range of Hokusai's artistic production in terms of one of his most remarkable characteristics: his intellectual ingenuity. It explores the question of how the self-styled "Man Mad about Drawing" approached his subjects-how he depicted human bodies in motion, combined figures and landscapes, represented three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces and when he used the techniques of illusionism or adjusted reality for greater visual or emotional effect. Including some 50 stunning and unusual paintings, prints and drawings from the peerless Hokusai collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this book is a treasure trove that introduces readers to a witty, wide-ranging and inimitably ingenious Hokusai. Known by at least 30 other names during his lifetime, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was an "ukiyo-e" painter and printmaker of the Edo period. In 1800, he published his two classic collections of landscapes, "Famous Sights of the Eastern Capital" and "Eight Views of Edo." His influence extended to his Western contemporaries in nineteenth-century Europe, including Degas, Gauguin, Klimt, Franz Marc, August Macke, Manet and van Gogh.

Eloquent and provocative drawings, exquisitely reproduced, provide an intimate encounter with these two daring Austrian masters. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were two of the most daring and controversial artists in Vienna during the culturally turbulent decades around the turn of the 20th century. They worked out their provocative depictions of the human body, created in a search for psychological truth as well as physical realism, in the direct and intimate medium of drawing. In Klimt’s studies, the distinctive character or unsettling emotional resonance of the person portrayed comes through in the artist’s delicate, sinuous lines. The striking presence of the individual in Schiele’s more finished drawings, often rendered with extreme frankness and bold colouration, pulses with dramatic immediacy. Although Klimt was almost thirty years Schiele’s senior, he quickly recognized and encouraged the younger artist’s extraordinary talent. The sixty important works exquisitely reproduced in large format in this volume reach from each artist’s early academic studies to more incisive and unconventional explorations of nature, psychology, sexuality and spirituality. By giving viewers access to these artists’ worlds, this album of unforgettable drawings provides a direct connection to the minds of two master draftsmen exploring the limits of representation, as well as the shock of recognition at seeing our own inner lives caught on paper.

Iturbide is modern Mexico's subtlest, most profound chronicler Graciela Iturbide, best known for her iconic photographs of Mexican indigenous women, has engaged with her homeland as a subject for the past 50 years in images of great variety and depth. The intensely personal, lyrical photographs collected and interpreted in this book show that, for Iturbide, photography is a way of life--as well as a way of seeing and understanding Mexico, with all its beauties, rituals, challenges and contradictions. The Mexico portrayed here is a country in constant transition, defined by tensions and exchanges between new and old, urban and rural, traditional and modern. Iturbide's deep connection with her subjects--among them political protests, celebrations and rituals, desert landscapes, cities, places of burial and Mexico's artistic heritage--produces indelible images that encompass dreams, symbols, reality and daily life. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Iturbide's work on the East Coast, this volume presents more than 100 beautifully reproduced black-and-white photographs, accompanied by illuminating essays inviting readers to share in Graciela Iturbide's personal artistic journey through the country she knows so intimately. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) began studying photography in the 1970s with legendary photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Seeking "to explore and articulate the ways in which a vocable such as 'Mexico' is meaningful only when understood as an intricate combination of histories and practices," as she puts it, Iturbide has created a nuanced and sensitive documentary record of contemporary Mexico.

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat's works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries--and sometimes collaborators--A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quinones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat's work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat's extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city. --Lauren Christensen "New York Times"

Highlights from one of the world's most impressive private collections of Dutch Golden Age masterpieces Over the past 35 years, husband-and-wife collector duo Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo have acquired an unparalleled private collection of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, representing a selection of work by the Dutch Golden Age's most important artists. This volume compiles some two dozen masterworks from the van Otterloo Collection, which was donated by the couple to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2017, as one of the most generous gifts in the museum's history. Included among these visually splendid paintings is one of the world's best-preserved Rembrandts, previously housed in a private collection: his 1632 piece Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh, which depicts its elderly sitter in dark robes and a delicate white millstone collar. Works by other Dutch Masters such as Cuyp, Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jan Brueghel the Elder round out the collection with a variety of pictorial subjects, from genre scenes to seascapes to still lifes. Accompanied by biographical and art historical information to provide context for the artists and their work, the series of lavish reproductions assembled in this volume invites readers to immerse themselves in the careful composition and beautiful light quality of this era's finest paintings.