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The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book

Postsecret.com founder Frank Warren is back with an irresistible addition to his bestselling PostSecret series. For The Secret Lives of Men and Women, Warren has selected a never-before-seen collection of postcards bearing the explosive confessions and captivating revelations of men and women everywhere. Created using photographs, collages, illustrations, and more, the handmade cards offer a compelling dialogue on some of today's most provocative topics—from marriage and infidelity, to parenting, office politics, repressed fantasies, and even abortion—daring us to consider how well we really know our friends, family, even ourselves.

Art Making, Collections, and Obsessions: An Intimate Exploration of the Mixed-Media Work and Collections of 35 Artists

Alberto Vargas: Works from the Max Vargas Collection

The storied and turbulent career of glamour artist Alberto Vargas took him from Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies in the 1920s to Hollywood in the 30s to Esquire magazine and the emergence of the "Varga Girl" in the 40s and, ultimately, to a lasting home at Playboy in the 60s and 70s.This is the first book on the works of Vargas in more than a decade. It is also the first to include a generous selection of his vivid original drawings and his finest work for Playboy magazine. Along with these highly sought-after pictures, the book features early unpublished works, unpublished sketches, the celebrated Legacy Nudes, and more. The decade-by-decade narrative essay and captions are by Reid Stewart Austin, an art director at Playboy for 20 years, and author of the bestselling Vargas biography written in 1978 in collaboration with the artist.

Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection

This massive book of Soviet propaganda posters, many rare and never before published, is at once a revealing historical document and a sublime example of graphic art at its best.

Dating from 1917 to the beginning of the Cold War, the posters in this book feature the work of such major Russian ground-breaking avant-garde designers as El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko as well as extraordinary works by anonymous artists. Presented in full color, the 250 posters gathered here range in themes from warnings about the dangers of alcohol abuse and the creeping Nazi menace to illustrations of utopian harmony and the Soviet industrial machine. A brief illustrated introduction offers a chronological overview of the period that produced such eloquent art, which has long been a major source of inspiration to artists and designers.

Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections

A rich survey of the life and work of one of the most intriguing artists of the twentieth century.

Published in conjunction with an exciting exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York, opening in autumn 2007, this beautifully produced book features more than one hundred color plates in a generous layout that allows close viewing of the artist's paintings and drawings. Admirers of Klimt will discover fascinating essays by leading scholars, many containing new research and fresh insights. The essays' subjects include Klimt's earliest patrons; his studios; the role of photography in his erotic work; profiles of the most important women in the artist's life; his relationship with Gustav Mahler and Auguste Rodin; his never-before-published 1917 notebook; and an interview by Neue Galerie director Renée Price with Maria Altmann, heir to the five paintings stolen by the Nazis that were recently returned to her by the Austrian government. Perfect for casual perusing or serious study, this lavish exploration of Klimt's life and art, and the influence of Klimt on popular culture, is certain to find a wide audience.

The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers

"The itch to make dark marks on paper is shared by many writers and artists," begins John Updike in his essay in The Writer's Brush, and this stunning collection will amaze lovers of the literary and fine arts alike. Author Donald Friedman has gathered 400 paintings, drawings, and scultpure--many from private collections, never before published--by more than 200 of the world's most famous writers, including 13 Nobel laureates.

The result is astounding. Whether viewing the beautiful landscapes that Hermann Hesse credited with saving his life, the manuscript sketches that Fyodor Dostoevsky made of his characters, or the can-can dancers secretly drawn by Joseph Conrad, readers of The Writer's Brush will gain new insights into the lives and minds of their favorite writers and the nature of the creative process itself.

Accompanying the artwork are fascinating biographies that provide little-known details of the writers' lives in the visual arts and offer the writers' own observations on their art and the relationships they saw between word and image. While written for a broad audience, The Writer's Brush is also an essential reference work, with alphabetical and chronological listings of its subjects and an extensive bibliography.

As Friedman notes in his introduction, for many of the writers anthologized here, a coin toss could have determined whether to spend the day standing in a smock or seated with a pen. The Writer's Brush brings together for the first time--in one unique, affordable volume--both worlds of these writers in the definitive work of the writer-artist.

Contemporary Botanical Artists: The Shirley Sherwood Collection

Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection

Art Held Hostage reveals the messy inside story about the most infamous world-class art museum that you've probably never heard of. The saga begins with the life and times of Albert C. Barnes, a Philadelphia business magnet who, after making his fortune during the Depression, becomes one of America's most important collectors of impressionist and post-impressionist art. The collection includes famed paintings by such luminaries as Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Renoir. Barnes became well known for his harsh personality and instigated a problematic invitation-only policy to his museum, located in a Philadelphia suburb. Strangely, even after Barnes' death the museum continued to become embroiled in financial, legal, and community disputes. The story gets uglier during the 1990s with a series of lawsuits for the foundation's high-profile president, including a racial discrimination suit and eventually near-bankruptcy for the collection. Author John C. Anderson, a contributing editor of The American Lawyer magazine, spares no cynical detail in his investigation into this truly American tale of power, litigiousness, and boardroom antics. This is a book for those interested in the dark underbelly of the business side of the art world. -- J.P. Cohen

The battle for control of America's greatest private art collection.

This is the story of how a fabled art foundation in a wealthy Main Line suburb of Philadelphia became captive to the roiling ethnic, racial, cultural, and political crosscurrents of a great American city.

The Barnes Foundation is home to the world's most important postimpressionist art collection (including more Cézannes than all of the museums of Paris combined). So rich is the collection that it is valued at more than $6 billion, yet today the Barnes is virtually broke. Its fate has been shaped by two men: Albert C. Barnes, who emerged from the Philadelphia slums to become a turn-of-the-century patent medicine king, and Richard Glanton, who escaped poverty in Georgia to become a wealthy and influential lawyer. Born almost a century apart, the two men stamped their distinct personalities on the foundation: Barnes as its iconoclastic founder, Glanton as its president during the turbulent decade of the nineties. 16 pages of illustrations, including color.

Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings

Henry Clay Frick

Henry Frick, remembered by art lovers today for his splendid collection of old-master paintings by Rembrandt, Bellini, and others that make up New York's Frick Museum, was one of the 19th century's worst robber barons. Brutal with workers, he never hesitated to hire mercenary armies to kill railway and mine strikers. Frick's was such a bloody and vicious climb to a pot of gold that his descendents have been understandably reluctant to allow historians full access to his papers. Finally, his great-granddaughter, Martha Sanger, a noted steeplechase and hunting enthusiast, decided to write about the life of her ancestor, and was allowed full use of the archives.

Sanger's publisher, Abbeville, has done her proud with a luxuriously produced volume in which Sanger offers many theories about why Frick bought certain works of art. And although art historians may dismiss her black-and-white analyses of a collector's motivations--based, as she admits, on her own years in psychoanalysis--they at least reflect how Frick's own family saw him. Among the reproductions are famous pictures by Goya, Greco, and Gainsborough, but also many others rarely reproduced, perhaps because they are typically bad-taste 19th-century art, showing that even Frick bought some duds. Whether or not he acquired paintings, as Sanger asserts, because they reminded him of a daughter who died in early childhood, Frick was still a major historical figure, and his life needs this kind of voluminous treatment in order to complement harsher portraits by professional historians like Samuel Schreiner, who subtitled his own 1995 book from St. Martins Press The Gospel of Greed. --Benjamin Ivry