This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs

By Jennifer A. Watts and Claudia Bohn-Spector

240 pages, hardcover

Item# 9781858944340  $75.00

Los Angeles, a sprawling, multi-ethnic city on the edge of a continent, conjures up imagery as seductive and contradictory as the place itself. Equal parts glamour and cataclysm, sunshine and noir, few cities have provoked visual representation as insistently as LA. This Side of Paradise explores the synergistic relationship between the city and photography from the mid-nineteenth century to the present through the key themes of landscape and the body. Eschewing the traditional, chronological approach to the subject, this stunning book encompasses the full spectrum of documentary, commercial and artistic imagery, shedding new light

on both LA and the photographic practices within it.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, this stimulating and wide-ranging survey includes images by Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Garry Winogrand, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Herb Ritts, John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and many others.

PRESSED IN TIME: AMERICAN PRINTS 1905 ­ 1950

By Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin M. Murphy

88 pages, 70 color illustrations, paperback
Item # 9780873282345     $19.95

This volume chronicles the development of printmaking in America through the first half of the twentieth century. During this period of dramatic social and cultural change, printmaking served artists as a cost-effective means of communicating their observations and ideas. Woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs -- many illustrated here -- by artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and Grant Wood addressed a variety of themes, including urbanization, small-town life, the Great Depression, the California landscape, and the two World Wars.

The skyscraper, for instance, became a prime subject, admired for its roots in American architecture as well as its associations with national power. Prints frequently portrayed the city's inhabitants, often in crowded spaces where the distinctions between public and private life might become uncomfortably blurred. Depictions of the Depression of the 1930s suggest pessimism about the prospects for social justice in a capitalistic economy. Other prints demonstrate a heroic conception of industry and an idealized view of life in the nation's agrarian heartland.

TREASURES FROM OLANA:

Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church

By Kevin J. Avery

71 pages, color illustrations,

Hardcover              

Item # 0801444306      $26.00

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) traveled the world, captured its beauty in countless paintings, and brought it home to live at Olana, his castle on the Hudson. The name Olana was inspired by a reference Church found to a fortress or a treasury-storehouse in ancient Persia; this extraordinary selection of Church's paintings from his collection at Olana puts the most cherished of his treasures on full display in a volume that includes 77 color plates.

SENSATION & SENSIBILITY

By Ann Bermingham

208 pages, softcover

Item# 0300110022 

WAS $39.95

NOW $19.97

Late in his career Thomas Gainsborough became preoccupied with the theme of the cottage door, and he created a group of paintings and drawings that show rustic figures clustered around the open door of a cottage set in a deeply wooded landscape. Often seen as exemplars of the rural idyll, these works were among the first landscape paintings to reflect the eighteenth-century aesthetic of sensibility. As a way of seeing, sensibility valued nature for its innocence and simplicity, and images, such as Gainsborough’s cottage subjects, for their power to move the viewer. This lovely book brings together the cottage door paintings and essays that discuss Gainsborough’s departure from the more naturalistic style of his earlier career and that place his new concern with sentimentalism and artificiality in the context of sensibility and the growing interest in expressive, even sensational, visual spectacles. To this end, contributors to the volume investigate new viewing practices associated with sensibility, the meaning of the cottage for Gainsborough and his contemporaries, the artist’s creation of affecting landscapes through the use of peasant subjects, and his theatrical treatment of these subjects in order to heighten his viewers’ emotional responses.

A NUT-HATCH (1740)

Attributed to George Edwards

(British, 1694-1773)

Nut-Hatch 5x7 Blank Notecard

Item# R601IND    $2.95

FUNCHAL, MORNING SUN

By Sir Edward John Poynter

(British, 1836-1919)

Item# M208PST000    $18.00

Funchal, Morning Sun Print

Matted 11x14 (image size 10x6)

WILLIAM MORRIS EXHIBIT BANNERS

Beautifully designed banners flew above the streets of Pasadena and Los Angeles to announce The Huntington’s exhibit, The Beauty of Life; William Morris & the Art of Design. Morris’s art, ideals, and life’s work paved the way for generation of artists who followed him in the pursuit of what he called “the beauty of life.” In keeping with that tradition, we have recycled the exhibition banners into fashionable bags, preserving their artistry while helping to protect the environment.

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.
- William Morris, The Beauty of Life, 1880

WILLIAM MORRIS BANNER BAG with a zippered pocket inside.Vinyl, 14"W x 14.5"H with a 5.75" gusset.

Item# W187GFT $65.00

THE NEWTONIAN MOMENT: ISAAC NEWTON AND THE MAKING OF MODERN CULTURE

By Mordechai Feingold

218 pages, color illustrations throughout

Item #0195177347    $22.50 softcover

From his optical experiments during the 1660s, to the publication of both the Principia (1687) and Opticks (1704), Isaac Newton's groundbreaking achievements were widely disseminated, inciting tremendous excitement as well as controversy. The Newtonian Moment investigates the effect of Newton's theories and discoveries, not only on the trajectory of science, but on the very shape of modern culture and thought. Beginning with a fresh view of Newton's intellectual development, Mordechai Feingold explores the manner in which Newton's spectacular success in revolutionizing the natural sciences made him a figure to be emulated or rejected, revered or excoriated- but always there to contend with.

A PASSION FOR PERFORMANCE:
SARAH SIDDONS AND HER PORTRAITISTS
by Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennet, and Mark Leonard

Item# 0892365579  

144 pages, softcover

WAS $24.95     NOW $12.47

This book features three essays exploring the life and career of the English actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) who was renowned for her majestic beauty and impassioned performances. This volume contains fifty-six portraits of Siddons including works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Romney along with a chronology of the actress' life.