National Gallery (Great Britain)

"In an innovative approach, Richard Thomson considers Claude Monet's paintings of buildings in their environment, offering a reappraisal of an artist more often associated with landscapes, seascapes and gardens. Buildings fulfilled various roles in Monet's canvases; some are chiefly compositional devices while others throw into sharp contrast the forms of man-made construction against the irregularity of nature, or suggest the absent presence of humans....

Painting "without color" has long held a fascination for artists. In this striking and original book, the authors explore how and why artists from the 15th century to the present have chosen to paint in black, white, and shades of gray. Sometimes artists used trompe l'oeil monochromatic effects to represent other media, such as sculpture, prints, or photography; others have consciously limited their palette as a means of re-focusing the viewer's attention,...

The American artist Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) is best known for his spectacular portraits of African Americans with knowing references to the grand European tradition of painting. He was commissioned in 2017 to paint Barack Obama, becoming the first Black artist to paint an official portrait of a president of the United States. His work makes reference to old master paintings by positioning contemporary Black sitters in the pose of the original historical...

Thomas Cole (1801-1848), arguably the greatest American landscape artist of his generation, is presented here in a new light: as an international figure, born in England, and in dialogue with the major landscape painters of the age, including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Cole traveled in Europe from 1829 to 1832. Thomas Cole's Journey reexamines his seminal works of 1832-36--notably The Oxbow and Course of Empire--as a culminating response to...