Art Books
100 Churches of Venice and the Lagoon
$60.00
An in-depth guide to Venetian culture and history through its houses of worship
Begun in 2014 by Ecuadorian-born, New York–based photographer Alejandro Merizalde (born 1979), 100 Churches of Venice and the Lagoon documents religious temples from every sestiere of Venice and the smaller towns of the Venetian lagoon. What began as a small challenge of photographing just the Grand Canal’s churches quickly grew in scope to include every neighborhood in the city. From Murano to Burano and Torcello, from Pellestrina to Chioggia, and deep into the northern lagoon to areas such as Lio Piccolo and Treporti, Merizalde photographed their respective churches whether they remained in service or were deconsecrated or repurposed. The layout of these images emphasizes the facade, relying on subtle repetitions for aesthetic continuity and balance. An essay by Marina Gasparini Lagrange combines her experience living in Venice with a poignant historical perspective.
By Alejandro Merizalde with contributions by Marina Gasparini Lagrange
112 pages
Published by Damiani, 2021
Hardcover
9.06 x 9.06 inches
A Little Book of Saints
$14.99
A small book listing Catholic Saints with images of retablos (small devotional paintings) done by artist Lynn Garlick. A pocket book with brief descriptions of saint's lives, with patronage, prayers and color illustrations.
By Lynn Garlick Retablos
104 pages
Paperback
4.5" x 5.5”
A Short Biography of Henry David Thoreau
$9.95
This short biography chronicles the life of Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) the 19th Century writer and philosopher from Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was best known as a Naturalist, and his journals are filled with daily observations of the flora and fauna of Concord. He was also an Abolitionist and was involved with the Underground Railroad; his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” would influence Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 20th Century.
The Short Biographies series from Applewood's Benna Books imprint features short, intriguing, and entertaining biographies of world-renowned figures. Each beautiful hardcover book includes an interesting retelling of a single person's life, suitable for young adults and adults alike. These little gems will become beloved souvenirs of a favorite artist.
By Richard Smith
Part of the Short Biographies Series
32 pages
Published by Applewood Books, 2018
Hardcover
4.2 x 0.3 x 5.8 inches
A Short Biography of James Abbott McNeill Whistler
$9.95
The Short Biographies series from Applewood's Benna Books imprint features short, intriguing, and entertaining biographies of world-renowned figures. Each beautiful hardcover book includes an interesting retelling of a single person's life, suitable for young adults and adults alike. These little gems will become beloved souvenirs of a favorite artist.
By Henri-Pierre Corbacho
Part of the Short Biographies Series
32 pages
Published by Applewood Books, 2017
Hardcover
4.2 x 0.3 x 6.8 inches
Adam Pendleton
$49.95
The first encompassing publication on the work of the groundbreaking American artist Adam Pendleton (Gardner Artist-in-Residence, 2008)
Adam Pendleton's original and powerful body of work has been described as the embodiment of a new era. His multifaceted projects, which include painting, collage, film, and publishing, re-contextualize historical and theoretical positions on abstraction, blackness, and the avant-garde. Working predominantly in black-and-white, Pendleton often creates 'total works' that envelop viewers and push the limits of contemporary discourse.
Written by Adrienne Edwards, Alec Mapes Frances, Andréa Picard160 pages
Published by Phaidon, 2020
Paperback
11.38 x 9.88 inches
Adam Pendleton: As Heavy As Sculpture
$100.00
An artist's book exploring the language of protest
A new artist's book by Adam Pendleton (born 1984), As Heavy as Sculpture follows Pendleton's 2021 installation of the same title, exhibited at the New Museum in New York. The book collects, repeats and processes over 80 source collages, incorporating drawings, sketches, writing and marks, often in combination with images.
Much of the language in the collages is drawn from the protests against police brutality that swept the US in 2020: Pendleton has transcribed slogans sprayed on walls and windows, combining them with his own improvised language as well as photographs of art objects and artifacts (sculptures, masks and figures). The work points to the poetic pressure that uprisings place on language itself, compressing it in some cases into the barest of forms: simple sequences like “ACAB” or “1312,” further reducible to the elements “A, B, C,” “1, 2, 3.”
In parallel with these operations of decomposition and recomposition, the collages in As Heavy as Sculpture have been duplicated, laid out across 30 sheets and folded into book signatures, creating new displacements and cuts. This folding is in effect a chance operation, a procedure of recombination and translation, resulting in arrangements of images not planned out in advance.
By Adam Pendleton
480 pages
Published by D.A.P., 2021
Hardcover
6.5 x 8.74 inches
Adam Pendleton: Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths
$45.00
The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought
In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of "Black Dada." Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents―an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze―formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls "radical juxtaposition."
By Thomas Hirschhorn, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joan Jonas Lorraine O'Grady, and Joan Retallack
448 pages
Published by DABA/Koenig Books, 2021
Hardcover
8.03 x 1.81 x 10.63 inches
Adam Pendleton: Who is Queen
$45.00
In this primer accompanying Adam Pendleton’s MoMA show, the artist behind “Black Dada” fuses musical counterpoint with the aesthetics of protest
Adam Pendleton draws on visual culture and historical archives to explore the ways in which context influences meaning. Referencing a broad range of artistic and cultural currents―including Dada, Minimalism and Black Power―Pendleton reconfigures words, forms and images to provoke critical questioning.
Published to accompany Pendleton's installation at the Museum of Modern Art, this reader serves as a primer and handbook to the exhibition and features a number of photocopied textual and visual sources, many of which directly relate to the concept, content and programming of the exhibition. The project questions the notion of the museum as repository and addresses the influence that mass movements, including those of the last decade such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, could have on the exhibition as form. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as Glenn Gould, Michael Hardt and Ruby Sales, Who Is Queen? seeks to explore the nexus of abstraction and politics.
Edited by Alec Mapes-Frances with introduction by Stuart Comer, and contributions by Adrienne Edwards, Mario Gooden, Danielle A. Jackson, Lynne Tillman
272 pages
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021
Hardcover
American Victorians and Virgin Nature
$16.00
This volume draws on cultural geography, museology, gender studies, and art history to explore nineteenth-century attitudes towards the American landscape in the broadest sense. The subjects range from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and Winslow Homer's illustrations of contemporary women, to dioramas of prehistoric life in the American Museum of Natural History. The "invention" of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination and even the films of John Ford are used to illustrate the Victorian era's obsessions with nature. These six essays were originally presented at a symposium organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Edited by T. J. Jackson LearsEssays by Richard White, Sarah Burns, Michele Bogart, Elizabeth Johns, Stephen Pyne, and Richard Slotkin
128 pages
Published by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2002
Paperback
7.5 x 10 inches
Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America
$50.00
This publication re-evaluates the artistic achievements of the Swedish painter Anders Zorn (1860-1920). Bringing his subjects to life with broad brushstrokes, Zorn experimented with different subjects and styles, painting portraits of high society, self-portraits and fellow artists' in their studios, and genre scenes of modern Parisian and rural Swedish life. Moreover, he was crucial in disseminating Swedish art, connecting Scandinavia with Western Europe and with the United States. If we follow the breathless media coverage during Zorn's multiple stays in the States, we might well come to the conclusion that he seduced the nation. America was entirely taken by this "Prince of Art," who exhibited widely, showcasing his sweeping portraits of socialites, unashamed nudes, and brilliant genre scenes.
Zorn's clients in the United States, especially his friendship with Isabella Gardner, forms a major focus of the book. Gardner was one of his most important patrons and a lifelong friend.
This book, based on the exhibition held at the Museum in 2013, illustrates how mutually beneficial and inspiring this relationship was to both Gardner and Zorn. Gardner helped Zorn procure commissions in and outside Boston, and by presenting new archival material, it will become clear just how much Zorn relied on her. The new evidence and interpretations in this book will allow reassessment of Zorn's inspired but often overlooked accomplishments, presenting him instead as an intoxicating artist, someone who is still able to seduce the public.
Edited by Oliver Tostmann
200 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2013
Paperback
9.5 x 0.8 x 11.2 inches
Art as Therapy
$19.95
Two authorities on popular culture reveal the ways in which art can enhance mood and enrich lives - now available in paperback
This passionate, thought-provoking, often funny, and always-accessible book proposes a new way of looking at art, suggesting that it can be useful, relevant, and therapeutic. Through practical examples, the world-renowned authors argue that certain great works of art have clues as to how to manage the tensions and confusions of modern life. Chapters on love, nature, money, and politics show how art can help with many common difficulties, from forging good relationships to coming to terms with mortality.
Written by Alain de Botton & John Armstrong240 pages
Published by Phaidon Press, 2016
Paperback
7.75 x 5.13 inches
Barbara Lynch: Out of Line - A Life of Playing with Fire
$26.00
Blood, Bones, & Butter meets A Devil in the Kitchen in this funny, fierce, and poignant memoir by world-renowned chef, restaurateur, and Top Chef judge Barbara Lynch (Gardner Artist-in-Residence, 2014), recounting her rise from a hard-knocks South Boston childhood to culinary stardom.
Celebrated chef Barbara Lynch credits the defiant spirit of her upbringing in tough, poor “Southie,” a neighborhood ruled by the notorious Whitey Bulger gang, with helping her bluff her way into her first professional cooking jobs; develop a distinct culinary style through instinct and sheer moxie; then dare to found an empire of restaurants ranging from a casual but elegant “clam shack” to Boston’s epitome of modern haute cuisine.
One of seven children born to an overworked single mother, Lynch was raised in a housing project. She earned a daredevil reputation for boosting vehicles (even a city bus), petty theft, drinking and doing drugs, and narrowly escaping arrest—haunted all the while by a painful buried trauma.
Out of Line describes Lynch’s remarkable process of self-invention, including her encounters with colorful characters of the food world, and vividly evokes the magic of creation in the kitchen. It is also a love letter to South Boston and its vanishing culture, governed by Irish Catholic mothers and its own code of honor. Through her story, Lynch explores how the past—both what we strive to escape from and what we remain true to—can strengthen and expand who we are.
By Barbara Lynch
304 pages
Published by Atria Books, 2017
Hardcover
6 x 1 x 9 inches
Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues
$60.00
This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed-media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.
“Watercolor is something that children use, so I decided, maybe I’ll paint something about children, maybe I’ll paint the dolls,” Saar says. Referencing the underrepresented history of Black dolls through Saar’s artistic lens, this catalog distills several intersecting themes, imagery, and objects in Saar’s oeuvre, highlighting her prominent usage and reinvention of Black imagery. It contains 90 color images, including early assemblage works that feature Black dolls, such as Gris-Gris Box (1972) and Mti (1973), plus early sketchbooks and a curated selection of Saar’s Black doll collection. It also includes original essays by Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, and Katherine Jentleson, Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art, and an interview with the artist by her granddaughter, Maddy Inez Leeser.
Edited by Katherine Jentleson and Rachel Federman
223 pages
Published by Roberts Projects, 2022
Hardcover
9.25 x 1 x 12.25 inches
Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer
$55.00
Uneasy Dancer brings together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and sculptures by the pioneering Los Angeles artist Betye Saar (born 1926) produced between 1966 and 2016. This handsomely designed volume presents Saar’s work as a copiously illustrated timeline, with numerous documentary images and exhibition details.
“Uneasy Dancer” is an expression Saar has used to define both herself and her artistic practice: “my work moves in a creative spiral with the concepts of passage, crossroads, death and rebirth, along with the underlying elements of race and gender.” Through her use of found objects, personal memorabilia and derogatory images that evoke denied or distorted narratives, Saar developed a powerful social critique that challenges racial and sexist stereotypes deeply rooted in American culture.
Edited with text by Mario Mainetti, Chiara Costa, Elvira Dyangani Ose. Foreword by Miuccia Prada, Patrizio Bertelli. Text by Richard J. Powell, Deborah Willis, Kellie E. Jones.320 pages
Published by Fondazione Prada, 2017
Paperback
6.5 x 10 inches
Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections
$58.00
Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition held at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University’s Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and serves as a guide to their production, illumination, functions, and readership. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste.
Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America.
Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Lisa Fagin Davis, and Anne-Marie Eze
378 pages
Published by McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2016
Paperback
9 x 1.1 x 12 inches
Bharti Kher (Jack Shainman Gallery)
$80.00
London-born, Delhi-based Bharti Kher is becoming known for her evocative, layered sculptures and paintings, which explore identity and multiplicity. Featured here is a series inspired by a 1928 autopsy of a blue sperm whale, which Kher has spun into imagery conflating Indian traditions with gothic, punk and camp elements.
Text by Ranjit Hoskote219 pages
Jack Shainman Gallery, 2010
Hardcover
9.25 x 10.75 inches
Bharti Kher: Chimeras
$49.95
‘I like the word ‘unpleasant’’ says UK-born, Indian contemporary artist Bharti Kher, whose heterogeneous oeuvre of work comprises painting, sculpture and installation.
She works primarily with representations of the female body and plays with the varied roles of women in society and culture. In her work from the last twenty years, time and again we see the motif of the bhindi, the dot painted on the forehead between the eyebrows that comes from Hindu tradition.
Chimera, the title of the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Pasquart in Biel, can be understood in relation to mythology as well as genetics. Bharti Kher sees her artistic practice as the search for the chimera, and in her works she hovers on the dividing line between reality and illusion.
Her monumental pieces encompass ideas of identity, social roles and gender. In interplay with clear references to the anatomy of humans and animals, they trigger strong emotions in observers such as alarm, confusion, shock or amusement.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Bharti Kher: Chimeras at Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart Biel/Bienne (26 June – 28 August 2018).
Written by Aveek Sen, Susan Silas, Chrysanne Stathacos176 pages
Published by Kunst
Hardcover
7.8 x 10 inches
Bharti Kher: Sketchbooks and Diaries
$36.00
Bharti Kher, 2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner, was enriched and recharged by spending time thinking and living amongst the Museum’s extraordinary building and art treasures.
The focus of this show—on view in the Fenway Gallery from September 20, 2017 to September 10, 2018—is a series of drawings and notebooks Kher made during that time. All the drawings in this artist's book were made by Bharti Kher between 2013 and 2015. The drawings are very tactile, often provocative, and charged with humor and a capriciousness that is smart and mischievous at the same time. They reflect on gender and motherhood, anatomy, and the physiology of pregnancy. They speak of empathy and love while investigating the enigmatic paradoxes and ambiguities of what it means to be human.
By Bharti Kher, edited by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Diana C Stoll
64 pages
Published by the Corraini Edizioni, 2017
Hardcover
9 x 0.5 x 6 inches
Bharti Kher: This Breathing House
$30.00
Published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the Freud Museum from September to November 2016, ‘This Breathing House’ offers an intimate view of Indian artist Bharti Kher‘s installation in Sigmund Freud’s final home in London.
Following a foreword from the museum’s director, the essay by Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator of the Hayward Gallery, explores Kher’s work, its themes and dialogue with its setting. The essay, separated into enumerated sections, unfolds the vivid and history-laden artworks, interpreting their forms while also leaving room for interpretation. Quotes feature from the artist herself as well as Sigmund and Anna Freud, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Didi-Huberman and Maggie Nelson among others. Replete with installation views as well as detail shots of individual works, the publication reads like a thoughtful measured walkthrough of the exhibition itself.
Text by Stephanie Rosentha, foreword by Carol Seigel88 pages
Published by Hauser & Wirth, 2016
Hardcover
8.25 x 8 inches
Book of the Bird: Birds in Art
$16.99
The Book of the Bird celebrates the bird in art with an elegant, international collection of paintings, illustrations and photographs, featuring all kinds of birds from the smallest tits and wrens to colorful exotics.
Interspersed though the illustrations are short texts giving background to the pictures and information on bird species. This is the perfect gift for all bird lovers.
160 pages
Published by Laurence King Publishing, 2016
Paperback
6 x 8 inches
Botticelli
$16.00
With the patronage of the powerful Medici family, a canon of secular and religious work, and contributions to the celebrated Sistine Chapel, Sandro Botticelli (1444/45–1510) was well placed for fame. After his death, however, his work was eclipsed for some four hundred years. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the painter began to gain major art-historical recognition.
Today, Botticelli is hailed as a towering figure of the Florentine Early Renaissance. His secular works The Birth of Venus and Primavera, mostly read as an allegory of Spring, are among the most recognized paintings in the world, resplendent in their delicate details, graceful lines, and compositional balance. His arrangements are fluid yet poised, his figures serene yet sensual. Venus, in particular, is held up as art-historical icon of beauty: pale-skinned, delicately featured, soft with fecund promise.
This essential introduction presents key works from Botticelli’s oeuvre to understand the making of a Renaissance legend. Through the painter’s most famous mythological and allegorical scenes, as well as his radiant religious works, we explore a mastery of figuration, movement, and line, which has gone on to inspire artists from Edgar Degas to Andy Warhol, René Magritte to Cindy Sherman.
96 pages
Published by Taschen
Hardcover
8.3 x 10.2 inches
Botticelli's Witness: Changing Styles in a Changing Florence
$21.95
The life of Sandro Botticelli coincided with the close of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th. This historical moment saw the transition from the rule of the Medici—whose name is synonymous with patronage of the arts—to the fanatical reforms of the Dominican Savonarola.
The catalog that accompanied the exhibition Botticelli's Witness: Changing Styles in a Changing Florence—on view at the Gardner Museum from January 24 to April 6, 1997—features major paintings from all decades of Botticelli's career, along with works by his followers and contemporaries. Within this catalog, three experts explore the relationship between Botticelli's distinct yet changing visual "voice" and the turbulent Florence society of his day.
By Hillard T. Goldfarb, James Hankins, and Laurence Kanter, with preface by former Director Anne Hawley
73 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1997
Paperback
11.5 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes
$28.00
Accompanying the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (February 14 – May 19, 2019), this catalog explores the work of legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (about 1444–1510). Today the alluring and enigmatic Primavera forms the cornerstone of his modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the heady intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. With staggering originality, Botticelli reinvented ancient subjects for the domestic interior, paneling patrician bedrooms with moralizing tales and offering erudite instruction to their influential inhabitants.
At the center of this exhibition is a spalliera reunited, the Gardner’s Tragedy of Lucretia and its companion The Tragedy of Virginia (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). Together with extraordinary loans of the same genre from European and American public collections, Heroines and Heroes explores Botticelli’s revolutionary approach to antiquity – from ancient Roman to early Christian – and offers a new perspective on his late career masterpieces.
By Nathaniel Silver, Curator of the Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
144 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019
Paperback
9.5 x 11 inches
Brilliant Bodies
$109.95
Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies, Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati—gorgeously dressed and adorned men—to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power.
Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials.
This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.
By Timothy McCall
240 pages
Published by University Press, 2022
Hardcover
9 x 0.94 x 10 inches
Catholica: The Visual Culture of Catholicism
$35.00
This richly illustrated book provides the visual keys for any art lover to decode and understand the iconography, tenets, sites, and rituals of the Catholic faith through accessible analysis of its visual and material culture
Focusing on a carefully curated selection of Catholic art and artifacts, this volume explores the influence of iconography and the mystic power of a range of ritual objects. Expert Suzanna Ivanic identifies hidden visual symbols in paintings and examines them close-up, building a catalog of key symbols for readers to use to interpret Catholic art and culture.
Catholica is organized into three sections―”Tenet,” “Locus,” and “Spiritus”―each with three themed subdivisions. Part one introduces the centerpieces of the faith, surveying symbolism in the artistic representation of the holy family, apostles, and saints in stories from scripture. The second part examines places of worship, identifying the essential elements of the cathedral and presenting evocative images of roadside shrines. The third part explores celebrations and traditions, in addition to personal devotional tools and jewelry.
For each of the nine central themes of the faith, introductory text is followed by pages that look in-depth at paintings and artifacts, identifying and explaining the symbolism and stories depicted. As the book progresses, readers build up their knowledge of the entire Catholic visual code―the symbols that define Catholic practice, the attributes of the saints, the parts of the cathedral―allowing them to interpret all Catholic imagery and objects wherever they find them and consequently to better understand the tenets, sites, and rituals of this faith.
By Suzanna Ivanic
256 pages
Published by Thames & Hudson, 2022
Hardcover
7 x 1.2 x 9.7 inches
Close Up: Bourdichon's Boston Hours
$19.95
This absorbing book explores the crown jewel of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s collection of rare books and manuscripts: Jean Bourdichon’s Boston Hours. As court artist to King François I of France, Bourdichon produced paintings, books and even parade floats for the sovereign and his entourage. This publication accompanies the museum’s first ever exhibition dedicated to this spectacular illuminated manuscript.
Painter to two kings, Jean Bourdichon remains today one of the most celebrated artists of the French Renaissance. By age twenty-four, he was already serving as “peintre du roy,” a title which Bourdichon held for the rest of his life. His illustrious career at the French royal court led to a wide range of commissions—from portraits to wall maps to stained glass—but he is remembered principally for astonishing illuminated manuscripts. The peerless Grandes Heures for Queen Anne of Brittany remains the touchstone of this group which includes some of the most lavishly painted books of hours ever produced.
One of these masterpieces—Bourdichon’s Boston Hours—in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the subject of this book. Bourdichon’s only intact book of hours in the United States was acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1890 and became the crown jewel of her collection of rare books and manuscripts. Leading scholars Nicholas Herman and Anne-Marie Eze explore its history in depth, shedding new light on the book’s patronage and provenance—from the shelves of a wealthy Catholic landowner in Lincolnshire to the shop of a Venetian art and antiques dealer.
This book is the latest in the Gardner’s Close Up series, each installment focusing on an individual, outstanding work of art in the collection. This publication is the first dedicated to this rare treasure, and precedes an exhibition opening in summer 2022.
64 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021
Paperback
9.3 x 7.6 inches
Close Up: Raphael & The Pope's Librarian
$19.95
Published in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, this engrossing book accompanies an exhibition the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian brings together for the first time one of the most fascinating works in the museum’s collection – the Gardner Museum’s portrait of papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami – and a painting from the Vatican Museums depicting an episode in his life. This book tells the story of the first Raphael in America and explores Inghirami’s fascinating career.
Nearly five centuries after his death in 1520, Raphael’s fame remains undiminished. According to the celebrated writer Henry James, Raphael’s work was “semi-sacred.” Gilded Age American collectors swooned over his iconic religious images. They feverishly tried and failed to acquire Raphael’s rare paintings in a market flooded with copies, and the occasional forgery.
Isabella Stewart Gardner was the first collector to bring a work by Raphael to America, where she named an entire gallery of her new Boston museum after the Renaissance master and installed many of her most celebrated works of art around his portrait of the rotund cleric Tommaso Inghirami.
Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian (October 31, 2019 - January 30, 2020) is part of the Close Up exhibition series, each installment of which sheds new light on an outstanding work of art in the permanent collection.
By Nathaniel Silver and Ingrid Rowland
Close Up: Sargent on Location, Gardner’s First Artist-in-Residence
$19.95
In the winter of 1903, shortly after the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum first opened to the public, John Singer Sargent used the Gothic Room of the museum as a studio. Among the portraits he painted was one of Isabella’s dear friends, Gretchen Osgood Warren. This finely illustrated gem of a publication explores these three remarkable friends: Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum’s founder and patroness of the arts; John Singer Sargent, premier portrait painter and the museum’s first artist-in-residence; and Gretchen Osgood Warren, a highly accomplished Gilded Age woman.
The collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum includes an astonishing array of objects, including renowned paintings, rare books, sculpture, and decorative arts, as well as more personal items such as collected letters, Isabella’s own correspondence, and ephemera. Mirroring Isabella’s inimitable gallery installations, this publication uses both fine and decorative art, photographs, and correspondence to provide a snapshot in time of the first few years of the museum, in which the collection and its carefully curated spaces inspired new works of art.
As the museum’s first artist-in-residence, Sargent fulfilled Gardner’s hopes for a new kind of cultural institution in Boston, one that would inspire creativity, cultivate artistic talent, and bring joy to artists and amateurs alike. Sargent painted five portraits during his stay at the museum and John Templeman Coolidge, a friend of Gardner’s, captured Sargent at work in the Gothic Room in seven candid photographs. Cigarette in mouth, brush in hand, and a smile on his face, Sargent is seen painting Gretchen Osgood Warren and her daughter who are posing and laughing. This vibrant double portrait stands as a testament to Sargent’s absorption of the museum’s inspirational qualities and his sensitivity to his subject.
Gretchen Osgood Warren was intellectually ambitious and after sitting for her portrait with Sargent, she moved to England with her family and pursued a degree in philosophy and metaphysics at Oxford University. Gardner embraced an increasingly progressive view of women’s rights by the turn of the century and looked approvingly on the educational, political, and professional ambitions of Gretchen Warren’s generation. In Warren, Gardner also discovered a deeply appreciative and sympathetic friend. The eighteen letters between the two women, published here for the first time, illustrate an intimate thirty-five year friendship sharing life’s joys, successes, hardships, and losses.
64 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2018
Paperback
7.5 x 9.5 inches
Cocktails with a Curator
$39.95
Based on the critically acclaimed video series of the same name, Cocktails with a Curator is a collection of lively and informative essays. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, and porcelain—from medieval times through the glorious Renaissance to the early twentieth century—are discussed for their exemplary status. The creators are some of the greatest artists and include Rembrandt, Vermeer, Whistler, Manet, Velázquez, and Veronese, and the stories (of both artists and subjects) are tantalizing. Cocktails, with recipes, are thematically paired with the works: a Jaded Countess (absinthe, vodka, lemon juice, and simple syrup) with Ingres’s portrait Comtesse d’Haussonville; a classic Pimm’s Cup with Gainsborough’s depiction of English beauty Grace Dalrymple Elliott; and a Bloody Mary (named after the last Catholic regnant queen of England) with Holbein’s painting of Sir Thomas More, who opposed the Reformation of Mary’s father, Henry VIII. The perfect addition to any art connoisseur’s library, this book is an innovative and intoxicating way to enjoy the treasures of a world-renowned art collection.
By Xavier F. Salomon, illustrated by Aimee Ng Giulio Dalvit Luis Serrano; forward written by Simon Schama
288 pages
Published by Rizzoli Electa, 2022
Hardcover
7.8 x 1.3 x 9.8 inches
Colnaghi Journal Vol 4,
$50.00
Colnaghi Studies Journal is produced biannually by the Colnaghi Foundation. Its purpose is to publish texts on significant pre-twentieth-century artworks in the European tradition that have recently come to light or about which new research is underway, as well as on the history of their collection. Texts about artworks should place them within the broader context of the artist’s oeuvre, provide visual analysis and comparative images.
The Museum is featured in the essay "Selling Botticelli to America: Colnaghi, Bernard Berenson and the sale of the Madonna of the Eucharist to Isabella Stewart Gardner" written by Jeremy Howard.
Edited by Stijn Alsteens, et al.174 pages
Published by Colnaghi Foundation, March 2019
Paperback
Colorstrology
$19.95
The bright and insightful guide to birthday colors is back with an all-new cover inspired by the iconic Pantone color system. Discover every vibrant aspect of your personality with Colorstrology, a fascinating blend of astrology, numerology, and color theory that offers exciting new insights about our lives and relationships. Written by renowned astrologer Michele Bernhardt using the numbers and color schemes of Pantone, Inc., the global authority on color, the system features 366 “birthday colors” that illustrate who we are and how we behave. Using Colorstrology, you’ll quickly understand how to enhance your best personality traits with your birthday color. This full-color book features detailed profiles of everyone you know, plus 366 perforated swatches so you can take your birthday color wherever you go.
Written by Michele Bernhardt432 pages
Published by Quirk Books, 2014
Paperback
5.89 x 5.89 inches
Community By Design
$45.00
In 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. moved from New York City to Brookline, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb that anointed itself the “richest town in the world.” For the next half century, until his son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. relocated to California in 1936, the Olmsted firm received over 150 local commissions, serving as the dominant force in the planned development of this community.
Little has been published on the importance of Brookline as a laboratory and model for the Olmsted firm’s work. This beautifully illustrated book provides important new perspective on the history of planning in the United States and illuminates an aspect of the Olmsted office that has not been well understood.
320 pages
Published by University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Boston, in association with Library of American Landscape History, 2013
Hardcover
7 x 10 inches
Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture
$60.00
Composite Landscapes examines one of landscape architecture's most recognizable forms: the montage view. The volume gathers work from a select group of contemporary artists and a dozen of the world's leading landscape architects. These composite views reveal practices of photomontage depicting the conceptual, experiential, and temporal dimensions of landscape.
Composite Landscapes illustrates the analog origins of a method now rendered ubiquitous through digital means. In revisiting the composite landscape view as a cultural form, Composite Landscapes illuminates the contemporary status of the photographically constructed image for the design disciplines and beyond.
Edited by Charles Waldheim and Andrea Hansen, with contributions by James S. Ackerman, James Corner, Stephen Daniels, Anette Freytag, Andrea Hansen, Karen M'Closkey, and Charles Waldheim
176 pages
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2014
Hardcover
10 x 1 x 12 inches
Cultural Leadership in America
$24.00
Seven experts discuss the impact of a few important Americans who, through force of personality as well as the nature of their art collecting, helped shape the culture of their times and some of the collections we enjoy today.
In their essays, experts discuss the development of American culture and cultural institutions through the key leadership role of women and other mold-breaking individuals, and present new scholarship on collecting, patronage, philanthropy, and arts management.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
124 pages
Published by the Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1997
Paperback
7.5 x 0.5 x 10.2 inches
Danijel Zezelj: Days of Hate, Act I
$17.99
Danijel Zezelj: The United States of America, 2022.
The loss that ripped them apart drove Huian into the arms of the police state and Amanda towards a guerrilla war against the white supremacy. Now they meet again.
This is a story of a war.
By Ales Kot, Danijel Zezelj, Jordie Bellaire, and Tom Muller
176 pages
Published by Image Comics, 2018
Paperback
6.6 x 0.6 x 10.1 inches
Dayanita Singh: Dream Villa
$35.00
In Dream Villa Singh explores how the night transforms what seems ordinary by day into something mysterious and unsettling. This series of colour photographs presents a landscape which exists as much in the artist’s imagination as in the real world. Singh travels to many different cities never knowing where Dream Villa or its inhabitants will present themselves. It is a place where nothing is quite as it seems to be – it comes alive at night, when all is lit by artificial light and the moon is just ornamentation.
By Dayanita Singh136 pages
Published by Steidl, 2010
Hardcover
4 x 8 inches
Dayanita Singh: House of Love
$45.00
“House of Love” is a work of photographic fiction that takes the form of nine short stories. Working closely with writer Aveek Sen, whose prose follows a journey of its own, Singh explores the relationship between photography, memory, and writing. “House of Love”, designed to blur the lines between an art book of photographic images and a work of literary fiction, is a book whose images demand to be read, not just seen, and whose texts create their own sensory worlds. The combination creates a new vocabulary for the visual book.
The “House of Love” itself is the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal as a recurring motif that stands for a range of meanings—meanings made up of the truths and lies of night and day, love and illusion, attachment and detachment.
By Dayanita Singh172 pages
Radius Books & Peabody Museum Press
Hardcover
6.25 x 9.75 inches
Dayanita Singh: Museum of Chance
$65.00
Dayanita Singh’s Museum of Chance is a book about how life unfolds, and asks to be recorded and edited, along and off the axis of time. The inscrutably woven photographic sequence of Singh’s Go Away Closer has now grown into a labyrinth of connections and correspondences. The thread through this novel like web of happenings is that elusive entity called Chance. It is Chance that seems to disperse as well as gather fragments or clusters of experience, creating a form of simultaneity that is realised in the idea and matter of the book, with its interlaced or parallel timelines and patterns of recurrence and return. The eighty-eight quadratone images in the book will also appear on the front and back covers in random pairs, transforming each copy of the book into a distinct piece of work by the author.
By Dayanita Singh, texts by Aveek Sen96 pages
Published by Steidl, 2014
Clothbound hardcover
11 x 12.8 inches
Degas: A Passion for Perfection
$50.00
A beautiful celebration of six decades of work by Edgar Degas, published in the centennial year of the artist’s death.
Edgar Degas’s (1834–1917) relentless experimentation with technical procedures is a hallmark of his lifelong desire to learn. The numerous iterations of compositions and poses suggest an intense self-discipline, as well as a refusal to accept any creative solution as definitive or finite. Published in the centenary year of the artist’s death, this book presents an exceptional array of Degas’s work, including paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings, monotypes, counter proofs, and sculpture, with approximately sixty key works from private and public collections in Europe and the United States, some of them published here for the first time. Shown together, the impressive works represent well over half a century of innovation and artistic production.
Essays by leading Degas scholars and conservation scientists explore his practice and recurring themes of the human figure and landscape. The book opens with a study of Degas’s debt to the Old Masters, and it concludes with a consideration of his artistic legacy and his influence on leading artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Ryan Gander, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, R. B. Kitaj, Pablo Picasso, and Walter Sickert.
Edited by Jane Munro
272 pages
Published by Yale University Press, 2017
Hardcover
9.7 x 1 x 11.6 inches
Dennis Miller Bunker and His Circle
$8.00
From the exhibition Dennis Miller Bunker and His Circle, on view from January 13 to June 4, 1995 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The exhibition featured works from the Gardner, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and several private collections.
The essay in this catalog explores Dennis Miller Bunker and the broader crosscurrents of influence in which Bunker participated, as well as his own crucial role as teacher and artistic pioneer. Also included are selected entries from the exhibition, featuring brief commentaries on the works.
By Erica E. Hirshler, with forward by Anne Hawley, former Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
63 pages
Published by the Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1995
Paperback
10.8 x 0.4 x 10.5 inches
© 2023 Gift at the Gardner.
