Big Beautiful Gift Books discussed on December 16th

The Art Museum is the finest art collection ever assembled between two covers. This revolutionary and unprecedented virtual art museum in a book, features 1,000 oversized pages of over 2,500 works of art. It is the most comprehensive and visually spectacular history of world art ever published. Ten years in the making, this unique book was created with a global team of 100 specialists in art history, who have collected together important works as they might be displayed in the ideal museum for the art lover. Unrestricted by the constraints of physical space, this volume contains an unprecedented wealth of masterworks spanning three millennia and culled from 650 museums, galleries and private collections from 60 countries to tell the history of world art. It is organized by innovative color-coded, galleries, rooms, corridors and special exhibitions, which display the paintings, sculptures, frescos, photographs, tapestries, friezes, installations, performances, videos, woodblock prints, folding screens, ceramics and manuscripts that tell the history of world art. This is the only museum to house Leonardo's Mona Lisa, a collection of Rembrandt's finest self portraits, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Picasso's Guernica, as well as ceramics from China, Hokusai's woodblock prints, gold artefacts from Peru, and works by Jackson Pollock in one place. With intelligent in-depth text throughout, explanatory lels for each artwork, a comprehensive glossary and detailed location maps, The Art Museum, is accessible for everyone from casual art fans to experts in the field.

In this book of original, behind-the-scenes photographs, acclaimed photographer Terry Richardson follows superstar Lady Gaga during one year of her life, from Lollapalooza through the final show of her Monster Ball tour. During the time period he followed Gaga, Richardson took over 100,000 images and attended more than 30 Monster Ball dates around the world. From the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal rally in Portland, Maine, to the Thierry Mugler show at Maxime, Paris, Richardson captures Lady Gaga as you've never seen her before. A year-long global odyssey- -all access, nothing off limits--this is the book Lady Gaga fans have been waiting for.

Annie Leibovitz Introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. She wasn?t on assignment. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The first place was Emily Dickinson?s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, which Leibovitz visited with a small digital camera. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls. ?That?s when I started making lists,? she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud?s final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. The work became more ambitious as Leibovitz discovered that she wanted to photograph objects as well as rooms and landscapes. She began to use more sophisticated cameras and a tripod and to travel with an assistant, but the project remained personal. Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of Thoreau?s cabin at Walden Pond. Once she got there, she was drawn into the wider world of the Concord writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson?s home and Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The Massachusetts studio of the Beaux Arts sculptor Daniel Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln?s portraits have been saved. Lincoln?s portraitists?principally Alexander Gardner and the photographers in Mathew Brady?s studio?were also the men whose work at the Gettysburg battlefield established the foundation for war photography. At almost exactly the same time, in a remote, primitive studio on the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron was developing her own ultimately influential style of portraiture. Leibovitz made two trips to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to the other photographer on her list, Ansel Adams, she explored the trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for fifty years. The final list of subjects is perhaps a bit eccentric. Georgia O?Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson?s Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her own. ?From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal,? she says. ?It taught me to see again.?

Watercolorist William Matthews has long been hailed as the preeminent painter of the American West. In this new collection of 180 staggering paintings, he captures the full range of western experience: endless skies, high plains, the last working cowboys, the Navajothe mystique of the Living Desert. Steeped in introspection and connected to land, tradition, and identity, Matthews' work evokes a place that is authentic, anachronistic, and dynamic. An essay by award-winning writer Annie Proulx provides insight into both the ranching and the art-making life, resulting in a glorious homage to this ancient terrainsome of the last untamed wilderness in America.