Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history. His impressive body of work spans thirty years, covering a wide range of painting styles and periods that includes 15th Century Icons, Picasso, and even Walt Disney. And while the copies could fetch impressive sums on the open market, Landis isn’t in it for money. Posing as a philanthropic donor, a grieving executor of a family member’s will, and most recently as a...

"The black-tie gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art promises to be a star-studded evening. Cordelia Stapleton and John Sinclair have flown in from Alexandria, Egypt, to help celebrate ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian culture with New York's elite. The influential crowd of artists, collectors, scientists, and New York society dine and dance at the museum's historic Temple of Dendur, unaware that terrorists are planning to attack. Fortunately, museum...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it is on the other hand still considered an elitist or hermetic language by audiences intimidated by its lack of recognizable subject matter. Yet ultimately, abstraction continues to be a viable creative...

This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel's (1900-1984) celebrated paintings of people, still life, and cityscapes. Featuring around seventy paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh and Cezanne, all of which provided...

"In a world filled with great museums and great paintings, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the reigning queen. Her portrait rules over a carefully designed salon, one that was made especially for her in a museum that may seem intended for no other purpose than to showcase her virtues. What has made this portrait so renowned, commanding such adoration? And what of other works of art that continue to enthrall spectators: What makes the Great Sphinx...

"Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world, a landlocked nation that borders both China and Russia. Kazakhstan has long struggled to find its own identity. Since declaring independence in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kazakhs have struggled to regain their unique culture. This volume takes readers through its past and current events, across mountains and valleys, and into the everyday lives of its citizens, using vivid photographs,...

In the tradition of the bestselling work "Stiff," a pop culture guru and author of "The Serial Killer Files" offers an all-inclusive, irreverent, and always lively look at the state of death. b&w photos throughout.

"Phoebe Hoban's definitive biography of the renowned American painter Alice Neel tells the unforgettable story of an artist whose life spanned the twentieth century, from women's suffrage through the Depression, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and feminism. Throughout her life and work, Neel constantly challenged convention, ultimately gaining an enduring place in the canon. Alice Neel's stated goal was to "capture the...

"See Paris through the eyes of the Impressionists and their followers. From the Louvre museum to the seedy cabarets of Pigalle, discover the places that inspired Manet, Degas and Van Gogh. Then travel beyond the city to the suburbs and Normandy to find the scenic villages painted by Monet, Renoir and Cézanne."--P. [4] of cover.