BOOKS

"Alberto Vargas: Works from the Max Vargas Collection" by Reid Stewart Austin
The storied and turbulent career of glamour artist Alberto Vargas took him from Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies in the 1920s to Hollywood in the '30s to Esquire magazine and the emergence of the "Vargas Girl" in the '40s and, ultimately, to a lasting home at Playboy in the '60s and '70s.
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"Lighting the Nude" by Roger Hicks and Frances Shultz
Available for the first time in paperback, the top-selling "Lighting the Nude" reveals the lighting secrets of the top photographers working today. It showcases more than 400 images of the nude, in a wide variety of styles. Each photograph is accompanied by detailed lighting diagrams and an explanation of what makes the shot work. Both beginners in this branch of photography and seasoned pros will find plenty of inspiring lighting ideas and practical guidance. Lighting the Nude is an essential reference for every studio photographer's bookshelf.
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"Sargent's Venice" by Richard Ormond and Warren Adelson
John Singer Sargent returned to Venice many times during his life, endlessly fascinated with this enchanting city. In paintings filled with vivid colors and dazzling light, he sought to capture its vitality and unique ambience, often working while afloat in a gondola. This gorgeously illustrated book presents nearly seventy of Sargent's oil and watercolor paintings of Venice, many of them famous but others only rarely seen. The book also contains fascinating new photographs of actual sites depicted in Sargent's paintings.
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"Life: The Platinum Anniversary Collection" by Life Magazine
For seven decades, LIFE has been thrilling the world with its unrivaled presentation of the very best photography to be found. Here, the editors have assembled the crème de la crème from the magazine's vast collection of images. Because LIFE has always dealt with matters of every sort, the entire spectrum of society is represented in these pages.
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"Henri Cartier-Bresson" by Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson reveals (as only a few great artists have done consistently) the richness, the sensibilities, and the varieties of the human experience in the twentieth century. This volume of Aperture's Masters of Photography series confirms the genius of the photographer whose pictures with the new, smaller hand-held cameras and faster films defined the idea of "the decisive moment" in photography.
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"Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft" by Simon Houpt
What kind of person would dare to steal a legendary painting—and who would buy something so instantly recognizable? In recent years, art theft has captured the public imagination more than ever before, spurred by both real life incidents (the snatching of Edvard Munch's well-known masterwork "The Scream") and the glamorous fantasy of such Hollywood films as The Thomas Crown Affair.
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"The Power of Art" by Simon Schama
"Great art has dreadful manners," Simon Schama observes wryly at the start of his epic and explosive exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. "The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs.
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"On the Street" by Amy Arbus
Between 1980 and 1990, over five hundred of photographer Amy Arbus's impromptu and edgy portraits of New Yorkers appeared in the Village Voice's monthly fashion feature, "On the Street." The column's missive was to document the city's most adventurous trednsetters as they lived their lives. But Arbus's photographs tell much more than a style story. From the friendliest to the grittiest, every one of these images is a potent tribute to self-expression.
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"The Rembrandt Book" by Gary Schwartz
With international attention focused on the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt von Rijn's birth, the world's leading Rembrandt expert weighs in with a penetrating-and accessible-examination of the Dutch master's life and art from both the biographical and the art historical perspective.
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"Work: The World in Photographs"; by Ferdinand Protzman
Culled from National Geographic's vast photographic archive as well as other important collections, this fascinating, wide-ranging volume presents a wonderfully varied group portrait of people at work-in great cities and tiny villages; in 19th-century China and 21st-century New York; in fields, factories, food carts, four-star restaurants, and just about everywhere else we earn our keep. Here are cowboys and clowns, shepherds and shopkeepers, street musicians and artists' models all plying their assorted trades; on one page a professional quarterback fires ...
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"Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture" by Michael G. Kammen
From the early years of the American Republic to the present, art and architecture have consistently aroused major disputes among artists, critics, scholars, politicians, and ordinary citizens. Now one of our most respected cultural historians chronicles these clamorous debates about the public appropriateness of paintings, sculpture, memorials, and monuments.
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