Today's (2/16/2012) New Book Releases on Arts & Photography

• A rare glimpse into the lives of trendsetting fashionistas

• Presents seven years of documentary catwalk shots from New York, London, Milan, and Paris

• Key icons from the fashion industry, including Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer, and newcomers such as Agyness Deyn, Lily Cole, Gareth Pugh, and Scarlett Johanssen

• Foreword by British supermodel Erin O’Connor.

"I am rarely front of house, I am always backstage. The adrenaline is amazing; placing the hats just-so, tweaking a veil, shoving in another flower, crossing my fingers and praying that my confections don't fall off! Those last moments as the girls line up backstage is the most exciting time of the entire creative process; six months condensed into a few seconds; like bolts of lightning speeding onto the runway. This book captures that moment.”–Stephen Jones OBE

Through a series of candid photographs taken over the last seven years covering all the different elements that make up the catwalk shows, the uninitiated viewer will get an insight into the chaos that makes up the apparently glamorous world of fashion shows!

This book allows the reader to be a fly on the wall, portraying the reality of the fashion world in a documentary style. Featuring quotes from several industry professionals and reporters–make up artists, hair stylists, models, editors, designers and bloggers–this title communicates in a contemporary vernacular to capture the way that fashion is expressed and recorded in today's world of social networking and blogging, the popularity of which has instigated a huge change in the layman's ability to break into the fashion world.

Firmly in tune with the current vibe and with a definite London edginess, A Front Row Seat is a sensational design statement in itself.

Published to coincide with the exhibition “From Catwalk to Cover” at The Fashion and Textile Museum, November 18, 2011 to February 26, 2012. The exhibition will feature work from the author, Kirstin Sinclair.

This title features a stunning array of the most ambitious examples of residential design in the tropics. From a simple dwelling on a remote island to a luxurious holiday home set in a spectacular landscape – from Brazil to Florida, from New Zealand to Singapore – Tropical Houses brings together a collection of exotic environments designed by well-known architectural firms with interesting approaches by local architects.The houses featured in this volume embrace the tropical lifestyle with open-air rooms, shady courtyards, sunny patios, and cool stucco walls. Exotic local materials and eco-conscious features are a seamless response to the settings of many of the featured houses.

Gertrude Stein and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead were unlikely friends who spent most of their mature lives in exile: Stein in France and Whitehead in the United States. Their friendship was based on a mutual admiration for the philosophical pragmatism of William James and skepticism toward the European tradition of intellectual abstraction extending as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Though neither was musical, both were leading exponents of a new orientation toward time and knowledge acquisition that would go on to influence succeeding generations of composers. Through Virgil Thomson, Stein came to influence John Cage and the New York school of abstract music; through his teaching in the United States, Whitehead’s philosophy of time and cognition came to be seen in America and abroad as an alternative to Newtonian neoclassicism, an alternative clearly acknowledged in the metric modulations of Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow as well as the post-1950 total serialism of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The seemingly unlikely influence of Stein and Whitehead on Thomson, Cage, Carter, and the minimalists tells a remarkable story of transmission within and among the arts and philosophy, one that Robin Maconie unravels through his series of essays in Avant Garde: An American Odyssey from Gertrude Stein to Pierre Boulez. Maconie explores, from Hollywood to Harvard, the way in which music functions as a form of communication across the boundaries of language, serving the causes of trade and diplomacy through its representation of national identity, emotional character, honorable intention, and social discipline. The study of music as a language inevitably became the object of information science after World War II, but, as Maconie notes, 60 years on, music’s refusal to yield to scientific elucidation has generated a stream of anti-music propaganda by a powerful collective of celebrity science writers.  In a sequence of linked essays, Stockhausen specialist Robin Maconie reconsiders the role of music and music technology through careful examination of key modern concepts with respect to time, existence, identity, and relationship as formulated by such thinkers as Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, and Stein, along with Freud, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and Marcel Duchamp.

This foray into art, music, science, and philosophy is ideally suited for students and scholars of these disciplines, as well as those seeking to understand more deeply the influence these individuals had on one another’s work and modern music.

The first monograph on one of the few women Realist painters, Colleen Browning, who painted streetscapes of Harlem, and Manhattan.

Inspired by the forms and forces of nature, Lin Emery’s gracefully undulating kinetic culpture—constructed of highly polished abstract metal shapes—adorn museums and outdoor public spaces around the world. “I love the natural movement of the trees on the levees, the river, and anything in nature,” Emery says. The flowing motion of her structures are also propelled by natural forces; she began using water to power her structures 30 years ago and later utilized wind to also generate movement in her creations. The resulting revolving, twirling, and linked elements evoke

plants, trees, clouds, or water.

This publication covers the life and majestic sculptures created during a career of nearly 60 years from her education working in clay under Ossip Zadkine in Paris, to her

move in the 1950s to New Orleans and her explorations in bronze, aluminum, nickel, and other metals. Emery has been a dedicated student to the craft of metal working since the beginning of her career. In the early years when the metal working studios in New Orleans wouldn’t accept women into their program, she went up to New York to learn welding techniques and to develop her skills.

The recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Grand Prize for Public Sculpture in Japan, Emery has exhibited throughout the United States as well as in England, Japan, Australia, Germany, and France, and her work hangs in venerable national collections including the National

Academy of Design in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation’s past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco’s death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation’s political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.

In this whirlwind tour spanning from prehistory up to the present day and beyond, Laurie Schneider Adams explores how art and our views on it have evolved. Delving into fascinating issues such as why some artworks can be so controversial, why a forgery can never be as “good” as the original, and what the future of art may hold, this beautifully crafted introduction provides a deft overview of Western artistic tradition.