The Largest Art

Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitioners Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture—large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a “declaration of independence” for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own. Ryan distinguishes urban design from its sister arts by its pluralism: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city. Ryan looks at three well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism: a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania, a Bronx housing project, and a formally and spatially diverse grouping of projects in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980: David Crane, Edmund Bacon, and Kevin Lynch. And he tells three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world. Ryan concludes his manifesto with three signal considerations urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are ceaselessly active, perpetually changing. It is the urban designer's task to make art with aesthetic qualities that can survive perpetual change.

The founder and CEO of Park West Gallery, Albert Scaglione, tells the story of how he created the largest art dealer in the world.

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.

The viral phenomenon #DrawWithRob is now a brand-new activity book for you to draw with Rob at home! As seen everywhere on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, TV, and more, from the creative genius and bestselling author Rob Biddulph!

“Boser cracks the cold case of the art world’s greatest unsolved mystery.”— Vanity Fair One museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld: the riveting story of the 1990 Gardner Museum robbery, the largest unsolved art theft in history. Perfect for fans of the Netflix series This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist! Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and a $5 million reward, not a single painting has been recovered. Worth as much as $500 million, the missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art world and their theft one of the nation’s most extraordinary unsolved mysteries. Art detective Harold Smith worked the theft for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to pick up where he left off. Traveling deep into the art underworld, Boser explores Smith’s unfinished leads and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock ‘n’ roll art thief and a golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse. A tale of art and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves.

"Part art book, part travel guide, this is a colorful journey through twenty California murals towns"--Provided by publisher.

This monumental new book is the first to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings from the encyclopedic collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive volume's broad sweep of material, all from a single museum, makes it at once a universal history of painting and the ideal introduction to the iconic masterworks of this world-renowned institution. More than 1,000 lavish color illustrations and details of 500 masterpiece paintings, created over 5,000 years in cultures across the globe, are presented chronologically from the dawn of civilization to the present. These works represent a grand tour of painting from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity and prized Byzantine and medieval altarpieces, to paintings from Asia, India, Africa and the Americas, and and the greatest European and North American masters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art includes and introduction and illuminating texts about each artwork written specially for this volume by Kathryn Calley Galitz, whose experience as both curator and educator at the Met makes her uniquely qualified. European and American artists include Duccio, El Greco, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Turner, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Vermeer, David, Renior, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Sargent, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Warhol. The artworks are arranged in rough chronological order, without regard to geography or culture, offering a visual timeline of the history of painting, from the earliest examples on pottery jars made over five thousand years ago to canvases on which the paint has barely dried. Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the Museum, the paintings resonate anew; and this chronological framework reveals unexpected visual affinities among the works. For those wishing to experience the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Met's collection, or study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, this important volume is sure to become a classic cherished by art lovers around the world.

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before." - Jerry Saltz Americans are rightfully proud of much of their heritage, especially as it relates to the ideas of democracy and government. The country has spread its ideals throughout the world and rose, in just two short centuries, to a place of global leadership. However, when it comes to art and culture, there's never been any doubt how young the nation is, especially compared to much older nations across the Atlantic. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was created to assuage some of that, and to show the world that America could hold its own with the leading galleries of the rest of the world. From the beginning, the Met has been unique, because unlike many European museums, the support for the sprawling New York City museum came from modern tycoons and philanthropists, instead of old families with wealth and land. Like the rest of the city, the museum grew quickly, as the millionaires of New York and other cities around the nation vied to see who could donate the most paintings or objects of art. Having one's work in the Met, or contributing to it, became something of a status symbol, a way to demonstrate prestige and importance. Having one's name on a gallery wall or a wing of the always expanding museum could cement a legacy. At the same time, the Met has always been a place that anyone could visit. Its very charter insisted that patrons be welcomed and educated by what they saw during their visits, a goal the museum has kept in focus for nearly 150 years. And while many European museums cater primarily to tourists, the Met remains something of a hometown treasure for New York City, focusing much of its attention on recognizing and balancing the city's cultural diversity with the needs of its patrons of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The History and Legacy of America's Largest Art Museum chronicles the remarkable history of the museum and highlights some of its most important pieces. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Met like never before.