Jonathan Bober

The legendary splendor of Genoese baroque artGenoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power into a thriving banking center for Europe in the seventeenth century. The wealth accumulated by its leading families spurred investment in the visual arts on an enormous scale. This volume explores how artists both foreign and native created a singularly rich and extravagant expression of the baroque in works of extraordinary variety, sumptuousness, and exuberance. This art, however, has remained largely hidden behind the facades of the city's palaces, with few works, apart from those by the school's great expatriates, found beyond its borders. As a result, the Genoese baroque has been insufficiently considered or appreciated.Lavishly illustrated, A Superb Baroque is comprehensive, encompassing all the major media and participants. Presented are some 140 select works by the celebrated foreigners drawn to the city and its flourishing environment—from Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Giulio Cesare Procaccini to Pierre Puget, Marcantonio Franceschini, and Francesco Solimena; by the major Genoese masters active for much of their careers in other settings—Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Filippo Parodi, and Alessandro Magnasco; and above all by the brilliantly synthetic but unfamiliar masters who worked primarily in Genoa itself—Gioacchino Assereto, Valerio Castello, Domenico Piola, and Gregorio De Ferrari. Offering three levels of exploration—essays that frame and interpret, section introductions that characterize principal currents and stages, and texts that elucidate individual works—this volume is by far the most extensive study of the Genoese baroque in the English language.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DCExhibition ScheduleScuderie del Quirinale, RomeMarch 4–June 19, 2022

Larry Day (1921-1998) was a distinguished painter and a dominant force in American art from the 1950s through the 1990s. Referred to as "the dean of Philadelphia painters," he was a charismatic teacher to several generations of artists, many of whom are important figures in the arts today. This celebratory catalogue will explore his contributions to the art of his time, and the lasting power of his observations and imagination. Day's first successes were with abstracted views of nature, but he is perhaps best known for figurative portraits and architectural landscapes, which he continued to develop for the rest of his career. The driving force behind Day's paintings was an intense engagement with earlier art and a deep classicism that governed his views of human interactions and the built environment. In the last decades of his life, he made several series of haunting and mysterious figure com-positions that mix everyday scenes with earlier works of art, fully integrating past and present. Day's art tells us that life is deeply imbricated with the past, and that reality is not a matter of simple observation, but is made up of memories and experience of all kinds of images—from art, literature, film, television, and fashion magazines. This fully illustrated catalogue will focus on Day's working process and relationships between his paintings and drawings. It will include a selection of Day's writings along with scholarly articles that will affirm Day's singular place within midcentury American art and his equally important legacy.