As if it weren't enough that Paul McCartney is one of the true geniuses of 20th-century popular music, now it comes out that he's no slouch with a paintbrush either. Beatlemaniacs will no doubt consider this volume a must-have, but the museum-and-gallery crowd will be pleased by what they find, too.

The months Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin  spent living and working together in Arles have long been viewed, writes Debora  Silverman, "through the lenses of mythic melodramas, as in the scenes involving the flinging of plates and squeezing of paint tubes in the film 'Lust for Life.'"
In VAN GOGH AND GAUGUIN, Silverman reexamines the two artists' relationship to each other and to "the religious systems that they were struggling to abandon.
 

The catalogue to a traveling exhibition, VINCENT VAN GOGH AND THE PAINTERS OF THE PETIT BOULEVARD explores Van Gogh's relationships and interactions with a disparate group of painters -- Seurat, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Gauguin, among others -- who gathered to discuss and debate new ideas and approaches, intending to inspire and challenge each other.

Though it's an aspect of her career that has rarely received attention, Georgia O'Keeffe created works on paper in watercolors, charcoals, and pastels throughout her lengthy 
creative lifetime. This catalogue of a traveling exhibition includes 80 images, 60 in full color, of works dating from 1915 through 1962.

With his astounding lifetime of work, beginning at the turn of  the century and continuing through the 1920s and '30s at Vogue and Vanity Fair and later as the director of the Department of  Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in  New York City, photographer Edward Steichen revolutionized photography as a 20th-century art form.

Though his portraiture has been among the least-studied aspects of Vincent van Gogh's oeuvre, the artist himself was quite dedicated  to capturing the essence of those with whom he came in contact. "What impassions me most," Vincent wrote in 1889, "...is the portrait, the modern    portrait."

Collector Alan Siegel may have made his professional mark in the field of advertising, but before he donned that gray flannel suit, he studied photography with Alexei Brodovitch and Lisette Model. Those studies served him well as he began, in the early 1960s, to avidly collect photography. Today his collection includes works by such icons as Man Ray, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Weegee, Ansel Adams, Andreas Feininger, Trude Fleischmann, and Edward Weston

Eugene Atget is known today largely thanks to the efforts of Berenice Abbott. She met him  late in his life and strove to ensure that he was given proper credit for his influential documenting of Paris in the early part of this century. John Szarkowski offers ATGET, a lavish collection of the best of the great photographer's work.

For more than two decades, Barbara Kruger has utilized her unique collages of images and words to challenge the status quo and to confront all who come in contact with her work.

M. C. Escher was equal parts artist, mathematician, and magician. His unique picture-puzzles raise questions such as the one articulated by J. L. Locher, director of  the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague: "How can a level field evoke depth or height, as well as surface? How can something be both inside and outside or both convex and concave?"