For a contemporary artist of serious aesthetic purpose, David Hockney enjoys immense, perhaps unequaled public visibility: the shock of dyed blond hair, the owlish glasses, and the shy, schoolboy grin are known as much through the popular press as through the journals of the art world. His engaging personality, his quirky but always enlightening ideas about art, and his inexhaustible inventiveness both of imagery and of techniques ranging from oil painting to photography to faxes are captured by Peter Clothier with clear-eyed intelligence and grace in this concise but comprehensive overview....

Lee Krasner never took the easy way out -- not in life, not in art. Brought up in a poor Brooklyn neighborhood and originally named Lena Krasner by her immigrant parents, she decided early on to create a new name and a new identity for herself. Later, as one of the few female painters in the aggressively male circle of Abstract Expressionists, she had to contend not only with the critics' skepticism about their new way of making art but also with the skepticism that greeted any woman's attempts to become a professional artist.
Many of Krasner's male colleagues -- including her husband,...