After a century in which the lexicon of artists' materials expanded from the classic oil, canvas, stone and plaster to include photography, film, performance, found objects and concepts, the spotlight has finally swung back. A new generation of artists--as well as some who never abandoned figurative painting in the first place--is relishing the solitary, slow, subtle set of processes involved in not just painting, but painting people. They are choosing paint's unique ability to distill a lifetime of events rather than photography's glimpse of a frozen moment. Painting People, edited by the prominent London art historian and critic Charlotte Mullins, unites and contrasts the work of a key group of artists from around the world, and investigates their richly varied accomplishments in lucid text with detailed commentaries, accompanied by more than 150 reproductions. The list of contributing artists is stellar, ranging from photo-based painters like Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas to Pop artists like Sigmar Polke and Alex Katz, photorealists like Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter, Neoexpressionists like Cecily Brown, and comics-inspired painters like Yoshitomo Nara, Inka Essenhigh and Takashi Murakami. There are erotic grotesques from John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, meditations on the muse by Elizabeth Peyton and Lucian Freud, "Repro-realistic" work from Neo Rauch and of course self-portraits by Philip Akkerman and Marcel Dzama, among others. Well documented with artists' biographies, a selected bibliography, a list of illustrations, and an index, this superbly conceived book makes the art of figure painting understandable to diverse audiences. It belongs in most academic, special, and public libraries that have art book collections. Strongly recommended.-Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia (Cheryl Ann Lajos Library Journal 20061101) Chris Ofili (born 1968) is an English painter noted for works referencing aspects of his African background. He is one of the best-known Young British Artists, a Turner Prize winner, and the source of one of the New York art world's biggest scandals. It was Ofili's painting, a depiction of a black African Virgin Mary surrounded by images from blaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, that caused then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to close the infamous Sensation exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Cecily Brown was born in London and received her MFA from the Slade School of Art there. Her work has been exhibited at many galleries worldwide including The Saatchi Gallery, London; the Gagosian Gallery, New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Laylah Ali was born in 1968 in Buffalo, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at inVA, London; 303 Gallery, New York; Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, Australia; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, among others. She has been featured in group exhibitions such as The Body, The Ruin, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia; 2004 Whitney Biennial, New York; Splat Boom Pow!, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas; 2003 Venice Biennale; and Freestyle, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She received a B.A. from Williams College and an M.F.A. from Washington University, St. Louis. Ali lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. MichaIl Borremans was born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Kunsthalle Bremehaven, and the Museum f r Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, among others. Borremans lives and works in Ghent. Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940 and studied visual art at Yale University. Photography has been an integral part of his painting process since the mid-60s, and later became a body of work in its own right. Close has also distinguished himself as a master of printmaking. Since 1967 his work has been the subject of more than 100 major exhibitions throughout the world.