Abstract Expressionism was the defining movement in American art during the years following World War II, making New York City the center of the international art scene. But what the heck did it mean The drips, the spills, the splashes, the blotches of color, the wild spontaneous energy--signifying what?Abstract Expressionism For Beginners will not only help you understand, but also appreciate the art of some of the most iconic figures in modern art--Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and others. Explore their lives and artistic roots, the heady world of Gre... View More...
Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a ... View More...
An explanation of what art history is, where it came from, what ideas, institutions and practice form its background and how it achieved its present shape and what critical methods it uses today. View More...
In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history.In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in... View More...
For years, Ken Perenyi raked in riches forging masterpieces, convincing even the most discerning experts that his works were the real deal. His works are so flawless that they are still appearing as originals in auction house catalogs, fine art, design and architecture magazines, unexposed as the forgeries they really are. Growing up as a working class kid in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Perenyi never dreamed of becoming an art forger. However, when he stumbled upon The Castle, a large crumbling estate in his neighborhood, he found himself in the middle of the New York avant-garde art scene. Under th... View More...
This book is the clearest and most concise introduction to Greek art of the classical age, which has influenced Western art for millennia. Most surveys of classical art include artists whose works do not survive and whom we only know through descriptions in ancient writers-which is of historical interest but is not useful to most readers, since we cannot appreciate artists without seeing their art.This book includes all the classical artists whose work survives, with summaries of what we know about their lives and with illustrations of their works, making it very easy to compare the artists an... View More...
The ideas that later had such a marked influence on the architecture of Walter Gropius and others of the Bauhaus movement, and subsequently on commercial art and graphic design, were first advocated by the Dutch magazine De Stijl. View More...
A common theme of western American art is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this book, the authors look at western American art of the past three centuries, re-evaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history and American studies. View More...
"She brings a keen painter's eye to bear. . . . The result is often striking: how the subject exists as well as looks."--James Salter"Whether focused on a landscape or the human features, the result is an enchantment."--George PlimptonBeautiful and inspiring portraits create a new image and identity for disability, showing grace, beauty, strength, and resolve. In portraiture, as in most human interactions, the head--indeed the eyes--are the first thing noticed. But confronted by a person in a wheelchair, the viewer's focus shifts to the chair. This work challenges any assumption of difference,... View More...
Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands was the first major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763), which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil, Catesby's Natural History exerted an important, though often overlooked, influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the eighteenth century. Inspired by a major traveling exhibition of Catesby's watercolor drawings from the Roy... View More...
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century. Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger res... View More...
On February 20th, 1909, a belligerent manifesto announcing the birth of the Futurist movement appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro and sent immediate shockwaves throughout Europe. The author, a young Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti, demanded that writers and artists reject the classic art of the past and celebrate the dynamic technology of modern city life. Joined by a group of like-minded artists, over the following years Marinetti pioneered an art that would eulogise speed and industry, in a reaction against the stasis of the classics, and even against contemporary m... View More...
Most "art and science" books focus on the science of perspective or the psychology of perception. Hidden Harmony does not. Instead, the book addresses the surprising common ground between physics and art from a novel and personal perspective. Viewing the two disciplines as creative processes, J.R. Leibowitz supplements existing and original research with illustrations to demonstrate that physics and art share guiding aesthetics and compositional demands and to show how each speaks meaningfully to the other. Hidden Harmony is the first serious look at what art and physics, as creative processes... View More...
Looks at the work of Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, Samuel Morse, Audubon, Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull. View More...
Lace as we know it today developed prior to the sixteenth century from the drawn work, cutwork, and lacis (darning on squares of net) that evolved out of centuries of embroidery and needlework. Traces of elaborate netting have been found in the tombs of ancient Egypt; the Bible mentions "fine twisted linen wrought with needlework"; and centuries-old Scandinavian burial chambers have yielded fragments of gold lace.This definitive history of lace-making is a landmark of nineteenth-century erudition and scholarship that has never been surpassed for its wide learning and comprehensive treatment of... View More...
From pottery to story to carnivals, various forms of artistic expression from the Americas can be shown to reflect universal human imagery and creativity. In this collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines utilize an ethnoaesthetic perspective to place art forms within their cultural and social milieus, and address the problem of understanding culturally patterned, creative expressions caught up in organized art worlds.The book presents an array of contemporary and ancient arts of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, ranging from the cultural heritage of the Centra... View More...
Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed. - The Times (UK) As she did for the Modernists In Montmartre, noted art historian and biographer Sue Roe now tells the story of the Surrealists in Montparnasse. In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dal 's Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse r... View More...
From the WORLD OF ART series, a survey of the artistic achievements of the Renaissance sculptors from Nicola Pisano through Brunelleschi and Donatello to Michelangelo and Cellini. View More...
Without the work of French artist, poet, publisher, activist and translator Jean-Jacques Lebel (born 1936), the emergence of happenings in 1960s Europe would be hard to imagine. From the very outset of the decade, Lebel was instigating happenings--often politically themed-- in Venice, Milan, London, Paris and New York, as the leading exponent for this new form of performance and a close associate of the Living Theater. In 1979 he founded the Polyphonix Festival, devoted to sound poetry and performance art. This hefty volume provides the most comprehensive overview of the life and oeuvre of thi... View More...
When he stands before Giorgione's La Tempesta, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered on a Prague street in November 1989 provokes reflection on the meaning of democracy and the reunion of a people with long-banished hopes and dreams. With the luminous essays in Keeping a Rendezvous, we are given to see the world as Berger sees it -- to explore themes suggested by the work of Jackson Pollock or J. M. W. Turner, to contemplate the wonder of Paris. Rendezvo... View More...
Looking at Art from the Inside Out highlights the role played by the psychological world of the artist in shaping the subject-matter and form of art works. Analysing masterpieces by Manet, Gauguin, Magritte and Picasso, Mary Mathews Gedo, who is trained in both art history and clinical psychology, details how the creative process can transform the artist's inner world into public statements meaningful for a broad audience. Demonstrating how biological predisposition, familial relationships and childhood experiences of future artists play a pivotal role in shaping their careers, she merges form... View More...
In this important work, Frances Colpitt chronicles the Minimal art movement of the 1960s. Maintaining the original spirit of the period--enthusiasm for innovation and a passionate commitment to intellectual inquiry--Colpitt provides an excellent documentary history that is both thorough and nonpartisan.Using a metacritical approach that embraces critical writings of the artists themselves, interviews by herself and the others, and a generous sampling of illustrations, Colpitt sets foth the issues and arguments and identifies key concepts that are crucial to an understanding of Minimal art. The... View More...
How many of us have stood before famous paintings only to realize, with quiet panic, that we can't work out what the fuss is all about? What do we do-beyond just staring-to get the most out of art? How do we come to develop an attachment to individual works and find them fascinating? How do they come to matter to us? While many teachers and critics have diligently directed attention to questions in art history, theory, or criticism, John Armstrong, in a powerful and original shift of focus, considers the roots of our personal attachment to art. Perhaps this most neglected aspect of thinking ab... View More...