Book Description

The first book to focus exclusively on the luminous watercolors and pastels of Arthur Dove (1880-1946), this volume explores the contributions of these mediums to the development of Dove's distinctive images of the American landscape. Dove's landmark pastel series of 1911-12, "The Ten Commandments," represents American modernism's first breakthrough into abstraction. His subsequent pastels of the 1910s and 1920s provided him with the stylistic innovations he later adapted in his oil paintings. Watercolor became the primary medium of Dove's summer months in the early 1930s and remained so throughout his career. Bringing together watercolors and pastels from collections across the country, this book will be of deep interest to both scholars and admirers of twentieth-century American art. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Humor, Wit, and Genius
Bicycle wheel on stool. A urinal. A bottle rack. A comb. A mustached Mona Lisa. And other sordid odds and ends. Though his "Readymades" continue to shock the public as monstrosities to the art world, very few know the story behind the wit and audacity that is Marcel Duchamp. In this exhaustive album of Duchamp's oeuvre, Naumann gives compassion to "Duchamp's things," objects crucified by indifference and imperception, through his stunning layout of text and colored figures; the book itself is truly an aesthetic masterpiece. Albeit an art historian, Naumann does not digress into meditations on esoterica. Rather, he examines Duchamp's letters, interviews, speeches, notes, writings, and other primary source evidence to construct an enlightening and entertaining interpretation for each and every one of Duchamp's masterpieces. Exploring the philosophical questions at play in each work, Naumann explains to us Duhcamp's ideal of art and answers convincingly why the artist provocateur felt the need to abandon the jurisdiction of Taste and Aesthetics. For anyone brave enough to be enlightened about the complexity of a urinal or the phonetic pun behind L.H.O.O.Q (the mustached Mona Lisa), I urge you not to only read this book but to perceive it in its entirety. ... Read more

Amazon.com

"Warning! This book is preposterous," says the back cover. This collaboration between the flamboyant Spanish painter and the Latvian-born portraitist is also a surrealistic work of art. Halsman understood the extroverted Dali better than any other photographer; their talents and personalities were the perfect complement to each other. In the course of this witty and inventive homage, the artist's celebrated whiskers tie themselves in a knot, are pressed into service as a paintbrush, become the hands of a clock and blemish the face of the Mona Lisa. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

A photography book
I was surprised to see that this Dali book is more a book of photography than of any of Dali's art. I mean, I knew it was mostly pictures of him, but it turns out to be all these complicated photographs of Dali! It's pretty interesting, especially if you're into photos. And what makes the book is the last section where there are descriptions of how all the weirdest pictures were taken. To think that all of them could have been done effortlessly on a computer these days says something about Philippe Halsman's dedication. Kudos!

Very funny book
I'm not an educated art critic or even really a big art fan, but I take an art class for my high school and one day my teacher showed us this book. I thought it looked weird and since thats the type of art I like i picked it up and read it. This book is very weird and funny. The ways they can get the moustache to stand are really cool. I especially like the fishing pole one and the graph but really all the pictures are good. This book has turned me on to the weirder side of art.

Great Photographs
I thoroughly enjoyed the photos in this book, but that is all there was to it. There are about 40 really great photos of Dali doing strange things with his mustache. It is certainly not, as I was led to believe by the other reviewer, a novel. One can easily read the whole book in just a few minutes. It is called a photographic interview and just has some questions, each followed by a crazy photo with a caption.

A fantastic journey into the strange world that is Dali.
A must have for all Salvador Dali fans and a definate collectors item. World famous photographer Philippe Halsman beautifully (and sometimes disturbingly) brings to life one of the greatest Dali obsessions of all time...his mustache. A funny and free-spirited trip into a crazy world. I highly recomend this novel for any enthusiast or someone with a taste for the bizarre. Painstainkingly produced. A masterpiece for all ages! ... Read more

Book Description

Walker Evans, more than any other photographer in the thirties and forties, defined the documentary aesthetic. For over four decades he used his camera precisely and lucidly to record the American experience. He is generally acknowledged as America's finest documentary photographer of this century.

He attempted to show both the beauty of his subjects and the horror of the social situations in which they lived. During the Depression, from 1935 to 1937, Evans took part in the most extensive photographic project ever carried out in the United States-the pictorial survey of the Farm Security Administration. The now-legendary collaboration with James Agee that resulted in the masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men documents his dedication to photographing the country he knew.

Evans's talented eye and sensitive heart make him one of the great photographers of this century. This volume contains many of his best-known images.
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Reviews (1)

A great primer on a long forgotten era
Whether you like the era of the 1930's or not, this book will give you a feel for the time and the places traveled by photographer Walker Evans. The photographs are superb technically, but it is the subjects that will remain in your memory long after you close the book. Evans's subjects are captured with dignity, and although you might be inclined to feel sorry for them, you are inevitably touched by the strength of these people. The book is a good introduction to Walker Evans and his feel for the human condition. His photographs remind me alot of Dorothea Lange's. ... Read more

Book Description

As his loving but crisply unsentimental images make evident, Peter Turnley is a clear-eyed descendant of such master French photographers as Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and Edouard Boubat; the latter two, in fact, have written brief tributes to him that serve as forewords to this book. That Turnley's work has been inspired by these earlier influences comes as no suprise, for as a young photographer he worked as Doisneau's assistant, and he subsequently became a close friend of Boubat, meeting him "at least once a week for an afternoon glass of rouge and warm conversation." Yet Turnley's work is uniquely his own, rooted in his 25-year affair of the heart with the most beautiful city in the world. A longtime resident of the city, he invites us to share an intimate Paris that outsiders rarely see, giving us seductive glimpses of Paris life as lived on the street, in the Metro, and at countless neighborhood cafes.

160 duotone photographs
168 pages
11 3/8 x 11 3/8"
Trade Cloth ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Cheaper than a Plane ticket
After being in Paris for an entire summer, I've returned to the US with great heartache. Paris had a profound effect on me, so when I arrived in the states, I feverishly tried to gather all I could to remind me of Paris. On a whim I bought "Parisians." From the moment I opened it up, I was suddenly back in my beloved city. The photographs capture Paris in the way that takes me back everytime. Turnley's skill at capturing the essence of Parisians is striking, uncanny and charming. If you've been, you miss it, or want to know what Paris is "really" like, just open the cover of "Parisians." On the days I want nothing more than to transport back to Paris, all I have to do is open this book and I'm there.

A touching collection of black and white images
Peter Turnley has captured the spirit of Paris and the souls of Parisians and presented it in one beautifully produced volume for the world to see at an affordable price. The images are stunning and the order of the images contributes to the quality of the book. I expect to return to these images often for years to come.

The Beauty of Paris
For those of you who have been to Paris, Peter Turnley's work will strike a deep sense of longing to return. His ability to capture some many facets of life throughout his book is delightful. I really enjoyed the mix of people, places, and situations he photographed such as a French woman in a barista or fans at a soccer game. His use of black and white photography added a sense of timelessness to the work. In summary, I think the book is an amazing piece of work that highlights the diversity and beauty of Paris. ... Read more

Book Description

Dancers always remained Degas's favorite theme

"No art could be less spontaneous than mine. Inspiration, spontaneity, temperament are unknown to me. One has to do the same subject ten times, even a hundred times over. In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement." (Edgar Degas)

In terms of both theme and technique, the key to understanding the early work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is classical painting. Although he was eventually associated with the Impressionists and even participated in their joint exhibitions, Degas never adopted a purely Impressionist approach.

Degas's work, reflecting an extremely personal and psychological perspective, emphasizes the scenic or concentrates on the detail. Thus, Degas's painting is often discussed with reference to the rise of short-exposure photography. Thematically, nature proved less interesting to the artist than the life and inhabitants of the modern metropolis. Degas primarily sought his motifs in ballet salons, at the race track or circus, or in bedrooms - but dancers always remained his favorite theme. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A Portrait of the Invisible
Koerner has written a philosophical masterpiece in the form of an art book. Caspar David Friedrich is one of the most complex and thought-provoking of nineteenth-century artists, whose whose exploration of perception shows up in his most mundane paintings as well as his most grandiose.
Koerner shows us how even a painting of something as simple as a bushy thicket in the snow contains many subtle contradictions and complexities that baffle the eye as we examine it more closely. The apparent simplicity and underlying intensity of many of his works is similar to that of Edward Hopper, on whom he seems to have been a major influence (and this book bears comparison with Kranzfelder's "Hopper").
Friedrich specialized in painting the human figure seen from behind (rueckenfigur), and this ties in with sense of nostalgia that is a major component of his art. A really notable example of this is "Abbey Graveyard under Snow", a painting of a ruined mediaeval monastery with a spectral procession of monks from a bygone age; this painting was destroyed by bombing in 1945 and exists only in reproduction - a ghostly painting of ghosts.
Koerner's dense prose is heavy going, but well worth the effort because it contains so much; the author evidently has a thorough grounding in philosophy as well as a great sympathy for his subject.
The last chapter is entitled "deja vu", and this sums up one of the main feelings aroused by this art. The last sentence is worth quoting:
"And it arrests you on the Dresden heath, before the thicket in winter, when what you thought were just alders in the snow are fragments of your darkest history". ... Read more

Book Description

Doris Schattschneider's classic M. C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry (1990) is the most penetrating study of Escher's work in existence, and the one most admired by mathematicians and scientists. It deals with one powerful obsession that preoccupied Escher: what he called "the regular division of the plane," the puzzle-like interlocking of birds, fish, lizards, and other natural forms in continuous patterns. Schattschneider asks, "How did he do it?" She answers the question by meticulously analyzing Escher's notebooks, and the New Scientist described the result as "a collection of detective stories whose plots are brilliantly organized patterns."

Like the first edition of the book, this new volume includes many of Escher's masterworks, as well as hundreds of lesser-known examples of his work. It also features an illustrated epilogue by the author that reveals new information about Escher's inspiration and shows how his ideas of symmetry have influenced mathematicians, computer scientists, and contemporary artists. Visions of Symmetry is a trip into the mind of a creator who continues to captivate the world. ... Read more

Book Description

In this handsome book, Anthea Callen deals with issues of sexuality, gender, and visual representation to illuminate the underlying meanings of Degas`s depictions of women in his series of bathers, dancers, and prostitutes.She argues that the gender politics of Degas` culture made it inevitable that he represent masculine desire-and anxieties about masculine identity evoked by such desire-through an apparently detached masculine scrutiny of the female body. ... Read more

Reviews (9)

One of the best on Leonardo.
This excellent book focuses on Leonardo's drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor. Everyone has seen the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, but Leonardo's greatest achievments are found in his drawings. Vivid HIGH QUALITY color reproductions are accompanied by insightful commentary and historical/biographical information. The book covers the whole breadth of Leonardo's intellectual development. 100 color drawings by history's greatest draftsman, and indeed one of most powerful minds the world has ever seen. As the book says "...[Leonardo's] drawings [are] the pure expression of his genius, boundless and magnificent."
What more could one want in a book? 5/5

The eternal genius
Kenneth Clark gives an unpropogating look at Da Vinci. All too often Leonardo's name has been attached to support a variety of causes of this or that nature. Being, seemingly, irreligious and unphilosophic while being the quintessential Renassaince Man. His name is often used as a mascot to justify the ideals of this or that group of whatever. He was clearly an animal rights lover, possibly a closet Franciscan, in all probability a homosexual (although not much of an activist). Leonardo was into his thoughts and had little patience for something that was already complete in his mind. He left scores of unfinished works, and minons of angry patrons - contrary to Bornstin's book that Leonardo was in constant search of patrons - Clark says he had many unhappy patrons. Leonardo was an animal lover who hated violence (although he designed armaments of various sorts). His depth of religious devotion could be argued, but he was not irreverant, as some have claimed. Leonardo was rather Franciscan and had a fondness for animals and individuality. He was free and valued his own individualism. Other than Da Vinci's notebooks nothing much authentic comes down to us. Every other work of Leonardo has been severally retouched or destroyed, what there is left of Leonardo's work is highly speculative - what bit is in his hand ect. Clark gives a healthy, vibrant, nonproselytizing look at a genius - something anyone might find interesting.

The best introduction to Leonardo & a compelling read
Kenneth Clark's book is probably the best available introduction to Leonardo da Vinci. It is both a good biography and an insightful analysis of Leonardo's art and artistic career. The text is appropriate for both laymen and students of art history. Clark's writing is concise and extremely engaging (to the point where I would recommend reading this book for fun), but it is also intelligent and very informative, with a clear thesis that ties the vast body of matieral covered together into an easily comprehensible package. This book is slightly out of date now, but Martin Kemp's introduction and revision help to ammend for that. I particularly recommend this most recent edition as it is well-illustrated.

"CHILD'S BOOK"?
This is the best book available in English on Leonardo da Vinci. True, the book was first published several decades ago, but the art historian Martin Kemp has added footnotes that bring the text up to date. Kenneth Clark made a tremendous contribution to the study of Leonardo da Vinci with this book - Science and Technology Museum notwithstanding!!!!

The Renaissance Man
Leonardo da Vinci. Probably the greatest painter, scientist, inventor, and philosopher of the High Renaissance, he changed the way we look at art and science. This book unravels all of the secrets of Leonardo, and the dark corners of his life. He considered himself a failure during his lifetime, but today, he is one of the greatest people in history. His inventions, theories, paintings, sketches, all shown in this book, and this book, there are some of his 4,500 pages of notes. This book reveals all that is known about his life today, and I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about Leonardo. ... Read more

Book Description

Frankenthaler Paintings on Paper is a 114 page hard cover book with (71) beautiful full color plates and (25) black and white and full color figures.

Essay by Bonnie Clearwater

Painting on paper provides Frankenthaler with an arena for experimentation in gesture and control. Her love of paper started in childhood, and she has retained the creative freedom she experienced working on paper in those early years. Over the past 10 years, she has worked almost exclusively on paper and in a scale that sometimes rivals her large canvases measuring seven by six feet.

Intriguingly, Frankenthaler paints her canvases like watercolors and her works on paper like paintings. For her canvases, she often painted with the stain technique that she innovated during the early 1950s when she began thinning her pigments to the consistency of watercolor and pouring them onto unsized canvas. ... Read more

Book Description

American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) is best known for his portraits of Depression-era America, a number of which were included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his famous collaboration with writer James Agee.In 1942 at the behest of retired journalist Karl Bickel, Evans journeyed to Sarasota to take photographs for the Mangrove Coast, a book Bickel was writing about the long and colorful history of Florida's Gulf Coast.

Featured in Walker Evans: Florida are the surprising images Evans took during that six-week stay in the area, which constitute a little-known chapter in Evans's distinguished career.Far from stereotypical postcard pictures of sandy beaches and palm trees, Evans captured a region of contradictions.Here in the nation's seaside vacationland, Evans focused his lens on decaying architecture, crowded street scenes, retirees, and numerous images of animals, railroad cars, and circus wagons from Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, whose winter home was Sarasota.

Accompanying the fifty-two images in Walker Evans: Florida is novelist Robert Plunket's wry account of the human and geographic landscape of Florida. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Second Evans Title in Series a Success
"Walker Evans: Florida," following on the heels of last year's "Walker Evans: Signs," is the second volume in what I hope will become a series from the J.Paul Getty Museum. Revealing as well as entertaining, it presents the Getty's holdings of Florida photographs that Evans made on assignment in 1941 for "The Mangrove Coast," with text by Karl Bickel, published the following year. This is a lesser-known body of Evans's work, somewhat overshadowed by his monumental document of the Great Depression collected in the files of the Library of Congress, and in the pages of innumerable volumes since his original "American Photographs" and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The value of this small volume is that Evans's excellant Florida work is now back in print; and if his whole career is ever to be properly evaluated, then all of its facets must be fully examined. My only criticism is with the book's design and layout. As with "Walker Evans: Signs," the photographs are often guttered and bled off the edge of the page, and the type is laid out in such an artsy way that it is often confusing. Evans would not have approved. The enjoyable introductory essay by Robert Plunket adeptly balances information about Evans and West Florida, with personal experiences of the author, a long time Sarasota resident. This is a book that all serious students of Evans will want to have. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

An extraordinary and unusual art book
The Impact Of Chaim Soutine is an extraordinary and unusual art book tracing how the works of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) affected the artistic sensibilities of avant garde artists de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, and Bacon. Filled cover to cover with full-color reproductions of bold painting, each image is paired with comments directly attributed to Soutine and the great artists he affected. Enhanced with artist and studio photographs, a chronology and biography, and a roster of Soutine Paintings in the Galerie Gmurzynska Exhibition, The Impact Of Chaim Soutine is a truly stunning and informative look at the influence and legacy of a notable man's abstract art and a welcome addition to personal and academic Art History collections. ... Read more

Book Description

Craig Harbison reveals the neglected human dimension of vanEyck's fabulously detailed oil paintings, and investigates the personalhistories of the worldly participants of such masterpieces as theArnolfini Double Portrait. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

great gift for any Art lover
I loved these book marks. I am a teacher and I plan to use them in my classroom. What better way to introduce your students to great works of art. I love Degas and I am sure my students will learn to love him too.The price is also right! You can afford to give a few away and still have plenty for yourself to enjoy. ... Read more

Book Description

Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a pioneer of modern sculpture in Britain. Yet he always felt an outsider in his adopted country, subjected as he was to relentless attacks and vilification. With his determination to break the taboos surrounding the depiction of sexuality, and his use of expressive distortion of the figure in a manner modeled more on non-Western art than the classical ideal, he aroused hostility throughout his career. Such controversy has meant that considerable attention is paid to certain aspects of Epstein's long and productive career, while in other respects the true nature of his overall achievement has been overlooked. This book intends to redress the balance. It provides a fascinating account of a sculptor who had a profound influence on successive generations of artists--not only for his carving but also for his courage. ... Read more