Book Description

Degas's pastel Waiting (L'Attente) is an extraordinary object in its craftsmanship and color, as well as in the emotional pull it exerts upon the viewer.But in addition to these, which we expect from a great work of art, Waiting also has an aura of ambiguity and even mystery.This study look at both its aesthetic qualities and the deeper questions that it arouses.Part of the Getty Museum Studies on Art series, the book offers a detailed discussion of Degas's pastel as well as an analysis of the broader context in which the work was created. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A Book for the True Dalinian
As an art lover, I find Salvador Dali to be one of the most eccentric artists that the 20th century has produced. His work is often misunderstood because it is so difficult to comprehend and yet I find that his important contribution to 20th century art must not be overestimated.

This book does Dali a lot of justice by explaining the political situations, the artistic influences, and the personal friendships that helped shape Dali to become the artist that he was. The book also includes almost all of the famous Dali paintings from his earliest years to his last painting from 1982. It also contains photographs and reconstructions of the various artistic projects that he created including jewelry, photographs, and the like.

If you think that Dali is bizarre or that his art simply is incomprehensible to you, try this book out. You will be surprised by how much you learn and how you will want to learn some more about this great twentieth century artist. ... Read more

Amazon.com

For many people, Walker Evans's name conjures up visions of the rural American South of the 1930s, where the photographer made some of his most notable images. But signs--marking buildings; advertising grocery prices, churches, and cabarets; communicating political messages--transfixed him throughout his life. Evans was interested in all aspects of signs, from the typography and graphic layout to the messages they conveyed and the objects themselves. He collected nearly as many of them as he photographed and often exhibited actual signs alongside his photos. Andrei Codrescu, in the essay he wrote to accompany the images in Signs, offers a concise explanation of the power of this subject matter. He writes that Evans's era was, "the time of popular writing, of huge advertisements, of lettering that invaded every nook and cranny and even wrote the skyline. America wrote big, with bold new alphabets, in lightbulbs, in neon, in smoke. One could follow the text of twentieth-century America from coast to coast...."

This small book is beautifully designed. The 50 gelatin silver prints selected from the Getty Museum's collection are reproduced on full pages with little or no cropping, and are meticulously documented at the back of the book with notations on dimensions, dates the photos were shot, and printing dates. A wide range of images, from the Photographer's Window Display, in which miniature portraits are displayed behind a pane of glass on which the word studio is painted, to a pair of commercially produced movie posters advertising a double feature of The Man from Guntown and I Hate Women, offers readers perspective on the breadth of Evans's vision. This focused look at an element of Evans's photography helps broaden the understanding of his entire body of work. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Graphics / Black & White fans MUST BUY
Another beautiful collection from Walker Evans, showing his greatest photos of billboards, movie posters, newspaper headlines, theater marquees, graffiti, street signs, hand-painted shop frotns, covering 1920-1975. You will discover variety of ways to interpret the different layers of meanings from his photos with striking impression. It provides an excellent documentary about American culture. Walker Evans also collected and exhibited signs, sometimes next to his photographs, which brings his work into another level. From letters to graphics, from graphics to signs, sometimes people is becoming helpless under the mass media. Highly recommended for graphics / black and white fans.

Just Beautiful!
Walker Evans SIGNS are unique and wonderful. These images glow in there black and white surroundings. Some of the images are simple and delicate and other are busy and loud...a great mixure.Codrescu's essays give you a delightful walk through of Evans life.Andrei has an original insight... description of these signs from our past.There is excitment in these essays...energy in which Evans must have had as he photographed these images.As you read on you will see Evans attraction to signs. I also enjoyed the layout of the book. The images have room to breath and the text is perfect. I was very happy to add this book with my collection of photography books. ... Read more

Book Description

"You don't have to agree with all of Thierry de Duve's premises and arguments (needless to say I don't) in order to recognize that he has written a remarkable book. The essays gathered in Kant After Duchamp mount the most formidable case yet made for Duchamp's importance, and what makes de Duve's achievement all the more unexpected is that this is done by way of an intense engagement with the writings of Duchamp's seeming opposite, the critic Clement Greenberg. A third constant presence in these pages is Kant's Critique of Judgement, which at once governs de Duve's understanding of Greenberg's "formalism" and is itself brilliantly reinterpreted in the light of Duchamp's readymades. De Duve has always been an independent thinker. Now he has produced an indispensable book, a brilliant and learned "archaeology" of Duchampian modernism that is also a highly original contribution to philosophical aesthetics." -- Michael Fried, Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University

Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesis with many implications for the history of avant-gardes. Although Duchamp's readymades broke with all previously known styles, de Duve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art." De Duve employs this shift (replacing the word "beauty" by the word "art") in a rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that reveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism. Part I of the book revolves around Duchamp's famous/infamous Fountain. Part II explores his passage from painting to the readymades, from art in particular to art in general. Part III looks at the aesthetic and ethical consequences of the replacement of "beauty" with "art" in Kant's Third Critique. Finally, part IV attempts to reconstruct an "archaeology" of modernism that paves the way for a renewed understanding of our postmodern condition. The essays: Art Was a Proper Name. Given the Richard Mutt Case. The Readymade and the Tube of Paint. The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas. Kant after Duchamp. Do Whatever. Archaeology of Pure Modernism. Archaeology of Practical Modernism. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Kant was a Lutheran
What's missing in this marvelous book is a discussion of Kant's Lutheran religious aspect.Most philosophers treat him as a secular philosopher, but he wasn't.The assault on Christianity by the entire left has seemingly eclipsed the fact that all of the great 19th century thinkers were Lutherans: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, of course, but also Nietzsche (who was raised as a Lutheran and whose seventeen prior generations of father, grandfather, etc., had been Lutheran pastors), Marx raised in a Lutheran household, and so on.

What Duchamp does is knock out the otherworldly purposiveness that Kant claimed for art.Thierry de Duve aborts the seriousness of his discussion by neglecting the theological dimension of Kant's inquiry.

However, this is still a great book albeit a limited one, as he could have gone further to the heart of the culture wars by contrasting the Sadean nature of the surrealist enterprise with the Christian nature of the Kantian.

Subliminal
A difficult question posed and a difficult answer given. In struggling with two of the most influential personnas in our culture, De Duve does himself, and aesthetics good. Long and convoluted (to the extreme ofworking out a symbolic logic of Duchamp?) this is nonetheless a great book ... Read more

Book Description

Sir Jacob Epstein was a pioneer of modernism in his use of 'direct carving' and of 'primitive' art as a means of conveying the deepest abstract feelings. His own collection of tribal and ancient sculpture was the largest and most important ever assembled by an artist.

This handsomely produced, highly praised and readable catalogue, first published in 1987 on the occasion of the major retrospective (held at Leeds City Art Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London) sold out before the close of the exhibition. In great demand as an authoritative, up-to-date reassessment of the great sculptor, the catalogue has now been reprinted to the same high standard. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Magic beyond understanding
The work of Escher has captured the imagination of many people and in this book Bruno Ernst (a personal friend of Escher) expands our understanding of the artist. After a brief but concise biography, the author throughly analyses the most important facets of Escher's artistic output: the illusion in drawing, the use of perspective, the creation of impossible realities, simultaneous and contrasting realities, crystals, and the infinite. Escher was an artist who was unique in in his work, he stands by himself, and this book is a helping tool in understanding and appreciating the unparalleled magic of his work.

This is the best book on Escher's work that I have seen.
The greatness of this book on the work of M.C. Escher is that it shows how he worked up his ideas for various pieces. It also gives a thorough explanation of his thought and design process. It is truely a shame that this book has gone out of print. I sincerely hope that the publisher brings it back.

Ernst gives a thorough, concise overview of Escher's work.
In The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, Bruno Ernst, an acquaintance of Escher's until Escher's death in 1972, presents a thorough summary of the life and work of Escher. Ernst devotes a chapter to the life of Escher, and uses the rest of the book to describe his amazing work. He includes the different themes and styles that Escher used, and devotes a good amount of space to each work discussed. The book is extremely thorough and includes large clear illustrations of the works themselves and also of earlier drafts of the works and mathematical descriptions to assist the reader. This is the most concise book of Escher and his work I have ever seen, and Ernst has done a fabulous job on it. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Writing on the French Revolution, Karl Marx famously commented that the heroes of the revolution "performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases." The one painter who was almost single-handedly responsible for clothing the revolution in the mantle of the classical past was Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), one of the most controversial painters to have emerged from this turbulent period in the history of modern France. Although David's austere classical style has fallen out of fashion in recent years, Simon Lee's study David does a fine job of rescuing the artist from antiquarian curiosity, and placing him right back at the heart of revolutionary France.

Lee charts the rise of David from relative mediocrity as a highly academic painter to his enthusiastic support for the Revolution of 1789, culminating in his remarkable painting Marat Breathing His Last (1793). Arrested and narrowly avoiding execution in the political backlash following the overthrow of Robespierre, David turned his back on politics to concentrate on his art, only to find himself catapulted back into the political limelight with his fervent embrace of Napoleon Bonaparte. This loyalty formed the foundation of some of David's most imposing paintings, from the equestrian portraits of Napoleon to the pomp of The Coronation of the Emperor and Empress. But once again, David's political hopes were dashed with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, which led the painter into self-imposed exile in Brussels, where he died a decade later.

Despite Lee's rather wooden prose, this is a thorough, detailed, and generously illustrated study of a fascinatingly contradictory, patrician, but technically brilliant painter. --Jerry Brotton ... Read more

Reviews (4)

David the Revolutionary
I agree with other reviewers that David is usually glossed over in textbooks, and this is a shame, because not only was David the most important and influential French artist at the end of the eighteenth century, he was also a politician active in the French Revolution, and I think we should be very careful about underestimating the impact of his images on the public at that time. David, in constrast to his Rococo predecessors, was very much a public artist, and his paintings were effective propaganda that tried to cement the new code of morals that surged in on the tide of the Revolution. This is a phenominally important fact that for some reason only gets slipshod treatment in more general books.

Another nice thing about this book that no other reviewers have mentioned is the section at the end that deals with David's legacy. These sections are in all the books in the Phaidon Art & Ideas series and I think they're especially eye-opening. Lee points out how opinions of David's work have continually been changing since his death. For example, he discusses how an Italian artist (whom the idiot reviewer from Singapore somehow mistook for the "narcissistic author" [?!?] and decided to pass off the rest of the book as worthless because of it) posed as a character from "The Intervention of the Sabine Women" to illustrate David's ideas of masculinity and start some sort of dialogue about how they apply (or do not apply) to the modern world.

Highly readable prose, great art history with appropriate general history breathed back into it--as it should be.

I didn't buy this book
Well, why not?
I have to admit that this book on David looks good. However, whilst flipping thru the book, I came across the end section and there was this picture of the author in full frontal nudity, in a heroic pose. I don't see the link between a photo of a naked man and David's biography.
I can only attribute this to the fact that the author is indulging in narcissistic display.

Excellent Profile of the Life, Times & Works of David
I was thoroughly impressed with this profile of Jacques-Louis David. It was given to me as a gift and I was not sure of quite what to expect. From my experience, David is often given little more than a few pages (or even a few brief paragraphs) in art textbooks and thus if a person wants to know more, it is necessary to do a bit of digging.

From the introduction, my fear was dispelled and I knew I was in for a treat. The author discusses David's personal life, his political ideas and involvement, the relevant historical details, and David's works. The illustrations are wonderful and aside from David's paintings and sketches, the works of artists like Boucher, Vien, Caravaggio, Poussin, Gros and Ingres are included. Lee generally gives a fair amount of analysis on each of David's works. Most students will recognize The Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Socrates, and Marat Breathing his Last but will also see and learn about The Coronation, The Distribution of the Eagle Standards, Brutus, Intervention of the Sabine Women, Belisarius Receiving Alms and Mars Disarmed By Venus, to name a few. Regarding the politics of the French Revolution, Lee discusses David's role, his allies, his enemies, and his skillful use of paintings as propaganda. We see David shift from painter to the monarchy to painter for the Revolution to painter for Napoleon to painter for himself, warts and all. One should not assume that Lee candy-coats the issues in this book. He neither presents David as a flawless genius nor spoils the book with pretentious blather. The text is informative and sophisticated without being cumbersome or haughty.

Other great features of the book include a convenient glossary, short biographies on pertinent figures, a map and a timeline. Whether you are an expert art historian or a student, you will find this book to be a great addition.

Splendid little treasure
Phaidon's new ART & IDEAS series has been consuming since I first purchased their NEOCLASSICISM and definitely will not be last. As expected from Phaidon, the production value is exquisite. Though compact, measuring 8in X 6in, it is lavishly illustrated in full luminous colors. There are two-page spread of David's popular works like THE OATH OF THE HORATII, THE CORONATION OF THE EMPEROR, and THE INTERVENTION OF THE SABINE WOMEN. Lee discusses David's bitter beginnings and his triumphs, the works in French political context, and the artist's inspirations and influences. Mercifully lacking in exceeding hero-worship prose, Lee also discusses David's jealousy and his extreme political views. Pompous, overeducated art scholars may dismiss the text as dry, plain, or written for "kids," but this page-turner is still a terrific overview of David's works. The book is painstakingly designed in such a way that you don't have to flip back and forth for a pictorial reference when reading a particular text; most of the illustrations are conveniently placed not more than three page-flip away from the relevant text. With its uncluttered, elegant cover design, and excellent editorial, Phaidon has another winner. Bring on Bruguel, Klimt, Caravaggio, and Magritte! More! ... Read more

Book Description

In the fall of 2003, a highly acclaimed exhibition of works by El Greco (1541--1614) was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show's next venue is the National Gallery, London. As this book and the landmark exhibition demonstrate, El Greco is of perennial interest to museum audiences and the general public. He was a fascinating and esteemed artist in his own time, but for nearly four hundred years he was derided, misunderstood, or simply forgotten. The book follows El Greco from his native island of Crete to Venice, Rome, Madrid, and then Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. The artist's unique ability to assimilate different artistic techniques and approaches to religion and philosophy enabled him to develop one of the most original styles of painting in the history of European art. Despite his highly successful career, El Greco was unappreciated for centuries after his death, and the book examines how his genius came to light again in the nineteenth century. For those looking for an excellent introduction to the life and work of this great artist, El Greco is a perfect choice. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A true treasure!
Just finished reading this book and I found it to be one of the best all-encompassing views of Leonardo the man, artist, and inventor that I have read. Of course, it is not truly all-encompassing and covering all the details of Leonardo's life, but it covers the basics and gives a nice overall picture of the man and his works. It goes over topics like the extra hand with the knife in The Last Supper to whether or not he was homosexual. I also liked the photo of people in front of The Mona Lisa painting. I've been there and one can see the painting's features much better in a book with no reflections or distance between one and the painting. The book includes a nice selection of his paintings and sketches on glossy paper. This is a wonderful introduction to da Vinci and/or a lovely reminder of highlights of his life and work. ... Read more

Book Description

Often criticized during his lifetime for his insistence on studying and painting the male nude, accomplished draftsman, anatomist, and artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is now acclaimed as one of America's greatest realist painters. Eakins believed in a classical approach to art, and made no compromises with the mores of his time. His insistence on having female students draw from live male nude models caused him to be dismissed from one important teaching post and created a storm of controversy which substantially hurt his career. Only at the end of his life was his work fully recognized as equal to that of some of the great European old masters. Taken from collections across the globe, this book features a stunning collection of drawings, paintings, and photographs of Eakins's male nudes, which showcase the artist's immense and still influential skill in rendering the male form. A major Eakins retrospective will be at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring of 2002. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Beautiful but pointless
This is a beautifully produced little volume of Eakins's photographs and paintings of nude males (the phrase "absolute male" is a journalistic euphemism for male art class models stripped of their posing straps). The text is thin and doesn't really say anthing new. The paintings are also likely to be familiar to anyone who has studied Eakins and have been frequently reproduced in more comprehensive catalogs. Even the photographs, called "Naked Series" because they show a single nude model from multiple angles, have been reproduced previously. Dating from the 1880s these may interest the student of early photography. While author John Esten seems to consider these to be works of art in their own right, they clearly served primarily as reference material for Eakins. This is most obvious in the swimming pictures and in one painting called "The Wrestlers" which--muscle for muscle, sinew for sinew--is based on a photograph he took of fellow art students in Paris in 1899 (pages 68 and 69).

The book includes a 2-page chronology of Eakins's life and a bibliography. The latter is a very short list; it only cites 19 works, two of which are books of poetry (Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" makes sense, but I fail to see the relevance of "The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake".) Very relevant but not cited is Helen Cooper's excellent 1996 book "Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures" (ISBN 0-300-06939-1). If your primary interest is a book of beautifully reproduced images, these shortcomings will not bother you.

The Credibility of Observation Unveiled
THOMAS EAKINS: THE ABSOLUTE MALE is a beautifully assembled volume of the photographs and paintings of America's premiere artist. The concept behind this very fine volume is to emphasize the importance of the strong-willed pioneer of figurative art in a time when the country was in the throws of Victorianism in art (have things changed in over a century?). In his short but fine essay John Esten simply outlines the chronology of Eakins career and then lets the works speak for themselves. Eakins trained both in America and in Paris, in the latter with the artist Gerome who insisted on classical perfection in his depictions of the human figure. This attitude rankled Eakins who believed that anything less than the observed representation of the body made it ugly. "I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature's works, the naked figure." And with that he absorbed all the good in the classes in Paris (which included the first use of photography in providing reference for drawing and painting) and returned to America where he resumed his sportsman activities, all the while using his observing eye to reclaim the beauty of the human form in action. His photographs are now considered some of the finest wroks of their kind. He worked with the famous Muybridge, adopting his technique of serial photography to study the nude male form. When he returned to teaching at the Philadelphia Academy he insisted on allowing fully nude models to pose for the students. His defiance of the mores of the day in requiring that the women students be given equality in this aspect of his Life Studies courses resulted in his dismissal as a teacher, but added to his importance as a mentor.

This excellent book includes Eakins many photographs of the nude male, posed and at play and sport. Where applicable the photograph used as a reference is displayed adjacent to the subsequent canvas. Here is the most singularly bold and creative presentation to the age-old, cloaked secret that artists should not use photographs as reference if they say they 'draw only from the figure'. If ever there existed an homage to the marriage of the photograph with painting it is here. This is a very fine book, worth placing in all libraries both private and public. ... Read more

Book Description

This book is a superb collection of American scenes taken in the 1940, 1950s and 1960s by one of photography's all time greats, Andreas Feininger. Each image is a fine example of Feininger's incorruptible sense of proportion, a tribute to the inimitable aesthetic quality that became the signature of his work. Many illustrate his ceaseless quest to minimize the difference between idea and reality, his desire to allow mundane subjects to slip into Utopia. Feininger's America is a photographic tour de force, from Chicago to New Orleans, from Hollywood to Coral Gables. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Not as interesting as one would expect
I feel that this book seems, at first glance, to be much better than it really is. That is, when one picks up the book for the first time in a book store and flips through the pages, one gets the impression that it will actually be interesting to read, and will help in understanding Escher's genius. But really, the works themselves are the only things this book offers, the text is basically useless, shallow and uninteresting.

Casual Fan Book
This is a nice collection of Esher work for the casual fan not looking to spend a lot of dead presidents. THe book also has biographical information,ect ... Read more

Book Description

Surrealism in its late phase often abandoned neutral exhibition spaces in favor of environments that embodied subjective ideologies. These exhibitions offered startled viewers an early version of installation art before the form existed as such. In Displaying the Marvelous, Lewis Kachur explores this development by analyzing three elaborate Surrealist installations created between 1938 and 1942. The first two, the "Exposition Internationale du Surralisme" (1938) and the "Dream of Venus" at the New York World's Fair (1939), dealt with the fetishization of the female body. The third, "First Papers of Surrealism" (1942), focused not on the figure but on the entire expanse of the exhibition space, thus contributing to the development of nonfigurative art in New York. Kachur presents a full visual and verbal reconstruction of each of the exhibitions, evoking the sequence that the contemporary viewer would have encountered.

The book considers Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dal, two artists who are not usually compared, within a common framework. Duchamp specialized in frustrating the spectator, using his ironic wit to call into question the definition of the work of art. Dal was a master at disorienting the senses by establishing and then undermining everyday spatial and object properties. The Surrealist challenge, as voiced by Andr Breton, was to evoke the marvelous. Duchamp and Dal extended that challenge to the physical and commercial realm of the exhibition installation. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Duchamp is very good curator
I have never read like the book about Marcel Duchamp, because the book focuses on the side of the curator of Duchamp. The book is about the Surrealist exihibitions in 1930's and 1940's. And the backgrounds of the exhibitions are very detailed and lively. I recommend the book to those who like, of course, Duchamp and are interested in installation.

scholarship and humor
Written with keen perception and humor, Lewis Kachur's latest book is likely to become a classic both in the fields of surrealism and of installations. It is scholarly and highly readable. ... Read more