Amazon.com

This arresting collection of photography features work by both Helmut Newton and his wife, actress Alice Springs. Newton's coolly elegant and sexy studies are splendidly counterbalanced by Springs's warmer and more vulnerable pieces. The book is divided into three sections: two "Us" sections, in which Newton and Springs alternately photograph themselves and each other, and a final "Them" chapter that features subjects photographed differently by each photographer. The cast is a glitzy mix of Riviera-style celebrities. Catherine Deneuve is especially sultry shot by Newton, dressed in a black negligee with a cigarette dangling from her lips just below her bedroom eyes, while in the facing portrait taken by Springs, her torso is concealed within a black turtleneck and she stares confidently and directly at the camera. Karl Lagerfeld is here before he went gray, and Gianni Versace is posed not quite languidly naked on a leopard-skin sofa. The self-portraits are revealing and occasionally disturbing. Springs is often in various states of undress in front of mirrors. Newton is most often with naked models, occasionally cross-dressed, and when he is naked is oddly wired up to various types of medical equipment such as EKG machines. Aside from a very brief introduction by Newton, there is no accompanying text in the book--not even captions--but this is a book of images, not words, and nearly all these fine photographs are worth at least a thousand of them. --Nick Wroe, Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Multidimensional Perspectives of Photography
This book has one of the most interesting premises of any photography book I have had the pleasure to examine. Spouses, Helmut Newton and Alice Springs, share their photographic perspectives of each other, themselves, and the same models. These different views echo around in your mind to help you understand the personalities, purposes, and methods of two interesting photographers. In the process, you get a better understanding of the photography itself . . . and how it changes the models in our perception. By providing images over many decades, you also get a time-lapse view of a relationship and the aging process.

Before going further, let me note that this volume contains many nude images of men and women that would be past the "R" rating if this book were a motion picture.

The book has a few brief comments by Helmut Newton to set the stage. "The book shows the work of two photographers . . . [who] have lived together for fifty years." " . . . [B]ut neither is usually present at the other's photographic sittings." " . . . [N]either one has in any way influenced the other's way of approaching their subjects." "I can see the truth and simplicity in the portraits of Alice Springs." "[She has] been an actress and a painter before she has taken up the camera seriously if somewhat sporadically." "As for myself, I recognize the manipulation and editorialising in my photographs."

Alice Springs looks for the core of the person, and captures the realities of daily life and aging very well. She shows you the joking and self-absorbed sides of Helmut Newton that help explain the stylized and challenging images that he is famous for producing. Helmut Newton obviously adds a gloss and a pose to everything, that gets his editorial position out. But it's fun in this context, much more so than in his other work. I found myself reevaluating his work after seeing these images by Alice Springs.

Here are my favorite images in the book by Alice Springs:

Of Helmut Newton -- Spain 1956; Rue Aubriot, Paris 1971; Ritz, London 1976; With Sylvia, Ramatuelle 1981; Monte-Carlo, 1987; Hollywood 1988, 1991

Of Alice Springs -- Ramatuelle, France 1975; Vail, Colorado 1996

Princess Caroline and son, Monte-Carlo 1985; Karl Lagerfeld, Monte-Carlo 1983; Rudi Gernreich, Los Angeles 1985; Tina Chow, Beverly Hills 1986; Angelica Houston, Hollywood 1983; Antonio Lopez, Paris 1977

Here are my favorite images in the book by Helmut Newton:

Of Alice Springs -- June as Hedda Gabler, Melbourne 1960; In our kitchen, Rue Aubriot, Paris 1972; Hotel Volney, New York 1982; Rue Aubriot, Paris 1974; Ramatuelle 1976

Of Helmut Newton -- Photomation, Paris 1970s; With wife and model, 1981; Clinique St. Jean, Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1997

Birgit Nielsen, Monte-Carlo 1987; Gianni Versace, Lake Como, Italy 1994; Donatella Versace, Off coast of Antibes, 1990; David Hockney, Los Angeles 1988; Peter Beard, Paris 1996

After you see this remarkable book, I suggest that you have some fun with your family. Take a day, bring a camera for each person, and make photographs of each other and the same subjects. Do this once a year to develop a better sense of your perspectives and relationships. Then comment on each other's work, and create a scrapbook or album out of this sharing. You'll have a lot of fun looking back on these images in future years.

Take a good look . . . and see more!

helmut at/with his best
Great book I been througt it a hundred times already. You will find out where he gets his great influences from! Also see junes great work, that greatly resembles his work! If you like Helmut Newton this is a must! ... Read more

Reviews (2)

where's the color?
A bit of a major disappointment for a book with good B/W illustrations, this is a book about one of the great colorist painters of landscape art. Disheartened.

thomas moran and the american west
This is one of the most extensive books on Thomas Moran's life. The Smithsonian recently published it (1992). It also has an excellent assortment of pictures of his works. For a complete overview of his work and life, this is the book to have. ... Read more

Book Description

From 1958 to 1966, master color field painter Barnett Newman created The Stations of the Cross - Lema Sabachthani, a cycle of fourteen canvas paintings, each of them 5 x 6 1/2 feet. Their scale is so large that the viewer is never able to take them all in at once. With The Stations of the Cross, Newman undertook one of the most demanding assignments in the history of modern art, namely to thematize, without the use of color and only in black and white, the tragedy of human existence vis-à-vis an almighty God--bringing it to new pictorial form. Accompanying texts consider the thematic content of the work, as well as the series' inaugural hanging in 1966 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. ... Read more

Book Description

Best, most representative sequences have been specially selected from the monumental original and are presented here in crisp, double-page plates printed on high-quality stock. Horses hauling, walking, trotting, etc., plus sequences of donkeys, an ox, pig, dog, cat, deer and other animals capture details of anatomy and movement with astonishing clarity.
... Read more

Reviews (2)

Too bad was only 95 pages!
I should have got Animals in Motion that is over 400 pages, though this book was just fine, it was, I presume, the appetizer for his other book which had four times as many illustrations for only a few dollars more. Perhaps I'll sell this one and buy the other one and see for sure. Otherwise, its a great book. It had about 13 pages just horses, then went to a donkey and cats, lions, camels and other stuff I didn't need nor was interested in. I wonder if the other book has MORE horses? There was an introduction of one page, a short summary, and the rest was whole pages filled with movie clip style shots that were about 2" SQUARE each frame, maybe 8 - 12 frames per page, each page one animal in motion. I need to see more, more and more of everything, but that's because I'm drawing horses and wanted to see 30 movement shots of one animal instead of 8. The more I have to choose from the better, so guess I'm gonna use the images here until I need to move up to the next Muybridge book, the 418 page one, Animals in motion which I now realize I should have got in the first place.

This book is great for 3d Animators
For those of you who are 3d animators this book is great, it really helps to know how to truly make lifelike those horses or other animals that are more complex then bipeds. I recommend this book to all.

davesheri@hotmail.com ... Read more

Book Description

Henri Matisse's adventures in color and light constitute a landmark in the history of modern art.From his apprenticeship in the studio of Gustave Moreau to the paper cutouts of the 1950's, the stages of his journey represent a triumph of artistic research and resolution.More than 300 reproductions grace this volume.The text provides a fascination survey of a complex life that crossed the paths of many legendary figures of the age. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Beautiful.
One looks at the works of Matisse and wonders why there is no Noble Prize in Art.He would have been so deserving.The works printed in this book are dazzling in their colors, shapes, lines and proportions.His work will be viewed for many, many years as the masterpieces of a tremendously creative man.

Cursory text, fabulous illustrations.
the problem with series that attempt to impose an accessible beginners' format on art and artists is that these things rarely conform to method.the Taschen introductions to great artists are all 96 pages long, dividing the artist's life into significant chronological chapters, following strict biography, and using key paintings to illustrate various points made.this is fine in practice, we've all got to start somewhere, and the series is noted for its refusal to talk down to the reader, its clarity of interpretation, and the bounteous range of miraculously mounted, full-colour reproductions, not just of paintings, but line drawings, lithographs, sketches, studies, woodcuts etc.

The obvious difficulty is not that artists are transcendent and wayward figures who won't fit into a neat grid, but that some artists lived to be considerably older than others.the first book in this series I read was Anna Meseure's 'Auguste Macke', the study of a painter who died when he was only 27.Meseure was able to elaborate each development in Macke's work in detail, and to give a proper treatment of biographical background and its influence on the art, if only on the level of subject matter.

Macke, however, remains a marginal figure.henri Matisse is one of the towering geniuses of 20th century culture.He lived, and painted masterpieces, until he was 85; his life spanned two cataclysmic World Wars, a riot of social and political changes, and almost every aesthetic revolution worth talking about in the last 150 years.given the same amount of space to discuss Matisse as Meseure had with a painter a third his age, Essers' study can't help being a cursory skim, with few revelatory anecdotes (we only learn in the chronology about Matisse's pilgrimmage to the aging Renoir; his theatre designs for Stravinsky; or the visit of Aragon to his sickbed during World War Two - such episodes are surely as important as some given prominence in the book), or, worse, few intimations of the blinding raptures that must have seized Matisse at each new artistic discovery and breakthrough.We learn very little about his relation to his cultural milieu, his tacit rivalry with Picasso, or his overall importance in the history of art; discussion of the work is apolitically formalist.Uncomfortable questions - the obsessiveness of his early year despite his family's poverty; his apoliticism during World War Two - are skimmed over.

None of this really matters.Matisse's work travels surprisingly well in reproduction, especially the later works involving cut-outs, simplified forms and bold colours.the colours throughout are done full bright justice to, so dazzling in fact that reading this book for more than an hour gave me a headache.The rich mix of classics ('Woman with the Hat', 'La Dance', 'Jazz') with the revelatory, less well-known (including spare, geometric, near-abstract views of Notre Dame during World War One) allow us to write our own story of this shamanic artist, whose patrician, Freudian mien concealed the colours and curves of a blazing and boundless inner life. ... Read more

Book Description

Of Edvard Munch's landscape paintings, Starry Night, executed in 1893, is one of the finest.It is the founding version of his later renditions wherein mood and content vary between two extremes: exultation in the beauty of a landscape he loved deeply and pessimism resulting from his sense of personal loneliness and artistic isolation. This well-illustrated monograph includes notes and bibliography as well as a color fold-out reproduction of Starry Night. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

museum for a trip at one dayes
a calander for ecibition of munch and henie-onstad museum ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Reproductions are great, text is boring
First and foremost, the reproduction quality is really good.That's the most important thing to look for in a book.I've purchased some books where some of the paintings are horribly reproduced.This isn't the case with this book.I am fortunate enough to live in Paris and I have went to the modern art museum to see the Matisse paintings in person and I am pretty satisified with the quality of the book.

However, the text of the book is disappointing.I really got the impression that the author was just writing to fill in space.I didn't really learn much about his technique or much about him in fact.I quit reading the text half way through and just enjoyed the paintings.

If you are just looking for good reproductions, this is a good book.If you want to learn more about Matisse and the artists of his time, I'd look at a few other books first, maybe you could do better.

A nice journey into Matisse life
If you love Matisse, you will surely like this book. This volume provides a nice balance of biographical and analytical information on Matisse, along with excellent reproductions. ... Read more

Book Description

This book is a celebration of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection-the most important and comprehensive single group of Moore's drawings, graphics, and sculpture. More than 300 of Moore's acclaimed works are reproduced in full color, and extensive captions are provided by distinguished sculptors, art critics, and art historians, many of whom knew and worked with Moore. Their fresh insights and personal anecdotes provide a detailed and compelling analysis of Moore's artistry. David Mitchinson's introductory essay traces the formation of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection, a fascinating story that has never been told before. He explains Moore's somewhat haphazard way of working, the confused ownership between the Foundation and its trading company, the strengths and weaknesses of the Collection itself, and the evolution of the Foundation's property at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. With a foreword by Sir Alan Bowness, Celebrating Moore will be a welcome addition to the study and appreciation of Henry Moore for years to come. From the Foreword:"Henry Moore talked well and liked talking about sculpture, but he rarely gave any verbal explanation of his own works. That was for others to do: He was the man who had made the piece and put it out in the world. This is the form that the catalogue takes-twenty-five sculptors, art historians, critics, curators, and film makers write about sculptures and drawings that particularly interest them." ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Spectacular creations that enliven the imagination.
This beautifully presented hardback book, contains refined images of sculptures in substancial materials that will last a life. I suggest everyone should purchase this book as a tribute to Henry's life and the skill he displayed. ... Read more

Book Description

"Of all the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, perhaps the least known is Eadweard Muybridge."

"Of all the great turning points in scientific, technological and artistic thought, undoubtedly the least known (because it has effectively, never been published) is Muybridge's eleven-volume pictorial treatise of human and animal life in motion."

"100 years after completion, this rarest of all photographic series (only 37 sets still extant, most of them incomplete) is finally published complete and accessible to a wide public, in three volumes of 20,000 photographs.Twenty years of devotion and invention, patience and insight, plus $50,000 and 100,000 negatives, culminated in the quintessential study of the moving figure.Muybridge had created an encylopedic anatomy of motion, unique in its day and unsurpassed in ours."

"The photographs consist of a series of movements shown in stop-motion sequence: 781 plates (each plate is a two-page spread) of nearly 300 separate actions split into as many as 50 individual shots per action. 532 of the plates show clothed and unclothed men, women and children engaging in a wide variety of typical actions and activities." ... Read more

Reviews (2)

fantastic book, but no animals...
if you are interested in clear depictions of humans in motion,
it is interesting that the absolute best work on the subject comes from the late 1800s. If you are interested in animal locomotion, get another book. I am assuming that the other 2 volumes will someday become available, making this a true "complete" study.
perhaps someone will update Muybridges work in the interim.

Motion Broken Down
As an artist and beginning animator, I have found Muybridge's motion studies to be helpful in understanding how the body travels in time (animals and machines too) using time-lapse photography. This book remains current and comprehensive especially in light of the current digital revolution's emphasis on special effects and eye candy. Muybridge's work is important because it goes to the roots of motion and reveals its simplicity and beauty. I highly recommend this fascinating book for those with curious minds. ... Read more

Book Description

"Unpainted Pictures" is the title of a series of fascinating watercolors painted by Emil Nolde from 1938 through 1945. Nolde created these works in the seclusion of his own home in Seebüll, after his works had been confiscated by the Nazis and he himself had been forbidden to paint. He lent many of them to friends for safekeeping, in order to protect himself and his art from Gestapo raids. These small, free, imaginative works were ''unpainted'' in the sense that they did not officially exist and were not supposed to exist--not only that, but Nolde hoped to expand on them at a later date. Nolde never offered any of these watercolors for sale, and today this collection--which has become, for many, the summary and epitome of his work--resides at the Nolde Foundation in Seebüll. All of the 104 watercolors in the series are presented here, along with a kind of diary, consisting of dated notes, thoughts, questions, and dreams, which together form a record of the period in which the "Unpainted Pictures" were being created. Gorgeous, diverse, and quietly moving, these "Unpainted Pictures" continue to be nothing short of a revelation. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Very good
I liked, though did not love, this book. I think that perhaps there are too many reproductions, some of which are inferior to the others. I hope that when I die and become a famous artist (well, one can hope, can't they?) someone will edit my work with more care.
Still Nolde is always interesting and this book is worth it for fans of his work.

Excelente
Muestra unas acuarelas increibles en toda la extension del libro ... Read more

Book Description

A Sculptor's World is the long-awaited reprint of Isamu Noguchi's 1968 autobiography. It remains Noguchi's most comprehensive statement about the art that brought him international acclaim. Told in words and images, A Sculptor's World is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the life and work of this seminal artist or a general interest in the art of sculpture. Also reprinted in this volume is the original foreword to the book by R. Buckminster Fuller, from which the above quote is taken. In my long experience as an intimate witness of Noguchi's work, I believe that whatever the external entities of his coordinate translating may be, they represent a faithful manifest of the intellectual and harmonic being, Noguchi. In my estimation, the evoluting array and extraordinary breadth of his conceptioning realizations document a comprehensive artist without peer in our time.--R. Buckminster Fuller

Foreword by Bonnie Rychlak.

Clothbound, 9.25 x 10 in./260 pgs / 13 color and 255 b & w. ... Read more

Book Description

An artist whose paintings emphasized the peaceful, joyous aspects ofspiritual life, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was the most popular religious painter of 17th- century Spain. Yet little has been written about Murillo, and this splendid volume— which accompanies the first-ever exhibition of his paintings in American collections—isthe only comprehensive survey of the artist's work available in English.

Presenting new research and essays by the major scholars in the field, the bookcovers the full range of Murillo's stylistic development—including portraits, historypaintings, and religious images. Many of the artworks have been freshly restored andnewly photographed, offering art lovers a wonderful opportunity to appreciate and enjoyMurillo's superb paintings. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

The book is not up to the standards of the exhibition
The exhibition was full of wonderful paintings. These were paintings that could be easily borrowed from American museums. The catalogue tries to justify the exhibition beyond a collection of beautiful paintings. The authors do a good job of providing essays that are of interest. Of patricular interest to me was the essay on the academic tradition in Spain. The reproductions are of varying quality. The single figure of the Prodigal Son was way too dark. If you saw the exhibition in Fort Worth or Los Angeles you might want it. ... Read more

Book Description

This Companion explores the visual, intellectual, and religious culture of Renaissance Florence in the age of Masaccio, 1401-1428.Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars and conservators, the essays in this volume investigate the artistic, civic, and sacred contexts of Masaccio's works and the sites in which they were seen. Inspired by the 600th anniversary of Masaccio's birth, The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio celebrates the achievements, influence and legacy of early Renaissance art and one of its greatest masters. ... Read more

Book Description

Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex and pluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based works to elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, and architectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums, including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparent eclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistic tendencies are conceptual continuities, one of which is an investigation of the nature of language.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nauman has refrained from participating in the critical discourse surrounding his own work. He has given relatively few interviews over the course of his career and has little to do with the art press or critical establishment. Indeed, he granted Janet Kraynak and The MIT Press almost complete autonomy in the preparation of this volume. In contrast to Nauman?s reputation for silence, however, from the beginning of his career, the incorporation of language has been a central feature of his art. This collection takes as its starting point the seeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words.

Please Pay Attention Please contains all of Nauman's major interviews from 1965 to 2001, as well as a comprehensive body of his writings, including instructions and proposal texts, dialogues transcribed from audio-video works, and prose texts written specifically for installation sculptures. Where relevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were composed. In the critical essay that serves as the book's introduction, the editor investigates Nauman's art in relation to the linguistic turn in art practices of the 1960s?-understanding language through the speech act--and its legacy in contemporary art. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (2)

The Best Magritte Book out there!
You know how Time Life comes out with those informercials selling CD collections - claiming that if you tried to buy all the different albums for the songs that they have all in one set, you would spend hundreds of dollars?

Well, it's kind of the same deal with art books. I will wait YEARS if necessary to buy the right book of XYZ artist - and my search ended with the Portable Magritte. It is not a particularly LARGE book, but if you are looking for a favorite work, you are more likely to find it here than in other books!

Hi.
Good book.. All pictures of all Magritte's works. good coffee table book. ... Read more