Ten lyrical and passionate essays on the culture, art, and history of Western Europe written from the perspective of the post-Stalinist thaw of the 1960s.

    On the way to nowhere in particular they pass a number of odd characters and observe a series of baffling phenomena, from a house burning down in a field to a palatial mansion perched precariously on a bluff.At once deeply vexing and utterly hilarious, darkly mysterious and amusingly absurd, The Willowdale Handcar is vintage Edward Gorey.

    The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco's thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco's mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of The Open Work, entitled The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Open Work explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco's convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco's thought.

    Contains more than 400 letters and poems written to family, creditors, debtors, and bankers.

    Includes a suite of poems by Paul Eluard, 15 colour photographs, 10 in black and white, plus numerous line drawings.Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) is one of the most illustrious names in the field of erotic art and Surrealism. The Doll comprises a series of photographs that have acquired iconic status and which exemplify the Surrealists’ conception of “convulsive beauty”. They are accompanied by a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts written between the 1930s and early 1960s which reveal Bellmer as one whose ideas are a “scandal for reason” (Joë Bousquet).The insight Bellmer’s writing provides into his work is crucial. He weaves together a remarkably disparate set of concepts - covering such diverse fields as the body, psychology, anagrams, chance, the laws of optics and mathematics, the fourth dimension, hermaphroditism, the marvellous, intuition - into a theory of eroticism which forms the underlying rationale of his fearsome art.This English edition is based exactly upon Bellmer’s original, the texts having been translated for the first time from the final German version.

    Essential to the understanding of the searching and remarkably informed spirit of this protean writer.

    With the catalogue for that exhibit long out of print, this study remains the definitive work on the project. Sponsored by John Entenza's Arts & Architecture magazine, the Case Study Houses program brought new thinking, techniques, and materials to post-war California house building. Contains the work of Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Craig Ellwood.

    George Kubler draws upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics and replaces the notion of style with the idea of a linked succession of works distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same action. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the ecstatic concept of style--the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

    The wall paintings of ancient Egypt and Babylon are tempera, as are many of the paintings of Giotto, Lippi, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, and many other masters. But in spite of the time-proven excellence of this technique — which boasts many clear advantages over oil paint — it does not receive the degree of attention from modern painters that it deserves.Part of the explanation for this neglect, surely, is the absence of sufficient information about the materials and procedures involved in tempera painting. The present volume, in fact, is virtually the only complete, authoritative, step-by-step treatment of the subject in the English language, D.V. Thompson wrote this book after an exhaustive study, over many years, of countless medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the British Museum and elsewhere, and is unquestionably the world's leading authority on tempera materials and processes.Beginning with an introductory chapter on the uses and limitations of tempera, the author covers such topics as the choice of material for the panel; propensities of various woods; preparing the panel for gilding; making the gesso mixture; methods of applying the gesso; planning the design of a tempera painting; use of tinted papers; application of metals to the panel; tools for gliding; handling and laying gold; combination gold and silver leafing; pigments and brushes; choice of palette; mixing the tempera; tempering and handling the colors; techniques of the actual painting; mordant gilding; permanence of tempera painting; varnishing; and artificial emulsion painting. The drawings and diagrams, illustrating the various materials and techniques, infinitely increase the clarity of the discussions. As a careful exposition of all aspects of authentic tempera painting, including many of the possible modern uses for this ancient method, this book actually stands alone. No one who is interested in tempera painting as a serious pursuit can afford to be without it.

    Nearly 2,000 fonts cover every need. Each typeface is arranged alphabetically, with Roman, Lineale, and Script versions, usually in upper and lower case alphabets and numerals. Along with new fonts, illustrations show many classic typefaces that are only found here. Bonus: a glossary of technical terms and tips on classifying types.

    

    Illustrated with over 250 images and packed with instructions, The Way of the Brush covers every aspect of brush painting, from brushstrokes, composition and the painting surface to meaning, perspective and artistic philosophy.Part One is a study of the techniques of Chinese painting and explains the elements, techniques and principles which eventually carried over into Japanese painting.Part Two is devoted to technical challenges and basic problems associated with the art, including the issue of fakes and forgeries of Chinese art in Japan.Also included are three appendices and a full bibliography.

    In his lifetime, Goya worked for some of the most prestigious Spanish patrons. For most of his career he was court painter, and yet he also produced some of the most compelling images of social unrest of the last century.

    Marc Chagall's magnificent stained-glass windows installed in the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew Medical Center in Jerusalem are no doubt among the most inspiring and beautiful pieces of twentieth-century art."

    Wood engravings of birds, animals, Aesop, cries of London, rustic scenes, all unexcelled for mood of bucolic tranquility.

    The author sketches how, with the collapse of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, it became necessary for the individual to derive order, meaning and value from his own identity rather from the objective world. Professor Peckham sees four stages in the nineteenth century's effort to solve the problem of finding a ground for human identity: the period of discovery and analogy from man to nature (sometimes called Romanticism), the period of Transcendentalism, the period of Objectism (sometimes, though less inclusively, called Realism or Naturalism), and the period of Stylism (sometimes inadequately called Aestheticism). At the end of this process, Nietzsche asserted that human identity exists but has no grounds in nature or the divine. This enabled him to do what the nineteenth century above all wished to do: to recognise the reality of human life in the contraries and opposites of human experience without falsifying them by comfortable but illusory reconciliation.