Best of
Art-And-Photography

1998

The Fantastic Art of Beksinski


Zdzisław Beksiński - 1998
    60 color illustrations. 10 photos.

Icon


Frank Frazetta - 1998
    His darkly dramatic Conan the Barbarian oils and the equally powerful and erotic compositions for the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs have become the ultimate standards of excellence in the fantasy and adventure field. Icon was Franzetta’s first major retrospective in his 55-year career. Lavish full-color reproduction on deluxe art paper showcases over 65 major finished oil paintings, 25 drawings, and other pieces. This new softcover edition contains 32 new pages of additional, never-before-published art and photos. New material includes paintings of Woody Allen and Peter Sellers; concepts of Clint Eastwood for the movie poster to The Gauntlet; original concepts for the Conan book cover paintings; and character drawings for the Broadway production of Li'l Abner.

Agnes Martin: Writings


Agnes Martin - 1998
    "I suggest that people who like to be alone, who walk alone, will perhaps be serious workers in the art field."--Agnes Martin.

Dog Dogs


Elliott Erwitt - 1998
    According to him, it just happened that way. And that one day, when he was looking through his boxes of photographs, he realized that somehow or other dogs had crept into a fair proportion of them. Not that they were dog portraits. More just photographs with dogs in. Pictures of poodles taken at dog shows, of Airedales fetching sticks in the park, of crowds of dogs larking around together, of Highland Terriers jumping in the air for joy - and hundreds of images of dogs walking, being carried, sitting on hearthrugs, beaches, riverbanks, sofas, park benches.DogDogs is a delightful object presenting the largest selection ever published of Erwitt's dog photographs. Any dog-lover's dream title, it contains 500 pictures, all of them printed full-bleed and in arresting duotone. Also included is a captivating essay by P G Wodehouse, who was an admirer of Erwitt's work and a keen dog-owner himself. As he says, ' ... what superb photographs these are. It does one good to look at them. There is not one sitter in his gallery who does not melt the heart.'

Jan Saudek


Jan Saudek - 1998
    Internationally famous Czech photographer Jan Saudek is no exception, and equally as uncompromising in pursuit of his own unique vision. For over four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire. The timeless strength of his hand-tinted photographs lies in their poetic compositions and their forceful?at times ribald?pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology. Rejecting the traditional beauty in his famous nude photographs, Saudek shows the distinctively different: old women, fat women, children; real people in tableaux vivants that remind us of everything from surreal early movies to fin-de-siecle carnival nights. They exist outside time, a uniquely colored and almost mythical theater of dreams. Covering his debut in the 1950s through his lesser-known work to recent images, this dazzling collection offers us the true "velvet revolution," fertile and unsettling images from the dreams we might still have. The author: Daniela Mr?zkov?, critic and editor of the Czech magazines Revue fotografie and Fotografie-Magaz?n, is the author of sixteen books on photography published in the Czech Republic and abroad, and the curator of around fifty photography exhibitions. She has been a member of international juries, and has authored film and television documentaries on photography and photographers. She hasfollowed Jan Saudek's work since his early years and is the author of Saudek's first Czech monograph, The Theatre of Life.

Madeleine Vionnet


Betty Kirke - 1998
    Madeleine Vionnet (18761975) was the greatest dressmaker in the world. Considered a genius for her innovations with the bias cutthe most difficult and desirable cut in clothing designshe has a fanatical following. Vionnet was a maverick, her results spectacular. She dressed the stars of the '30s, invented new pattern-making techniques, and eschewed corsets for her models. Vionnet's dresses are virtually un-copiable and highly coveted by vintage clothing collectors. Madeleine Vionnet is the definitive study of this venerated artist. Illustrated with more than 400 photographs, line drawings, and watercolors, it also includes 38 original patterns for Vionnet dresses. As the Art Deco Society of L.A.'s newsletter has said, anyone "interested in Art Deco or fashion must have this book."

The Bone House


Joel-Peter Witkin - 1998
    For this collection Joel-Peter Witkin has personally selected from his own archives his finest images, ranging from his early Coney Island "freak show" studies to his most recent work. Witkin's portraits of subjects both living and dead have disturbed countless viewers for their unwavering viewpoint and magically grotesque compositions. The artist's sojourn captured here, with each photograph a station along his path, veers between oblivion and salvation. This book depicts Witkin's journey until now. Texts by the artist and Eugenia Parry.

Powers of Ten: A Flipbook


Charles Eames - 1998
    This spectacular adventure in space and time takes the reader from the edge of the cosmos to a single atom -- and it all begins at a picnic.Based on the bestselling classic Powers of Ten, this magnificient journey begins millions of light years away, with every two pages representing a view ten times larger than the view two pages earlier. As readers flip through the pages, they will descend the dimensions of the universe, through our solar system down to a park on Earth, then into a human body, it's cells, DNA, and finally a single proton. Or readers can travel in reverse, from proton to deep space.A fun and compact visual odyssey, the Powers of Ten flipbook shows us not only the relative size of things in the known world, but our own place in it.Also available is the critically-acclaimed Scientific American Library Paperback version of Powers of Ten, offering detailed commentary on astronomy, biology, particles physics and more by Philip and Phylis Morrison as well as many additional photographs and illustrations. Stephen Jay Gould, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it "a brilliant pictorial and textual embodiment of a wonderful idea".Both the paperback and flipbook were inspired by the brief and beautiful film Powers of Ten A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. Made by the famous designers, the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, and available on video-cassette, this remarkable film has given many people their first grasp of the dimensions of the world we live in.

The Unknown Matisse, 1869-1908


Hilary Spurling - 1998
    Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last.Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers--magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty--an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite. But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam--and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family--have been erased from memory until now.It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.From the Hardcover edition.

Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style


Carl Larsson - 1998
    At their famous house at Sundborn, in central Sweden, Carl and his wife, Karin, a textile designer, created a series of revolutionary interiors that combined old furniture and objects with startlingly modern concepts of color and design. These designs gave way to a new approach to interior design that continues to influence designers today. This book presents the Larssons as designers and as creators of a remarkable domestic ideal. It sets them in their artistic and social context, using contemporary photographs and comparative pictures. At its heart are the remarkable Ett hem paintings and a series of color photographs showing the interiors at Sundborn and Karin's textiles.

Appalachian Legacy


Shelby Lee Adams - 1998
    The accompanying text offers the collected stories of each family and Adams's relationship with them. 80 photos.

Burg: Wolfgang Tillmans


David Deitcher - 1998
    Wolfgang Tillmans could well be the coolest photographer on the planet, and here's the evidence. Always imitated, never bettered, he's the lens-meister of the zeitgeist, the photo-journo who went artside, a man in constant demand, moving effortlessly from magazine to fashion shoot to gallery retrospective. He creates identities, he's the brand name of hip. From Ray Gun to i-D, his images feel iconic before they're out of the fluid. I'll be your mirror, he whispers, and the Gen X-kids find themselves reflected in his always open pictures. Make your own meaning, rave about them, the artifice, the stagings, it's so close to home and snapshot-casual you could do it yourself. But you couldn't. Framing is all. Every shot is classically composed, it's just the subjects that are so Now. From the portraits that made him famous, through the still lives and landscapes (undermining the genres with every shot), this second book, with design and layout from the man himself, is high colour, dirty realist heaven. Finding the still point in the information overload, the sexuality in the machine, and the image in the image saturation, Tillmans gives us the brief epiphanies we might just remember as our own.

The Big Book of Trains


Christine Heap - 1998
    Giant sized poster-like spreads and informative captions will keep imaginations soaring and eyes wide open with these amazing children's guides.

A New History of Photography


Michel Frizot - 1998
    Edited by Miche Frizot (researcher at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique in Paris) and published on the initiative of the Arts Council of the Centre National du Livre, this volume brings together conrtributions by the most reputed international specialists.

Lewis & Clark


Stephen E. Ambrose - 1998
    Between each of the eight chapters is a visual essay of National Geographic photographer Sam Abell's modern images.

Rainforest: Ancient Realm of the Pacific Northwest


Graham Osborne - 1998
    Exquisite, large format photography by internationally known nature photographer, Graham Osborn with text by Wade Davis

Brooklyn Gang


Bruce Davidson - 1998
    His camera captured these children of the James Dean generation in both private and public moments at the soda fountain, the tattoo parlor, Coney Island, and late-night basement dance parties. The beautiful adolescents that fill the pages of this book exude a cool sensuality which came by way of the young Brando and Dean, and traveled from American shores around the world. Davidson has created an exquisite photographic elegy for a time when, in retrospect, we all seemed young.

Aubrey Beardsley


Stephen Calloway - 1998
    This book, which accompanies a major centenary exhibition on Beardsley, tells the story of his brief, hectic life and uncovers the roots of his genius in the racy artistic and literary culture of 1890s London.Beardsley's startling drawings, prints, bookbindings, and posters are reproduced here from original drawings and from rare early editions of his work. Portraits and photographs of his friends and contemporaries, among them Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Max Beerbohm, and W. B. Yeats, bring his story to life. The authoritative text is the first to fully explore Beardsley's diverse influences, which range from ancient Greek vase paintings to erotic Japanese ukiyo-e prints.The book concludes with a look at Beardsley's artistic legacy and the legend that has grown around him. It demonstrates why his drawings, with their subtle symbolism, highly charged eroticism, sensuous ornamentalism, and self-conscious decadence, have a renewed resonance in our own turn-of-the-century world.

III Millennium


Luis Royo - 1998
    Each collection sparkles with pieces seen on book covers from around the world. Fantasy, science fiction, eroticism, etc... Royo has devised a special personal mix of media that makes his work so uncannily real, so beguilingly engaging as to make him a best-selling star.