Best of
Art-And-Photography

2000

Migrations


Sebastião Salgado - 2000
    Photographs taken over seven years across more than 35 countries document the epic displacement of the world's people at the close of the twentieth century. Wars, natural disasters, environmental degradation, explosive population growth and the widening gap between rich and poor have resulted in over one hundred million international migrants, a number that has doubled in a decade. This demographic change, unparalleled in human history, presents profound challenges to the notions of nation, community, and citizenship. The first extensive pictorial survey of the current global flux of humanity, "Migrations" follows Latin Americans entering the United States, Jews leaving the former Soviet Union, Africans traveling into Europe, Kosovars fleeing into Albania and many others. The images address suffering while revealing the dignity and courage of the subjects. With his unique vision and empathy, Salgado gives us a picture of the enormous social and political transformations now occurring in a world divided between excess and need.

The Architect's Brother


Robert ParkeHarrison - 2000
    I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed. Through my work I explore technology and a poetry of existence. These can be very heavy, overly didactic issues to convey in art, so I choose to portray them through a more theatrically absurd approach.--Robert ParkeHarrison

由貴香織里画集 天使禁猟区 II: 失墜天使 -Lost Angel- [Tenshi Kinryouku II: Shittsui Tenshi - Lost Angel]


Kaori Yuki - 2000
    Along with the full-color, full-page illustrations, Lost Angel presents highly detailed character and series information indexed to help fans navigate the knotty Angel Sanctuary universe. In addition to all this, Kaori Yuki sits down for a nine-page interview. Highly recommended for angels and devils!

Caravaggio, 1571-1610


Gilles Lambert - 2000
    Though his name may be familiar to all of us, his work has been habitually detested and forced into obscurity. Not only was his theatrical realism unfashionable in his time, but his sacrilegious subject matter and use of lower class models were violently scorned. Michelangelo Mirisi de Caravaggio lived a life riddled with crime and scandal, producing a body of work that wouldn't be appreciated until centuries after his mysterious death. Though his body was never found, he is assumed to have been murdered by ruffians on a beach south of Rome-a fate strangely similar to that of controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini who was, like Caravaggio, a homosexual.Caravaggio's reputation was decidedly poor during his lifetime; sometimes rich, sometimes penniless, when he wasn't in prison he was running away from the police or his enemies. Perhaps no other painter has suffered such injustice: his works were often attributed to more respected painters while he was given the credit for just about anything vulgar painted in the chiaroscuro style. Caravaggio's great work had the misfortune of enduring centuries of disrepute. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that he was rediscovered and, quite posthumously, deemed a great master.

The Magic of M.C. Escher


M.C. Escher - 2000
    Escher's mesmerizing artworks create a realm of enchantment and illusion, and tens of thousands of people everywhere have fallen under his spell. This exciting new book deepens our understanding of this artist, who has been the subject of some of the most successful books Abrams has published over the past half century.Brilliantly interweaving well-known prints with numerous unpublished drawings, incredible details, the artist's eloquent words, and observations by Escher expert J.L. Locher, this fresh presentation -- which includes 10 dynamic full-color gatefolds -- reveals Esther's tireless quest for new visual concepts of space and time. Here at last is a book that does justice to Escher's invention, which is, if anything, increasingly relevant in today's sophisticated world of 3-D computer graphics.

Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective


Steven A. Nash - 2000
    Best-known for his deadpan still-life paintings of cakes, pies, delicatessen counters, and other consumer goods, Thiebaud has also explored such themes as figure studies, the topography of Northern California, and cityscapes exaggerating the vertiginous roadways and geometric high-rises of San Francisco. Continuous throughout his career is his combination of the perceptual and the conceptual, of sensuous color, light, and painterly texture with rigorously formal composition, resulting in a highly personalized Americana. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same title, the first major survey in fifteen years of work by this famous American figurative artist. Steven A. Nash, Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has organized the exhibition and provides a biographical essay on Thiebaud. An extended essay by Adam Gopnik, the Paris Journal writer for The New Yorker, links Thiebaud to American writing as a painter in the tradition of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and John Updike.

Jungles


Frans Lanting - 2000
    In a glorious portfolio of images made over a period of twenty years in jungles from the lowlands of the Congo to the cloud forests of the Amazon, Frans Lanting interprets the aesthetic splender and the astonishing natural realm of the tropics. His provocative images represent a personal vision of the emerald worlds that shelter the ultimate expression of life on personal vision of the emerald worlds that shelter the ultimate expression of life on earth. Through images and words, Lanting takes readers on a dazzling journey into a realm of bewildering complexity, where nothing is the way it first appears. In photographs that range from spectacular gatherings of rainbow-colored macaws to the misty exudations of a forest at dawn, he evokes the luscious sensuality and intricate natural order of the tropics. His stories chronicle a series of rugged expeditions into remote tropical wilderness areas, from the otherwordly island continent of Madagascar to the soaring mountains of Borneo, to capture the mesmerising beauty and eerie fascination of nature at its most fantastic.

They Called Her Styrene


Ed Ruscha - 2000
    Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956, excited by the newness, mobility and freedom represented by the Southern California landscape. Pulling elements from the visual language of advertising and commercial art, he has made hundreds of 'word' prints, drawings, and paintings that exhibit an interplay between bold letters and softly shaded, atmospheric backgrounds. This book reproduces approximately 500 'word' drawings and works by Ruscha. Assembled together in the form of a thick block, these images become a sort of novel without an obvious plot, a series of words with no narrative. Some of the works consist of only one word -- great, mud, trust; others of short combinations or phrases such as Indeed I do, She Sure Knew Her Devotionals, Your Polyester People, That Housing Tract is Only Texture, and, of course, They Called Her Styrene. In these works Ruscha's words transcend their apparent randomness to become visual icons of universal emotions and places known and imagined.

The Complete Cats in the Sun


Hans W. Silvester - 2000
    The Complete Cats in the Sun is the essential Hans Silvester: together in one book are all the free-spirited felines from the enormously popular Cats in the Sun, Asleep in the Sun, and The Mediterranean Cat. This is a beautiful one-volume collection of those memorable cats leaping from one fishing boat to the next, prowling across the rounded azure rooftops in search of the perfect place for a quick nap in the sun, or slinking through the cool shadows of a Mediterranean afternoon. The Complete Cats in the Sun is destined to become the classic gift book for lovers of felines, the sun, and the magic that is the Grecian Isles.

Devil's Advocate: The Art of COOP


Chris Cooper - 2000
    This book is a delight! A Complete comprehensive pictorial of Coops entire body of work. The book features his album covers, original paintings and Pop Culture Merchandise. The book also contains original sketches for the finished artworks and revealing commentary from Coop himself. It is a must have for every Coop Collector and Art Historian!

One Hundred Flowers


Harold Feinstein - 2000
    Each variety is coupled with a brief description, including tips about cultivation, as well as comprehensive notes about the major flower groups, all written by a distinguished botanistmaking the book as useful as it is beautiful. One Hundred Flowers also includes an introduction by popular garden author and lecturer Sydney Eddison and a critical essay by celebrated photography critic A.D. Coleman.

Hollywood Portraits: Classic Shots and How to Take Them


Roger Hicks - 2000
    'Hollywood Portraits' offers an in-depth analysis of around 50 shots, enabling the readers to create classic Hollywood-style portraits of their own.

Uta Barth: In Between Places


Uta Barth - 2000
    It is in this place that Barth begins her investigation into the very nature of perception, where the epistemological importance of such formal qualities as lighting and composition becomes astoundingly evident Uta Barth. In Between Places is the first comprehensive book on Barth's oeuvre, presenting a carefully selected survey of her works, and as such is a must-have for viewers, collectors and students attracted to contemporary art and photography The poetic resonance, radical intelligence and sheer beauty of Barth's pictures are given perfect illustration in this book, designed with the artist herself Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, London, San Francisco, and Stockholm.

Yves Tanguy And Surrealism


Susan Davidson - 2000
    Tanguy's artistic obsession was the world of imagination, of dreams and reveries, and his cryptically codified imagery continues to perplex audiences today. His paintings seem to exist in a hazy, oddly beautiful limbo dimension beyond time and space, a world at once vertiginous and calm, disturbing and breathtaking. The central focus of Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is the Surrealist mode, to which Tanguy dedicated himself like no other painter of his time, cementing the movement's place in the history of visual art. On the basis of previously unpublished documents and works, authors discuss Tanguy's otherworldly oeuvre in all its aspects--from his development as an artist to the reception of his work in the United States. With stunning reproductions in full color as well as black and white, Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is an extensive overview of the work of an artist whose forays into the creative unknown continue to resonate.

Seeing Gardens


Sam Abell - 2000
    One of the world's premier photographers combines candid, personal narrative and lush full-color photography in a fascinating international odyssey in search of the world's great gardens, in a three-part volume that includes The Garden, Wild Gardens, and Seeing Gardens and ranges from English

Car Crashes & Other Sad Stories


Mell Kilpatrick - 2000
    This book contains selections from the photographic collection of one Mell Kilpatrick, a news photographer from South California who relentlessly pursued his profession during the 40s and 50s, capturing images from the plentiful crime scenes and in particular automobile collisions that came his way. Kilpatrick was an obsessive witness to the effects of the post-war explosion of car culture in California, and through his lens he repeatedly viewed the fatal consequences of speed. technology and reckless abandon. His work might have remained lost and unknown, sealed away in his locked darkroom, untouched since his death in 1961, if it hadn't been brought to light by collector and dealer Jennifer Dumas, who found the 5,000 negatives and realised she'd stumbled upon something very special. Although he covered other 'stories' apart from crashes, including shots of everyday life in the small towns he visited, it is the roadside images that dominate the collection. They are an unsparing archive of human tragedy. Picture after picture unveils yet another tableau of disaster with infinite variations -- the fragile shells of cars collapsed and upended, corpses hidden or fully revealed, stoic cops and laughing bystanders dealing in different ways with the reality of sudden death. It is this combination of the banal or ordinary and the appalling horror of the moment of impact that makes Kilpatrick's work a fascinating experience.

George Platt Lynes, 1907-1955


David Leddick - 2000
    This skill and passion for his subjects led to enormous success in the 30s and 40s as he was published in the leading fashion magazines of the day -- "Vogue," "Harper's Bazaar" and others. But Platt Lynes was also a myth-maker with a photographic obsession that sadly remained mostly unpublicised until after his death. In collaboration with his male nude models he was able to transcend time and place -- these images simultaneously glance back as a "homage" to Greek mythology and athleticism, and look forward to the modern, urban eroticism of Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. This book breaks down his body of work into distinct sections. The portraits include such luminaries of twentieth century art and society as Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Countess Bismarck and Gertrude Stein, as well as fellow lens-men Cecil Beaton and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and it is clear from the lighting and the often surreal framing that he was a master of the form. This extends into his work with ballet and fashion, but of course it is in his extensive nude images that his admiration for the male body and his expert technique are truly brought together.