Art

    Extensive glossary and updated bibliography. 833 illustrations, including 105 in full color.

    While public attention was preoccupied with the Impressionists, many painters were reacting in a totally different...and more imaginative way...to the grim horrors of the new industrial society around them. The roots of the Decadents, as these artists came to call themselves, were to be found in the poetic visions of the English Pre-Raphaelites of the 1850s. Their first great Continental exponent was a brilliant and neglected painter of the fantastic, Gustave Moreau; their most obvious expression was 'Art Nouveau,' a style closely interwoven with sinuous and half-unconscious eroticism. Philippe Julian takes the reader on a conducted tour through the bizarre symbolism of this half-forgotten world, introducing him to a large number of writers and artists. Many of these artists...Moreau; Toorop, the brilliant half-Balinese, half-Dutch painter and draftsman; the French Odilon Redon, the great master of Symbolist art; the Viennese Klimt; and the Belgian Khnopff...have been known for some time to a few enthusiasts; In this lively study their inventiveness and skill are explored afresh, and their fantastic imaginings and weird symbolism exposed to a sometimes ironic light. Proud of their romantic appearance, extravagant habits, and outrageous conduct, the artists of the 'mauve nineties' drew on a wide range of writers for their ideas, including not only Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, but also less well-known and stranger poets. The book ends with a short anthology of Symbolist themes taken from these writers, and 149 pictures drawn from museums and collection in the Europe and the U.S.

    Now this definitive work on Bauhaus is available again in a boxed hardcover edition.Documents in Bauhaus are taken from a wide array of sources--public manifestos, private letters, internal memoranda, jotted-down conversations, minutes of board and faculty meetings, sketches and schemata, excerpts from speeches and books, newspaper and magazine articles, Nazi polemics, official German government documents, court proceedings, budgets, and curricula. The illustrations include architectural plans and realizations, craft and industrial model designs (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, stained glass, typography, wallpaper), sculpture, paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, posters, programs, advertising brochures, stage settings, and formal portraits of such Bauhaus masters as Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Hebert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

    Withdrawn in manner, conventional in dress, and virtually unknown for the first half of his career, the French painter and graphic artist drew upon his own startlingly complex and fantastic inner world to create haunting works that reveal an existence beyond that of everyday vision. He transformed common subjects and models into strange, eerie images and exhibited a predilection for spiders and serpents, skeletons and skulls, gnomes and monsters — all rendered in a distinctive style of controlled, delicate realism.Redon's popularity arose chiefly among young progressive artists, who considered his works as visual correspondence to the literary symbolism of Mallarmé. Modern devotees regard Redon's translation of the subconscious world of dreams into visual reality as a precursor to Surrealism. This modestly priced volume offers a rich compilation of the influential artist's graphic works, with 209 illustrations — 72 lithographs, plus 37 etchings and engravings — depicting unforgettable scenes of fantasy and mystery.

    The daughter of artists details the lives of her parents and her struggle to find her own identity.

    

    

    From the vibrant Blaue Reiter movement to Surrealism at the end of the 1930s and throughout his teaching years at the Bauhaus, he attempted to capture the organic and harmonic nature of painting by alluding to other artistic mediums such as poetry, literature, and, above all, music. While he collaborated with artists like August Macke and Alexej von Jawlensky, his most famous partnership was with the abstract expressionist, Wassily Kandinsky.

    So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs. It is this premise that William M. Ivins, Jr., elaborates in Prints and Visual Communication, a history of printmaking from the crudest wood block, through engraving and lithography, to Talbot's discovery of the negative-positive photographic process and its far reaching consequences.

    

    

    

    H. Abdul-Rahman, photography by Dominique Darbois [translated by Iris Urwin]