Best of
Art-History

1981

Sandro Botticelli 1444/45 - 1510


Barbara Deimling - 1981
    This book explores his work.

King of the Confessors


Thomas Hoving - 1981
    This new edition contains revelations that render the events even more extraordinary, and explains why Hoving thinks the Museum has got it wrong.

W. Eugene Smith: Masters of Photography


W. Eugene Smith - 1981
    Eugene Smith is the master of the photographic essay; he created essays which include some of the most dramatic and affecting single images of the twentieth century. Fiercely energetic, he made countless photographs memorable for their formal brilliance and for their compassion. This volume of Aperture's Masters of Photography presents more than 70 of Smith's greatest photographs, selected from work created over the course of 45 years. Smith's interests were broad; his work spanned subject matter from the process of birth to the horrors of death in action. Included here are photographs from Smith's most celebrated photo-essays, including Country Doctor, Spanish Village, Pittsburgh and Minamata, as well as examples of his World War II work and selections from the later, more introspective work made in his loft in New York City. In his introductory essay, Jim Hughes, Smith's biographer, provides an overview of Smith's life, and insight into his work.

The Pre-Raphaelites


Christopher Wood - 1981
    Dozens of reproductions attest to these painters’ scrupulous attention to natural details: more than 40 artists are represented, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones, John William Waterhouse, and Ford Maddox Brown.

Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist


Gail Levin - 1981
    Such paintings as House by the Railroad, Early Sunday Morning, and Nighthawks seem to embody the very character of our time. Yet few people have penetrated the mask of Hopper's public image. Here, Gail Levin has gone beyond the standard evaluations of the man and his work to investigate the authentic identity of the artist and the way his personality informed his art. She has uncovered aspects of Hopper's life (and even unknown works) that provide the first comprehensive view of the artists early development.The fascinating and often poignant story of Hopper's long struggle for recognition gives new insight into his later pessimism. A complex man is revealed, introspective and intellectual, yet romantic, illuminating the many levels of meaning in the paintings of his maturity.In addition to Hopper's watercolors and oil paintings, there are study drawings for his major works and documentary photographs illuminating all phases of his life.

Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art Since 1858


Siegfried Wichmann - 1981
    This volume shows the influence of Japan on the fine and decorative arts of the period.

Mucha's Figures Décoratives


Alphonse Mucha - 1981
    His distinctive graphic approach to the 1895 poster advertising Sarah Bernhardt's performance in Gismonda captured the Parisian public's imagination and catapulted the artist into overnight success. During the next ten years he became the high priest of Art Nouveau, publishing several stylebooks which were to have a lasting influence on 20th-century art and design.Figures decoratives, originally published in 1905, is a landmark book of the Art Nouveau movement and perhaps best exemplifies Mucha's artistic product in the years 1895–1905, the decade that made him famous. Mucha's purity of line and beauty of proportion take their inspiration from nature. But more than nature's imitator, he was its interpreter, translating its rhythms and designs into works that exude an indefinable charm. His unique approach combined originality of invention with spontaneous energy supported by flawless draftsmanship.This new edition of Figures decoratives carefully reproduces all forty of the original two-color plates from a rare first edition now valued at several thousand dollars. Comprised of finished pen, pencil, charcoal, and chalk, this volume represents the essence of Mucha's genius and documents the subtle shadings and linear excellence that characterized his masterful illustrations. Placed in rectangles, triangles, stars, circles, and a number of irregular geometric forms are figures of women, young girls, and children of both sexes. The harmony between the movement of head, limbs, and drapery and the sense of balance in each pose are the result of Mucha's instinct for composition, gift for ornamentation, and profound knowledge of his craft.Mucha's hand and eye are clearly evident in all his work though one can see other artistic influences which shaped the artist's development, including Gauguin's cloissonnism, Horta's and Van de Velde's kinetic treatment of curvilinear design, as well as the linear conventions of Moorish architecture and Islamic ornamentation. Yet Mucha himself believed that he owed his greatest artistic debt to the folk art traditions of his native Moravia.

Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art, Revised Edition with Previously Author's Unpublished Notes


Ananda K. Coomaraswamy - 1981
    This new edition of Coomaraswamy's classic book, considered his most important work on the philosophy of art, includes all of the revisions Coomaraswamy had wanted to add to the original edition.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man


Martin Kemp - 1981
    Martin Kemp, one of the world's leading authorities on Leonardo, takes us on a mesmerizing journey through the whole span of the great man's life, painting a fully integrated picture of his artistic, scientific, and technological achievements. Kemp shows how Leonardo's early training inFlorence provided a crucial foundation in the science of art, particularly perspective and anatomy, while his period in the service of the Sforzas of Milan enlarged his outlook to embrace a wide range of natural sciences and mathematics, as he searched for scientific rules governing both man andthe universe. It was these rules, Kemp argues, which provided the basis for his imaginative reconstruction of nature in masterworks such as the Last Supper, The Mona Lisa, and St. John, which reveal his increasingly complex vision of man in the context of nature. And towards the end of his life, Leonardo became fascinated with the mathematics underlying the design of nature, behind which lay the ultimate force of the prime mover, as manifested with supreme power in his Deluge drawings. Covering every aspect of Leonardo's achievement, generously illustrated, and now including a new introductory chapter setting Leonardo's work in its historical context, this fully updated edition provides unparalleled insight into the mind of this central figure in western art

Egon Schiele


Frank Whitford - 1981
    Rejected by his family, hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and an obsession with sexuality, death and decay. He was only twenty-eight when he died, yet he left behind him a body of work that sustains a huge public reputation--and a myth. This book sets out to examine both. 151 illus., 20 in color.

Art Nouveau Decorative Ironwork


Theodore Menten - 1981
    Generally referred to as Art Nouveau, it exerted its influence on painters, illustrators, architects, ironworkers, furniture designers, interior decorators, potters, jewelry designers — in fact, nearly every kind of artist-craftsman. While Art Nouveau is a broad and varied style, it is almost uniformly characterized by abstract, asymmetrical, curvilinear design. The thrust of this "new art" was twofold: to elevate the status of the "crafts" to equals and partners of the "fine arts"; and to bring a designed object into a harmonious relationship with its environment through the use of lines — either expressive or controlling — that were natural, vital, and most importantly, organic.Among the most imaginative realizations of these pervasive rhythms and serpentine patterns was the ironwork that was created during this period and still exists in major European cities (chiefly Paris and Brussels). Gates, railings, balconies, doorways, staircases, elevator cages, grilles, lampposts, and many other architectural features reveal the sinuous forms, foliate motifs, expert craftsmanship, and rich detail characteristic of the style.No other existing work documents so extensively and accurately the full range of Art Nouveau ironwork. Derived from now unavailable sources, this new anthology attests to the enduring qualities of both the design and its constructive material. Graphic designers, illustrators, architects, artists, and craftspeople of all disciplines will discover numerous ornamental ideas, authentic motifs, and design solutions among the 137 royalty-free photographic illustrations. Collectors and enthusiasts unfamiliar with this particular area of Art Nouveau will delight in the exquisite craftsmanship, ornamental felicities, and juxtaposition of strength and beauty as they observe these unyielding iron creations fashioned into delicate germinating buds and wandering tendrils. Captions for the photographs provide the building, city, architect, and designer of the ironwork. These latter include such notables as Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, Louis Majorelle, Charles Plumet, and Emile Robert. Their work and that of many others is preserved in this fine selection of photographs.

Turner and the Sublime


Andrew Wilton - 1981
    Many of the subjects have not previously been published.

Art in the Ancient World: A Handbook of Styles and Forms


Pierre Amiet - 1981