A fun but informative guide, this "professor in your pocket" features chronologically organized chapters-from the pyramids to Picasso-that explain the forces behind Europe's most important cultural and artistic periods. Other features include handy lists of sights that allow you to link your newly acquired knowledge with the specific paintings, sculptures, and buildings you'll see on your trip, a humorous, readable style that is a joy to read compared with the history textbooks you slept on in school, and timelines, maps, drawings, and photos that illustrate Europe's story and round out your education.

    In this fascinating study, Rozsika Parker traces a hidden history--the shifting notions of femininity and female social roles--by unraveling the history of embroidery from medieval times until today.

    J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives—be they bar-maids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers, or petits bourgeois lunching on the grass. The central question of The Painting of Modern Life is this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny? The revised edition of this classic book includes a new preface by the author.

    Traces in detail the evolution of the chief genres of architecture, sculpture, painting, and draughtsmanship. Essays link individual works to the history & ideas of the time. 11" x 12 1/2". Color & b&w illus.

    Focusing on the multifaceted relation of architecture to society, Robert Hillenbrand covers public architecture in the Middle East and North Africa from the medieval period to 1700. Extensive photographs and ground plans-- among which are hundreds of newly executed three-dimensional drawings that provide an accurate and vivid depiction of the structure--are presented with an emphasis on the way the specific details of the building fulfilled their function.Included are chapters on religious and secular architecture and the architecture of tombs. Each building is discussed in terms of function, the links between particular forms and specific uses, the role of special types of buildings in the Islamic order, and the expressions of different sociocultural groups in architectural terms. Here the student or historian of Islamic architecture will find an astonishing resource, including Maghribi palaces, Anatolian madrasas, Indian minarets, Fatimid mausolea, and Safavid mosques, each rendered in lavish illustrations and explained with incomparable precision.

    The many illustrations of his work - sketches, drawings, paintings, graphics, and stills from his Surrealist films - are accompanied by photographs of Dali and his inner circle, quotations from his writings, and a detailed account of his life.

    Beginning with early agricultural and religious practices, Professor Itoh describes how the major garden types-from microcosmic stone-and-gravel compositions and tea-ceremony settings to spacious landscapes for strolling-evolved from a rich mingling of native and foreign influences. While never totally rejecting outside influence, the Japanese nevertheless willfully misinterpreted rigid Chinese models to suit their own tastes and infused Zen gardens with a sensitivity to material born of their native Shinto animist faith. Even today, garden designers responding to new building styles and ways of living still preserve the impeccable sense of design and intimacy with nature that are the hallmark of the Japanese tradition. Each page is packed with information, anecdote, and every kind of illustration-maps, plans, sketches, reproductions from ancient books, and photographs of great gardens and historical figures. One chapter is wholly devoted to Kyoto's famous Moss Temple, while another visits modern-day temple, tea, and country gardens to offer a rare look beyond the private gates and into the hearts of people who actually enjoy these gardens in their daily lives. There is an examination of the important elements-stones, lanterns, pathways, basins, plantings, fences-and at the end a special appendix gives Teiji Itoh's personal choice of gardens to visit in Japan, including addresses, descriptions, and hints on when to go and what to look for. The Gardens of Japan is by far the most delightful and informative volume in the field. With 96 pages of superb color, it is in every detail a fitting celebration of nature's beauty, joy, and meaning.

    Includes 20 painstakingly reproduced paintings; excerpts from the critics.

    Based in Italy and led by Ettore Sottsass, it overturned and re-shaped the pre-suppositions on which the production of so-called Modern Design is based. It became the almost mythical symbol of the New Design. Laughing out loud at our culture and at itself, Memphis pulled out all stops when it came to colour, pattern, decoration and ornamentation.

    It also looks at the roots of American Impressionism, explaining its progress from the avant-garde to more diverse manifestations.

    Miss Piggy takes the reader on a tour of her art museum which houses several muppet masterworks including Gainsborough's "Green Boy."

    Accompanied by over 400 color photographs, a guide to the art of the carousel, or merry-go-round, traces its development by describing style variations and identifiable features of carousel animals.

    His influence on modern art, both during his lifetime and today, has never stopped growing; in the eyes of the world, he is the French painter par excellence. Henri Matisse is all the more cherished because his work celebrates the positive aspects of life, as evidenced by the titles of many of his major paintings: Luxe, Calme et Volupte, La Joie de Vivre, La Danse, Musique, to mention but a few. His explosions and juxtapositions of color and pattern inspire pure delight in the beholder, and his mastery of line, volume, and form are perhaps unequaled in the art of our time. The vitality, energy, and life-enhancing qualities that radiate from his art represent distillation of all that is affirmative in the human condition and are given immortality through that rare and indefinable quality known as genius. The art of Matisse describes a trajectory leading from realism to abstraction, from darkness to light, from the cold of the north to the heat of the south, a route marked off by such revolutionary innovations as the burst of color found in Fauvism or the invention of his cut-outs. Matisse was still creating at a time in his life when many artists are content to rest on their laurels. Since its original publication in 1984, this book by Pierre Schneider stands alone as the bible on the art of Matisse. The author spent fourteen years amassing a prodigiousamount of information on the artist, and includes his own personal and original views on the work. Including over nine hundred illustrations, this is the most substantial reference of the works of Matisse ever published. The reader will discover Matisse watercolorist, draftsman, ceramist, and the architect-- and unquestionably one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

    A legend grew up around Modigliani, who, along with others, engendered the concept of the peintre maudit – the accursed painter – whose poverty, corruption and excess were the very seeds from which his remarkable works of art were conceived.Unlike the Italian Futurists, who stormed at their own overwhelming tradition, Modigliani seemed to sense the possibility of returning to it for renewal. His interpretation of a central theme of the tradition, the reclining female nude, produced a series of uniquely beautiful works, outstanding in the grace and harmony of their linear designs and the quality of their colour. Nude, portraits and studies of a surprising range of personalities and psychological types are represented in this ideal introduction to the artist, as is a selection of his remarkable stone carvings, of which about 25 survive.

    With surprising candor and objectivity, it captures the paradoxical nature of a complicated woman and artist. Her two marriages, her love affair with John Gilbert, and her attitudes as a mother are described with compassion, yet unflinchingly honesty.Especially interesting is Mrs. Courtney's ability to convey in print the stage techniques of a professional whose special magic affected all who saw her, from early road-company days through Peg O' My Heart and Outward Bound, to her final exquisite creation Amanda in the Glass Menagerie

    An illustrated catalogue of imps, hobgoblins, demons, and witches taken from literature and the author's own imagination.

    In this visually stunning and intellectually provocative work, nineteen heavily illustrated essays by fifteen scholars confront complex aesthetic, art-historical, and sociological problems posed by this dramatic chapter in the history of modern art.

    The Golden Age is a modern and wide-ranging chronology that not only includes recent scholarly insights but also makes fascinating reading for all those wishing to learn more about this extremely flourishing artistic period.

    Traces the development of European painting from the late 1200's through World War I by examining the lives and works of such artists as Giotto, Delacroix, Gauguin, and Picasso.

    Revolutions start the story -- first the American, then the French, leading to new forms of government and new ways for artists to view society and their own place within it. The Industrial Revolution created a new ecomonic order and a new aristocracy of moneyed patrons of the arts. New techniques found their way into the studios of painters and sculptors alike. This search for the new as the key to a better life remains a hallmark of modern life and art.19th-Century Art explores the nineteenth century's creative wellspings and present here the first comprehensive view of its achievements. To match the opulence of their subject, the authors selected over 500 illustrations, of which 89 are faithfully reproduced in excellent color. Dr. Janson photographed many of the sculptures himself, and many of the paintings have never before been reproduced in color.In the text, the authors draw from the historical documentation of the period of the dynamics of the making and viewing of art, examining the reciprocal influences of art and technology, art and politics, art and literature, and art and music.includes discussions of the careers of distinguished artists such as David, Manet, Renoir, and Rodin.

    As he traces the roots and evolution of the art, the story becomes one of prints, people, and events--from the printmakers, their artistic conceptions and works, to the curators, dealers, collectors, critics, printers, workshops, and exhibitions that played crucial supporting roles.

    Born Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, he grew up in Berlin, Switzerland and Paris, and later moved back and forth between France, the Far East and Rome. Continually crossing all sorts of borders, he remained an outsider throughout his life. His art was a sensuous and poetical admixture of fairytale, Eros and dreams; it was figurative in an age of abstraction and painted using the techniques of Italian Quattrocento fresco - in other words, at no point did it fit any customary category.

    Fully illustrated with both black and white and color plates.

    

    Originally published: New York: Viking Press, 1984.