Gustav Klimt's art is thoroughly fin de siècle.It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper-middle-class society — a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt (1862-1918) and his contemporaries found — or hoped to find — in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death, and death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. Particularly his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world "in female form." Author Gottfried Fliedlalso discusses the Secession movement and Klimt's role within this important group of artists.

    As seen here, his color harmonies can be analogous to musical compositions, complex and expressive. Full-color reproductions and thorough text provide a quick yet solid introduction to this master.

    His own legacy is scarcely paralleled in its scope and diversity. Our study of Picasso, the most exhaustive record of his work to date, contains almost 1500 illustrations - from his earliest drawings to the master's very last painting.

    Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting. Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the "Blauer Reiter" in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the "First Abstract Watercolour" of 1910. In his theoretical writings Kandinsky repeatedly sought the proximity of music; and just as in music, where the individual notes constitute the medium whose effect stems from harmony and euphony, Kandinsky was aiming for a pure concord of colour through the interplay of various shades. Gauguin had demanded that everything "must be sacrificed to pure colours." Kandinsky was the first to realise this and thus to influence a whole range of artists. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

    Rackham's illustrations for such works as Alice in Wonderland, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and Rip Van Winkle have attained the classic status of the writings themselves—and indeed, in some cases, they have become synonymous with them. His works were also included in numerous exhibitions in his lifetime, including one at the Louvre in Paris in 1914. Rackham himself, however, has previously remained a shadowy figure. As well as featuring exquisite illustrations and sketches, extracts from Rackham's correspondence and insightful commentary shed new light on this much-collected illustrator.

    Documents, workshop products from all areas of design, studies, sketches in the classroom, and architectural plans and models are all part of its comprehensive inventory. The Bauhaus Archiv is dedicated to the study and presentation of the history of the Bauhaus, including the new Bauhaus in Chicago and the Hochschule f

    A revised edition of a retrospective on the Venice Biennale grand prize-winning artist incorporates the last ten years of his career including his retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1997, in a lavishly illustrated portrait that traces his early years, the creation of his famous combines, his work with new technologies, and the establishm

    He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

    The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Cubism. The third essay tackles the controversial field of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. Bryson concludes in the final essay that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women. In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson is at his most brilliant. These superbly written essays will stimulate us to look at the entire tradition of still life with new and critical eyes.

    

    This apotheosis of banal, everyday objects simultaneously constituted a criticism of the traditional elitist understanding of art. Almost alone among artists, Lichtenstein pursued the question of how an image becomes a work of art. Wholly in keeping with the spirit of the Classical Modern, he held that it was not the "rank" of the picture's subject that lends the picture its artistic character, but rather the artist's formal treatment of it. To Lichtenstein, however, this position seemed far too broad to be seriously pursued. Developed in the early 60s, Lichtenstein's grid technique, with its allusion to the mass-production of graphic art, allowed the painter to give vent to his own artistic scepticism. In the 60s and 70s, Lichtenstein expanded his formal repertoire of techniques for creating distance and irony by means of an idiosyncratic process of abstraction and especially by his use of his numerous art quotations.

    From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.   As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art.  In this book:  nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject.   For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists.  He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.”  He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic).   Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded.  His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture.  There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate.  And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s.   A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.

    Borobudur contains more than a thousand exquisitely carved relief panels extending along its many terraces for a total distance of more than a kilometer. These are arranged so as to take the visitor on a spiritual journey to enlightenment, and one ascends the monument past scenes depicting the world of desire, the life story of Buddha, and the heroic deeds of other enlightened beings—finally arriving at the great circular terraces at the top of the structure that symbolizes the formless world of pure knowledge and perfection.

    Same-scene paintings are shown together to accentuate Monet's love of light and varying effects.

    

    Traces the first one hundred and fifty years of photography, and shows photographs of representative artists from William Henry Fox Talbot to Cindy Sherman.

    In this beautiful new book, Paul Hayes Tucker provides a fresh context for these heralded canvases. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from popular broadsides to political speeches, Tucker proposes that Monet's series paintings were not only an artistic response to the beauties of nature but were also related to contemporary events in France and to Monet's determination to provide active leadership for his nation's artistic production. Monet, who had been accused earlier in his career of disregarding professional decorum and denigrating the aesthetic values that France held dear, was hailed by the end of the 1890s as one of the finest landscape painters of the century and as a great national artist. Tucker examines the circumstances that contributed to this shift in opinion: the changes in Monet's art and in his life, an evolution in public taste, and the maturation of concerns the French had about their country and its place in the world. Tucker looks carefully at the development of Monet's art before the 1890s, analyzing in particular the cultural pressures of the 1880s that caused Monet to turn to serial painting. He then focuses in considerable detail on the major and minor series from the ensuing decade, examining how they were painted, their critical reception, and the meaning they held for Monet and his public.This engrossing study provides new subtlety to the series paintings, showing that their rich, encrusted surfaces, extraordinary light effects, and dazzling repetition of images touched deep aesthetic and nationalistic chords. In addition, as Tucker sets the paintings in this larger historical context, he also is able to give us a fresh perspective on Monet's role in the continuities and contradictions of fin-de-siecle French culture.Publication of this book coincides with an exhibition of Monet's series paintings of the 1890s. The exhibition will open in Boston in February 1990 and will move to Chicago in May and London in September.Paul Hayes Tucker, associate professor of art at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, is also the author of Monet at Argenteuil.

    The sky orange-red above him. His hands raised to his ears, his mouth wide in a haunting wail. In painting The Scream, Edvard Munch (1863 1944) created Mona Lisa for our times. The shriek of his iconic figure reverberates around the world, its echo resounding in the work of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Martin Kippenberger, Marlene Dumas, and Tracey Emin.This introductory book surveys Munch s staggering capacity for psychodrama in The Scream and beyond. With rich illustration, it looks at the lurid, dark, and deeply modern visions that made up the artist s response to relationships and emotions. These compelling images, regarded by the artist himself as a means of free confession, remain as magnetic today as they were on the brink of modernism.About the series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions"

    While the "Glasgow Boys" group of painters has been widely written about, their female contemporaries have received far less attention. In this work, the editor redresses this imbalance, bringing together research from 18 scholars on the work of an astonishing number of female artists from this period.

    These urban scenes were very popular with the public, particulary in the north of England where he did so much of his work, but less so with the offical art world.Contents:The Leeds background; Early years; Knostrop old hall; Painter of moonlight; "No marks of handling" Grimshaw's methods and technique.

    Gems culled from thrift shops reveal a "twilight zone where high art, popular culture and the collective unconscious overlap."--The New York Times

    This affordable oversize paperback provides an unusual glimpse into the painter's life, and particularly his relationship with model Sue Lewin, with an unusual interplay of black-and-white photographs and full-color plates, showing how Lewin's simple poses became fully realized fantasies under the brush of the master.

    Warning against the uncritical adoption of theoretical fashions and equally against the a priori rejection of all theory, Bois argues that theory is best employed in response to the specific demands of a critical problem. The essays lucidly demonstrate the uses of various theoretical approaches in conjunction with close reading of both paintings and texts.

    An essay on the emergence of the Fauve landscape is followed by four essays devoted to individual sites and such topics as Fauvism's impact on tourism and politics. Another essay concentrates on the critical landscape, in essence the critics' reception of these paintings. Matisse, Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Marquet, Manguin and Friesz are represented with examples of their works.

    It traces the evolution of the conception and the depiction of space in European and American painting and the ways in which this evolution reflects ideological changes in society over 2000 years.

    There are spectacular fakes once hailed as masterpieces of ancient and modern art. There are musical instruments and manuscripts, Chinese bronzes and Chelsea porcelain. There are literary and documentary frauds and political forgeries that have changed the course of history. Both the methods of making fakes and the recent scientific advances in their detection are described, but many puzzles remain. The book concludes with a discussion of intriguing cases like the Vinland Map, the "Aztec" rock-crystal skull, and the mysterious discoveries at Glozel, which continue to perplex curator, historian, and scientist alike.

    Covers painters, critics, patrons, and collectors, and describes the cultural background of the time.

    The Christmas we love today sprang from the festive parlors and bedecked halls of a century ago, where it lives still in the lush pages of "Joy to the World." A specially embossed and die-cut jacket wraps the book like a precious gift. Selection of the Literary Guild and the Better Homes & Gardens Family Book Service. 199,000 copies in print.

    This critical history of the Pop Art movement offers a clear perspective of the movement, with a fully documented chronology that unravels the sequence of events associated with the evolution of Pop in Britain, the USA and Europe.

    It focuses not only on his use of various media, but also on the suites of works on the same subject that reflect the artist's modern practice of thinking and working serially and thematically.

    It allows us to reconstruct the keen eye, the commitment to perception, the gift of rapt concentration, the conviction that great paintings are not necessarily understood easily, and the further conviction that a great painter deserves to get from us as good as he gives. By drawing on these qualities, Fried achieves something out of reach for all but a handful of his colleagues. In his writing, art history takes on some of the character of art itself. It is driven by the same stubborn resolve to open our eyes."—Richard Wollheim, San Francisco Review of BooksCourbet's Realism is clearly a major contribution to the highly active field of Courbet studies. . . . But to contribute here and now is necessarily also to contribute to central debates about art history itself, and so the book is also—I hesitate to say 'more importantly,' because of the way object and method are woven together in it—a major contribution to current attempts to rethink the foundations and objects of art history. . . . It will not be an easy book to come to terms with; for all its engagement with contemporary literary theory and related developments, it is not an application of anything, and its deeply thought-through arguments will not fall easily in line with the emerging shapes of the various 'new art histories' that tap many of the same theoretical resources. At this moment, there may be nothing more valuable than such a work."—Stephen Melville, Art History

    In this book Suleiman shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists in the 20th century and in the process offers interpretations of major French avant-garde writers.

    The mystery of Ana's death and its cicumstances has never been resolved -- until now. Illustrated.

    In collaboration with Felix Feneon, renowned critic and friend of Seurat, Rewald produced a portrait of a fervent era in art history that is essential for understanding the work of the pioneer of pointillism. This reprint includes 173 reproductions of the artist's work and a comprehensive bibliography.

    Known as the Golden Age of Tamil Culture, the Chola period produced dynamic royal personalities who shaped the artistic activity of theirtimes. Art of the Imperial Cholas examines the dynasty's architectural and sculptural achievements, which stand among the masterpieces of India.

    She reached a pinnacle of artistic achievement despite the restraints society placed on her sex, adroitly combining her artistic ambitions with a rewarding family life. Anne Higonnet brings fully to life an accomplished artist and her world.

    Vestiges of their art, architecture, and unique language have long intrigued scholars, and the search for this mysterious civilization continues to fire the imagination. Despite a history of pillage, rich archaeological evidence survives: thousands of tombs, many of them frescoed and filled with vases, sculpture, jewelry, and metalwork; and the mysterious Etruscan sites that are places of tourist pilgrimage, such as Cerveteri, Vulci, and Tarquinia. In this new book, the first survey of its kind in more than twenty years, Nigel Spivey brings the Etruscan world to life, illuminating the social, political, and cultural context of the art objects and artifacts that remain the singular achievement of the Etruscans.

    To understand Newman's unique place in the culture of the twentieth century, we must know both his paintings and his words—a knowledge made possible by this long-awaited volume."Barnett Newman [1905-1970] was a thinker who chose to develop his ideas both in painting and in writing. He was also a citizen who made his acts of painting and writing political. And he was an artist."—Richard Schiff, from the Introduction

    Among the artists are Andrea Mantegna, Filippino Lippi, Raphael, Dürer, Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Pontormo, Lucas van Leyden, Holbein, Rubens, Hals, Bernini, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Watteau, and Ingres. In these striking, brilliantly realized portraits, art students will find a concise survey of the finest examples of portrait drawing — works of art whose deeply impressive effects were attained through great individuality of focus, style, and technical achievement. Art enthusiasts will savor the choice, far-ranging content of this exemplary collection, which combines in one inexpensive volume master drawings by so many great artists.

    

    Sun Yat-Sen classical Chinese garden / Joe Wai --The art of Penjing / Judy Oberlander --Dr. Sun Yat-Sen: profile of a leader / Judy Oberlander.

    More than 400 sculptures, paintings and objects illustrate this survey on the arts of Mexico.

    Richard and Gloria Manney's superb collection of over 300 miniatures represents almost every noted American miniaturist who painted between 1750-1850.

    Full-color illustrations.