Best of
Visual-Art

2002

Kingdom Hearts Official Strategy Guide


Dan Birlew - 2002
    Hidden U.S. bosses, including Sephiroth, are revealed! Complete mini-game coverage of 99 Dalmatians, Jungle Slider, Mushrooms, and many more. The Gummi Garage shows gamers the ins-and-outs of building their own gummi ships. Exhaustive inventory and item lists. Plus-a bestiary, trinity locations, and magic spells. This Signature Series guide features a special cover treatement, bonus content, and a Sticker Activity Journal, to help players track their progress in the 99 Dalmatians mini-game. Gamers won't miss a single Trinity Mark with this cool poster!

The Quilts of Gee's Bend: Masterpieces from a Lost Place


William Arnett - 2002
    Beautifully illustrated with 110 color illustrations, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend includes a historical overview of the two hundred years of extraordinary quilt-making in this African-American community, its people, and their art-making tradition. This book is being·released in conjunction with a national exhibition tour including The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle


Matthew Barney - 2002
    Three essays by Barney experts articulate the series' diverse themes and explore the artist's innovative aesthetic vocabulary; interviews with key collaborators, a composer, costume designer, make-up artist, technicians and actors reveal his working process. A trailblazing essay by Curator of Contemporary Art Nancy Spector charts Barney's work from the 1990s to the present and provides critical insights into the aesthetic vocabulary of his five Cremaster films, while Neville Wakefield's "Cremaster Glossary" illuminates the films' most far-flung references with citations from sources as diverse as Freud's psychoanalytic studies, Mormon law and lore, and hardcore music fanzines. In addition to stills from the five films--including the final episode, Cremaster 3--the book features related sculptures, photographs, drawings and storyboards. For anyone intrigued by the Wagner of contemporary art, this is an atlas to his enticingly hypnotic worlds. Barney himself collaborated on all aspects of this extraordinary publication, including the selection of over 700 images, most of them never before published.

Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting


Gerhard Richter - 2002
    Unlike many of his peers, he has explored these issues through the medium of painting, challenging it to meet the demands posed by new forms of conceptual art. In every level of his varied output--from his austere photo-based realism of the early 60s, to his brightly colored gestural abstractions of the early 80s, to his notorious cycle of black-and-white paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group--Richter has assumed a critical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be. The result has been one of the most convincing renewals of painting's vitality to be found in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art. With an extensive and insightful critical essay by curator Robert Storr, a recent interview with the artist, a chronology, an exhibition history and nearly 300 color and duotone reproductions, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting marks a significant contribution to the understanding of contemporary art in general, and Gerhard Richter in particular.

Lucian Freud


Lucian Freud - 2002
    1922) has built up a reputation as one of the most distinctive contemporary figurative artists. Freud's startling and disconcerting portraits and nudes have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget. This stunning book -- which accompanies a major retrospective showing at Tate Britain in London, Fundacio"la Caixa" in Barcelona, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles -- brings together key works from Freud's entire career, including over 140 paintings, drawings, and etchings, some new, and many never before exhibited.Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs from the artist's personal archives, this volume contains a detailed analysis of Freud's work by curator William Feaver along with a contribution from the artist's friend, painter Frank Auerbach. Unprecedented in scope and providing an exciting opportunity to view the exceptionally productive period of the last 20 years in the context of earlier decades, this book celebrates the lifetime achievements of a powerful artist, one of the greatest realist painters of our time.

Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal


John M. MacGregor - 2002
    His name was Henry Darger. He had lived in this room for forty years. It was filthy, crammed with his possessions, mostly things found in the garbage. Henry never threw anything out. The room was filled, almost solid, with junk. He was now eighty years old and far too feeble to carry anything down the stairs. So he left everything behind. He had no need of his possessions. Anyway, he was going to an old folks home to die. When he left the room his life was over. His landlord asked him what he wanted done with his possessions. Henry is said to have replied, "You can have them, Mr. Leonard." At that moment the gift had no meaning. There was nothing in the room but garbage. Everything would have to be thrown out... When Darger's landlord, Nathan Lerner, assisted by a young student, David Berglund, began to clean out Henry's room they found some surprises: an eight volume autobiography, consisting of 5084 handwritten pages, entitled, The History of My Life which Henry had begun writing in 1963 after retiring. The short auto-biographical introduction to what is otherwise an enormous and utterly fantastic piece of imaginative fiction, provided some of the crucial pieces of evidence underlying the biographical reconstruction of Darger's life that form the first chapter of this book. Then, when the old trunks were opened, they made a far more spectacular discovery: a history of another world called, In The Realms of the Unreal in fifteen volumes, 15 145 type written pages, unquestionably the longest work of fiction ever written. In time the room also yielded the three huge bound volumes of illustrations for that work, several hundred pictures, many over twelve feet long and painted on both sides. By accident, the landlord had stumbled upon a concealed and secret life work, which no one had ever seen: Darger's alternate world.

August Sander: People of the 20th Century (7 Volume Set)


Susanne Lange - 2002
    But those images make up only a portion of this deluxe seven-volume set, which will stand as the definitive collection of Sander's considerable achievement.The books include some 150 never-before-seen images and essays by leading experts on the German photographer's work. Praising Sander's "vision...his knowledge, and his immense photographic talent, " the writer Alfred Doblin said: "Those who know how to look will learn from his clear and powerful photographs, and will discover more about themselves and more about others."

Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time


Kara Walker - 2002
    In her choice of black cut-paper silhouettes, Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. The silhouette was a parlor art practiced by genteel ladies and gentlemen, who created portraits, landscapes, and decorative motifs. There were also traveling silhouettists who took their craft around the country. The 18th- and 19th-century silhouette was also associated with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which held that one could analyze psychological and racial types by studying profiles. Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker has turned it into a powerful force to evoke the complexities of the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed. "Pictures From Another Time" is the first major publication on the work of this extraordinary artist. It includes nearly 70 examples of her work, including her silhouettes, prints, drawings, projected installations, and watercolors. Texts include an interview with the artist by curator Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of Programs at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and essays by literary critic Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of English at the City University of New York and Annette Dixon, Curator of Western Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the 1890s; Complete Paintings: Volume II


Richard Ormond - 2002
    It comprises over one-hundred and fifty formal portraits and portrait sketches in oil and watercolor that he painted between 1889 and 1900. The catalogued works have been grouped into chronological sections, each with its own introduction to set the particular group in context. In addition, an overall introduction places Sargent in the context of European portraiture of the past and of his own time. Each work is documented in depth: entries include traditional data about the painting or watercolor; details of the work’s provenance, exhibition history and bibliography; a short biography of the sitter; a discussion of the circumstances in which the work was created; and a critical discussion of its subject matter, style, and significance in Sargent’s career. With very few exceptions, all the works are reproduced in color. There is also an illustrated inventory of Sargent’s studio props and accessories and a cross-referenced checklist of the portraits in which they appear.

Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin


Rowan Williams - 2002
    Specifically, it explores three of the most common yet theologically rich images of the Holy Virgin She Who Points the Way or Hodegetria, The Virgin of Loving Kindness or Eleousa, and The Virgin of the Sign or Oranta all of which serve as a wonderful springboard for theological and personal reflection.

A Life Drawing


Shirley Hughes - 2002
    A personal text in the form of a story details her remarkable life as an illustrator.

Masterpieces in the Van Gogh Museum


Denise Willemstein - 2002
    Famous paintings like The potato eaters, The yellow house, The bedroom and Sunflowers are featured. Experts from the Van Gogh Museum tell the story behind the paintings in short accompanying texts. The works by Van Gogh are complemented by masterpieces painted by his contemporaries like Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. A number of recent acquisitions are also included in the selection. Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum) 2009. Available in nine languages.

The Black Female Body: A Photographic History


Deborah Willis - 2002
    In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and U.S. archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies.In the nineteenth century, black women were rarely subjects for artistic studies but posed before the camera again and again as objects for social scientific investigation and as exotic representatives of faraway lands. South Africans, Nubians, enslaved Abyssinians and Americans, often partially or completely naked and devoid of identity, were displayed for the armchair anthropologist or prurient viewer. Willis and Williams relate these social science photographs and the blatantly pornographic images of this era with those of black women as domestics and as nursemaids for white children in family portraits. As seen through the camera lens, Jezebel and Mammy took the form of real women made available to serve white society.Bringing together some 185 images that span three centuries, the authors offer counterpoints to these exploitive images, as well as testaments to a vibrant culture. Here are nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed and beautifully coifed creoles of color and artistic studies of dignified black women. Here are Harlem Renaissance photographs of entertainer Josephine Baker and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Documenting the long struggle for black civil rights, the authors draw on politicallypointed images by noted photographers like Dorothea Lange, Louis Hine, and Gordon Parks. They also feature the work of contemporary artists such as Ming Smith Murray, Renee Cox, Coreen Simpson, Chester Higgins, Joy Gregory, and Catherine Opie, who photograph black women asserting their subjectivity, reclaiming their bodies, and refusing the representations of the past.A remarkable history of the black woman's image, The Black Female Body makes an exceptional gift book and keepsake.

Landscapes


Stephan Koja - 2002
    While Klimt is largely revered for his opulent, symbol-laden portraits of the Viennese bourgeoisie, these works were just one aspect of his artistic expression. His landscapes represent an important facet of his career and are a valuable contribution to the school of European nature painting. For many years the artist travelled to the Austrian and Italian countryside during the summer, where he took advantage of the extraordinary light and spectacular hues to paint and sketch landscapes. Among the most exquisite of Klimt's landscapes are those in which he experimented with composition and style. Accompanied by scholarly essays, the images reproduced in this book comprise all extant landscapes from this brilliant artist, proving that his mastery extends beyond portraiture and revealing themes that appeared throughout his life's work.

A Palpable Elysium


Jonathan Chamberlain Williams - 2002
    With photos and text, Jonathan Williams (poet, publisher, and raconteur) pays tribute to heroes of the spirit from Paul Strand and Buckminster Fuller to Wendell Berry and James Laughlin.

Immemory


Chris Marker - 2002
    His landmark 1962 film La Jet�e is made up almost entirely of stills, its one moving image as thrilling as the Lumi�res' films must have been for their original audiences. Marker's films (including the features Sans Soleiland Level Five) continued to stretch the definition of the art, merging at times with the essay, political manifesto, personal letter, art installation, even the computer game. In Immemory, Marker used the format of the CD-ROM to create a multi-layered, multimedia memoir. The reader investigates "zones" of travel, war, cinema and poetry, navigating through photographs, film clips, music and text, as if physically exploring Marker's memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our digital era. With it, Marker has both invented a literary form and perfected it.System requirements: for Macintosh computers running System 7.5 through Mac OS 9 (including the "classic environment" of Mac OS X).

Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life


Richard Calvocoressi - 2002
    During her extraordinary life, she came into contact with a wide range of people including many of the most celebrated and influential artists, writers, actors, fashion designers and socialites of the last century. The photographs include not only Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Igor Stravinsky, Henry Moore, Colette, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire and a host of others, but also pictures of unsung individuals engaged in war work. Most memorable of all are Miller's pictures of victims and perpetrators of Nazi oppression - some of the most powerful images from the last century. These brilliant portraits are shown together for the first time. Throughout the book, Richard Calvocoressi demonstrates the originality and artistry of the photographer's work, while exploring the relationship between the photographs and Lee Miller's fascinating life.