Best of
Visual-Art

2004

Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids


Andrei Tarkovsky - 2004
    The melancholy of seeing things for the last time is the highly mysterious and poetic essence that these images leave with us. It is as though Andrei wanted to transmit his own enjoyment quickly to others. And they feel like a fond farewell."Tonino Guerra, from the IntroductionThis beautifully produced book comprises sixty Polaroid photographs of Andrei Tarkovsky's friends and family, taken between 1979 and 1984 in his native Russia and in Italy, where he spent time in political exile.The size of the Polaroids is exactly as presented in the book, including the frame. The book may therefore be viewed as a facsimile edition. 60 color illustrations.

Passage


Andy Goldsworthy - 2004
    A cairn made by the renowned sculptor in the Scottish village where he lives reveals the influence that his work close to home has on projects he creates elsewhere. A series involving elm trees, from glowing yellow leaves to dead branches, exemplifies his work's vigorous beauty as well as its association with death and decay. Creations on the beach and in rivers explore the passage of time, while a white chalk path investigates the passing from day into night. "Passage also includes the Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where the artist planted 18 oak trees through holes in hollowed-out, earth-filled boulders. Documenting these and other recent works, this beautiful book is an eloquent testament to Goldsworthy's determination to deepen his understanding of the world around him, and his relationship with it, through his art.

Hockney Pictures


Gregory Evans - 2004
    Including more than 300 illustrations, accompanied by quotes from the artist that illuminate the passionate thinking behind the work, Hockney’s Pictures shows the evolution and diversity of Hockney’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints, and photography, confirming and reinforcing his position as one of the world’s most popular living artists.

The Usborne Complete Book of Art Ideas


Fiona Watt - 2004
    It shows exciting ways of using different art materials. Simply follow the step-by-step instructions exactly or use the ideas to create pictures of your own.

Ana Mendieta: Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985


Olga Viso - 2004
    The Cuban-born American sculptor is celebrated for her earth-body works of the 1970s, sculptural interventions in the landscape that placed her body--or its haunting silhouette--in symbiotic relationship with nature. Using extracts from her films, original slide documentation, photography, and other archival material, this catalogue illustrates early performances from Mendieta's student days, as well as her more well-known "Silueta Series" made in Iowa and Mexico from 1973 to 1980. Earth-body works executed in Canada, Cuba and the United States in the early 1980s, and select sculptures, drawings and installations dating to the mid-80s will also be illustrated. This publication promises to be the definitive study of the artist's work.

Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings


Lawrence Weschler - 2004
    Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his career and the full range of his concerns–which is to say, practically everything.Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the twentieth century’s Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In his profile of Roman Polanski, Weschler traces the filmmaker’s symbolic negotiations with his nightmarish childhood during the Holocaust. Here, too, are meditations on artists Ed Kienholz and David Hockney, on the author’s grandfather and daughter, and on the light and earthquakes of his native Los Angeles. Haunting, elegant, and intoxicating, Vermeer in Bosnia awakens awe and wonder at the world around us.

Henry Darger: Disasters of War


Kiyoko Lerner - 2004
    The heroines are the seven Vivian sisters, Abbiennian princesses, who, after many battles, fires, tempests, and lurid torture, succeed in forcing the Glandelinians to give up their barbarous ways. "The Disasters of War" offers an affordable introduction to Darger's astonishing outsider oeuvre. It explains the technique, diligence and creativity of the works, illustrates details, and features a conversation between the Darger estate holder and the Kunstwerke's curator. A selection of 12 previously unpublished excerpts from "The Realms of the Unreal" and from Darger's diary explore the artist's favorite topics: thunderstorms and atrocities. With a biography and exhibition history.

Egon Schiele: Landscapes


Rudolf Leopold - 2004
    While Schiele is largely revered for his provocative paintings of women, these works were just one aspect of his artistic expression. Schiele's landscapes represent an important facet of his career and are a valuable contribution to the school of European nature painting.

The Unhinged World of Glen Baxter


Glen Baxter - 2004
    Celebrates the humorous and offbeat artwork of visual satirist Glen Baxter.

Rodin


Raphael Masson - 2004
    Revered today as the greatest sculptor of all time, whose expressive style prefigured that of the modernist movement and abstract sculpture, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) stirred up much controversy during his lifetime, and his sculptures often met with hostility and incomprehension from his peers. This monograph traces the life and work of the artist, from his youth and early poverty-stricken years of apprenticeship to his most celebrated works—The Kiss, The Thinker, The Gates of Hell—which have become veritable icons; and from his passionate and tumultuous relationship with Camille Claudel to his extraordinary studio, working methods, and sources of inspiration, and his final years marked by war and illness. Written by experts from the Musée Rodin in Paris, this richly illustrated volume includes drawings, watercolors, engravings, and archival documents, as well as specially commissioned photographs of Rodin’s sculptures, completed by a chronology, bibliography, and history of the Musée Rodin—housed in the artist’s former studio in the Hôtel Biron. Providing insight into the many facets of his creative genius, this new compact edition of the Musée Rodin’s definitive reference on the artist and his oeuvre coincides with museum’s reopening in September 2015.

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico


Ilona Katzew - 2004
    Created as sets of consecutive images, the works portray racial mixing among the main groups that inhabited the colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ilona Katzew places casta paintings in their social and historical context, showing for the first time the ways in which the meanings of the paintings changed along with shifting colonial politics. The book examines how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. Drawing on a range of previously unpublished archival and visual material, Katzew sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the construction of identity and self-image in the colonial world.

Tales of Symphonia Official Strategy Guide


Dan Birlew - 2004
    Strategies to customize and equip each character. Expert boss tactics and an all-inclusive bestiary. Complete coverage of all mini-games and side quests. Area maps, weapon and item rosters, and much more!This product is available for sale in the U.S. and Canada only.

Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker


Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw - 2004
    These visually arresting narratives draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamics of race, sexuality, and violence in both the antebellum South and contemporary culture. Walker’s work has been featured in exhibits around the world and in American museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. At the same time, her ideologically provocative images have drawn vociferous criticism from several senior African American artists, and a number of her pieces have been pulled from exhibits amid protests against their disturbing representations. Seeing the Unspeakable provides a sustained consideration of the controversial art of Kara Walker.Examining Walker’s striking silhouettes, evocative gouache drawings, and dynamic prints, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw analyzes the inspiration for and reception of four of Walker’s pieces: The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, John Brown, A Means to an End, and Cut. She offers an overview of Walker’s life and career, and contextualizes her art within the history of African American visual culture and in relation to the work of contemporary artists including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Michael Ray Charles. Shaw describes how Walker deliberately challenges viewers’ sensibilities with radically de-sentimentalized images of slavery and racial stereotypes. This book reveals a powerful artist who is questioning, rather than accepting, the ideas and strategies of social responsibility that her parents’ generation fought to establish during the civil rights era. By exploiting the racist icons of the past, Walker forces viewers to see the unspeakable aspects of America’s racist past and conflicted present.

Dan Flavin: A Retrospective


Michael Govan - 2004
    The simplicity and systematic character of his extraordinary work, along with his relentless exploration and ingenious discovery of an art of light, established him as a progenitor and chief exponent of Minimalism. Uniquely situated outside the mediums of painting and sculpture, the majority of Flavin’s work after 1963 consists of art made from light.This landmark book—the first retrospective publication of Flavin’s art since 1969—includes around 45 of the artist’s most important light works, beginning with a pivotal series of constructed boxes with attached incandescent or fluorescent lights, called “icons,” made from 1961 to 1963. Works spanning Flavin’s career are discussed in depth, including examples that integrate light with the surrounding space and show the particular characteristics of blended fluorescent light, large-scale installations, and constructed corridors. The book also includes reproductions of Flavin’s drawings, which show his thought processes and working methods.New scholarship and interpretation of Flavin’s work appears in the form of three critical essays by experts, an extensive chronology, comprehensive bibliography, and exhibition history. In addition, Flavin’s seminal text “‘. . . in daylight or cool white.’ an autobiographical sketch,” originally published in Artforum in 1965, is included.Exquisitely designed and produced, with many new stunning color reproductions, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective captures the brilliance of this artist’s contribution to and challenges of the art world and will be the authoritative volume on Flavin for years to come.

Charles Burchfield's Seasons


Guy Davenport - 2004
    Adhering to the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of revealing nature's primordial energy through the drama of human emotions, Burchfield made the commonplace extraordinary, the everyday miraculous. "Charles Gurchfield's Seasons offers a wealth of visionary art rendered in the artist's personal abstract stylistic shorthand that vividly expresses the moods and sounds of light and wind. Accomplained by quotations from Charles burchfield's "Journals, the color plates in this book resonate with the artist's vibrancy.

Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties


James Meyer - 2004
    Artists known as minimalists have distinctively different methods and points of view. This highly readable history of minimalist art shows how artists as diverse as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Anne Truitt came to be designated as minimalists during a series of exhibitions in the 1960s.“I can think of no book that even undertakes a comparable art historical account—not merely tracing a movement year by year, but showing how the movement’s consciousness of itself emerged.”—Arthur Danto, Times Literary Supplement“Many skeptics deem the sixties too close for comfort and hence not suitable for an art history in the grand tradition. James Meyer proves them wrong. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties establishes a historical precision and seriousness that many have thought lacking in the recent wave of writing about postwar American art.”—Christine Mehring, Art Journal“By far the best account to date of Minimalism’s development and the essential point of departure for all future research on the subject.”—Pepe Karmel, Art in America

Buffalo River Handbook


Kenneth L. Smith - 2004
    All in a compact size, with more than 170 photos, maps, and diagrams. Coordinated with National Geographic Maps, Trails Illustrated. Ken Smith is the author-photographer of The Buffalo River Country, the Ozark Society Foundation classic now in its ninth printing.

Raphael: From Urbino to Rome


Hugo Chapman - 2004
    . . . Strikes a judicious balance between technical expertise—history, attribution, scholarship—and a wider public’s interest in how pictures are made, how highly organized workshops such as Raphael’s were set up, what people have seen in Raphael in earlier eras, what they themselves should be seeking out, and seeing, in the works on display.”—Ingrid D. Rowland, New York Review of Books

Rick Trembles' Motion Picture Purgatory


Rick Trembles - 2004
    Includes- "Naked Lunch- "Touch of Evil- "Grease- "Psycho- "Last Year at Marienbad