Chroma


Derek Jarman - 1994
    From the explosions of image and color in In The Shadow of the Sun, The Last of England, The Garden and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways, making his ideas on the subject of interest to filmmakers, film audiences, artists and students alike. Blue, his most personal and innovative film, consists of a compelling soundtrack accompanied by a monochrome blue image and is, among other things, a comment on Jarman's diminishing eyesight due to AIDS. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classical theory, anecdote, and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams. He explains the use of color in Medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists and draws on the great color theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He writes too about the meanings of color in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy. Read either as a work on color, or a distillation of Jarman's artistic vision, Chroma presents an exciting perspective on the subject.

Paul Klee: Painting Music


Hajo Düchting - 1997
    A talented violinist as well as a painter, Klee drew much of the inspiration for his abstract art from musical rhythms and structure. Like a composer, he developed and harmonized pictorial themes, weaving a complex series of signs and symbols into his painting. Art historian Hajo Duchting focuses his study primarily on Klee's decade-long tenure at the Bauhaus, where the artist's theories and practice first merged, and where he was to develop his Color Spectrum, Square and Polyphone painting series. Illustrated throughout with full-color reproductions of Klee's paintings and etchings, as well as entries from his diaries, this unique study sheds light on an important aspect of Klee's work while providing insights into his development as an abstract artist.

Black Mirror: The Selected Poems


Roger Gilbert-Lecomte - 1996
    The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English. With René Daumal he was the founder of the literary movement and magazine "Le Grand Jeu", the essence of which he defined as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness". "The glimpse of eternity in the void", writes Rattray in the Introduction, "was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a metaphysics of absence". Rattray, a poet acclaimed for his translations of Artaud, keeps intact the power and originality of Gilbert-Lecomte's work.

The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium


Stephen Powers - 1999
    From Sprite commercials to The Source magazine to Soho art galleries, the elements and vernacular of the graffiti aesthetic are apparent in today's society. This book examines graffiti's influence from its earliest days to its undeniable ubiquity now. Written by an insider, it includes a general history, in-depth interviews with both the progenitors of the form and current artists, and full-color illustrations of the most important works over the last 30 years. Unlike other subcultures that have been corrupted by the media and the mainstream, graffiti has maintained its sense of the underground and its clandestine feel. The purity and integrity that have defined the graffiti writer's mission have never faltered. The Art of Getting Over offers an unprecedented glimpse into this deeply affecting urban art form.

The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí


Ian Gibson - 1997
    He provides a full narrative of Dalí's life as artist and as uninhibited exhibitionist, from his wild and troubled youth through his often rollickingly funny adventures in Paris, New York, and Hollywood to his poignant last years. Here is Dalí fully revealed through his voluminous correspondence; his novel, poems, and essays; and interviews with some of those closest to him. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí reexamines the roles of the two most important individuals in the artist's life: the Spanish playwright and author Federico García Lorca and the enigmatic, libidinous Gala, the Russian émigré whose marriage Dalí broke up and with whom he subsequently lived in unconsummated bliss and terror. This is a truly incandescent life of the surrealist artist who caught the imagination of the twentieth century.