Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974


Werner Herzog - 1978
    During this monumental odyssey through a seemingly endless blizzard, Herzog documented everything he saw and felt with intense sincerity. This diary is dotted with rants about the extreme cold and utter loneliness, poetic descriptions of the snowy countryside, along with personal philosophizing. What is most remarkable is that the reading of this book flows with the experience of watching his films: through this walk we witness how his images are born. Although he received a literary award for it, this introspective masterpiece has lingered out of print since 1979. Beautifully designed and emotionally impressive, Of Walking in Ice is the first in a color-coded series of remarkable yet long-forgotten titles being republished by Free Association.

Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry


Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - 1766
    Originally published in 1766, the Laocoön has been called the first extended attempt in modern times to define the distinctive spheres of art and poetry.

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness


Chris Kraus - 2004
    Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe


Laurie Lisle - 1980
    Her vivid visual vocabulary--sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth--had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art. O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvases. Here is the first full account of her exceptional life-- from her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher, to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde, Alfred Stieglitz, to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death. And here is the story of a great romance between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, Georgia O'Keeffe is a twentieth-century legend who career spanned the history modern art in America.

Looking at Pictures


Robert Walser - 1981
    His essays consider Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau, Fragonard, Brueghel and his own brother Karl and also discuss general topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante as well as the differences between painters and poets. Every piece is marked by Walser’s unique eye, his delicate sensitivity, and his very particular sensibilities—and all are touched by his magic screwball wit.

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album


Matthew Robertson - 2006
    music explosion of the late '70s through the '90s with groups like Joy Division (soon to be the subject of an Anton Corbijn movie), New Order, and Happy Mondays leading the New Wave. At Factory, musicians and designers commingled creatively, with innovators such as Peter Saville, Den Kelly, Mark Farrow, 8VO, and Barbara Kruger elevating album covers to a new art form. The label broke further ground when it opened its own disco, the legendary Hacienda. Factory Records is the ultimate and only collection of Factory's complete graphic output, including every single piece it produced: extremely rare record sleeves, club flyers, and posters all gathered together for the first time. A must for collectors and enthusiasts, Matthew Robertson's meticulous compilation of underground ephemera is poised to introduce a new generation of music and design fans to the creative genius of Factory.

Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style


Wilhelm Worringer - 1907
    Its profound impact not only on art historians and theorists but also for generations of creative writers and intellectuals is almost unprecedented. Starting from the notion that beauty derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object, Worringer argues that representational art produces satisfaction from our objectified delight in the self, reflecting a confidence in the world as it is as in Renaissance art. By contrast, the urge to abstraction, as exemplified by Egyptian, Byzantine, primitive, or modern expressionist art, articulates a totally different response to the world: it expresses man s insecurity. Thus in historical periods of anxiety and uncertainty, man seeks to abstract objects from their unpredictable state and transform them into absolute, transcendental forms. Abstraction and Empathy also has a sociological dimension, in that the urge to create fixed, abstract, and geometric forms is a response to the modern experience of industrialization and the sense that individual identity is threatened by a hostile mass society. Hilton Kramer s introduction considers the influence of Worringer s thesis and places his book in historical context."

The Principles of Uncertainty


Maira Kalman - 2007
    Part personal narrative, part documentary, part travelogue, part chapbook, and all Kalman, these brilliant, whimsical paintings, ideas, and images - which initially appear random - ultimately form an intricately interconnected worldview, an idiosyncratic inner monologue.

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses


Juhani Pallasmaa - 1996
    This new, revised and extended edition of this seminal work will not only inspire architects and students to design more holistic architecture, but will enrich the general reader's perception of the world around them. The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory and consists of two extended essays. The first surveys the historical development of the ocular-centric paradigm in western culture since the Greeks, and its impact on the experience of the world and the nature of architecture. The second examines the role of the other senses in authentic architectural experiences, and points the way towards a multi-sensory architecture which facilitates a sense of belonging and integration.

Maxims for Revolutionists


George Bernard Shaw - 1902
    As it is, the political problem remains unsolved. Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries. Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.

Night Studio: A Memoir Of Philip Guston


Musa Mayer - 1988
    His style ranged from the social realism of his WPA murals through his abstract expressionist canvasses of the 1950s and 1960s (when he counted Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline among his friends) to his cartoonlike paintings of Klansmen, disembodied heads, and tangled piles of everyday objects. Critics and public alike savaged Guston for his return to figurative art, but today his late work is recognized for the singular power of its darkly hilarious vision. Musa Mayer augments her firsthand knowledge with extensive interviews with his family, friends, students, and colleagues, as well as Guston's own letters, notes, and autobiographical writings, to re-create a turbulent era in American art. Night Studio, profusely illustrated (including almost a dozen paintings in full color), illuminates not only the life of a great artist, but the experience of growing up in his shadow.

Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction


Noël Carroll - 1999
    as well as historical approaches to the nature of art.Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art.Unique features of the textbook are: * chapter summaries* summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art* annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters.Also available in this series: Epistemology Pb: 0-415-13043-3: �12.99Ethics Pb: 0-415-15625-4: �11.99Metaphysics Pb: 0-415-14034-X: �12.99Philosophy of Mind Pb: 0-415-13060-3: �11.99Philosophy of Religion Pb: 0-415-13214-2: �12.99

Beauty


Roger Scruton - 2009
    "It can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend." In a book that is itself beautifully written, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful. This compact volume is filled with insight and Scruton has something interesting and original to say on almost every page. Can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? Perhaps so. The prose of Flaubert, the imagery of Baudelaire, the harmonies of Wagner, Scruton points out, have all been accused of immorality, by those who believe that they paint wickedness in alluring colors. Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more beauty in a Rembrandt than in an Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Can? Can we even say, of certain works of art, that they are too beautiful: that they ravish when they should disturb. But while we may argue about what is or is not beautiful, Scruton insists that beauty is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and that the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world. Forthright and thought-provoking, and as accessible as it is stimulating, this fascinating meditation on beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial, but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives.

Jean Michel Basquiat


Richard Marshall - 1992
    Published to accompany an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1992-93, the book contains illustrations reproducing paintings, drawings, collages, silkscreens, and constructions, many previously unpublished.

Hieronymus Bosch: Complete Works


Stefan Fischer - 2013
    1450–1516) was more than an anomaly. Bosch’s paintings are populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire, fantasy, and angst. One of his greatest inventions was to take the figural and scenic representations known as drolleries, which use the monstrous and the grotesque to illustrate sin and evil, and to transfer them from the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts into large-format panel paintings. Alongside traditional hybrids of man and beast, such as centaurs, and mythological creatures such as unicorns, devils, dragons, and griffins, we also encounter countless mixed creatures freely invented by the artist. Many subsidiary scenes illustrate proverbs and figures of speech in common use in Bosch’s day. In his Temptation of St Anthony triptych, for example, the artist shows a messenger devil wearing ice skates, evoking the popular expression that the world was “skating on ice”—meaning it had gone astray. In his pictorial translation of proverbs, in particular, Bosch was very much an innovator. Bosch—whose real name was Jheronimus van Aken—was widely copied and imitated: the number of surviving works by Bosch’s followers exceeds the master’s own production by more than tenfold. Today only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Bosch’s oeuvre. He continues to be seen as a visionary, a portrayer of dreams and nightmares, and the painter par excellence of hell and its demons. Featuring brand new photography of recently restored paintings, this exhaustive book, published in view of the upcoming 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death, covers the artist’s complete works. Discover Bosch’s pictorial inventions in splendid reproductions with copious details and a huge fold-out spread, over 110 cm (43 in.) long, of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Art historian and acknowledged Bosch expert Stefan Fischer examines just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential.