Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros


Desmond Rochfort - 1998
    Now legendary, these men have emerged as the most prominent figures of the famed Mexican mural movement, which lasted from the '20s through the early '70s and was hailed as the most significant achievement in public art of the 20th century. The dramatic story of the movement is told here in a fascinating history of the artists, accompanied by over 100 spectacular color reproductions of the murals. Showcasing popular as well as lesser-known works from around the US and Mexico, this is the first high-quality paperback to do justice to a subject that will captivate every lover of Mexican art and culture, Rivera fan, and art historian, as well as anyone who appreciates a beautiful, intelligent art book.

Graphic Design: A New History


Stephen J. Eskilson - 2007
    Organized chronologically, the book illuminates the dynamic relationship between design and manufacturing as well as the roles of technology, social change, and commercial forces on the course of design history. The layout of each chapter reflects the unique style of the period it describes, and some 450 illustrations throughout the volume provide a visual record of more than one hundred years of creative achievement in the field.Under the influence of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th century, a new era began for design arts. Fueled by popular Art Nouveau advertising, the work of graphic designers became central in the growing consumer goods economy. This book traces the emergence of varied modernist design styles in the early 20th century and then examines the wartime politicization of regional styles through American government patronage and revolutionary Soviet ideas. Richly contextualized chapters chronicle the history of the Bauhaus and the rise of the International Style, followed by the postmodern movement of the 1970s and '80s. After highlighting recent developments in graphic design around the globe, the author discusses the impact of inexpensive, powerful design software and the challenges facing designers now.

The Watercolor Flower Artist's Bible: An Essential Reference for the Practicing Artist


Claire Waite Brown - 2007
    The stylish design of this book, along with the interior photographs, illustrations and diagrams, make the learning process simple and fun for beginning painters and provides useful tips for more advanced artists.This book is divided into three sections. In the first section, you will find practical advice on choosing the necessary tools and equiopment as well as hints on mixing colors€”one of the trickier skills to master until you have learned some of the basic properties of color. Next, the techniques used in watercolor painting are explained in detail, from the most basic like laying washes and reserving highlights to some of the more unusual and exciting methods like wax-resist or spattering paint. Tutorials and more than 100 step-by-step sequences demonstrate how to paint a wide range of subjects, including landscapes, buildings, people and still life. Over 180,000 copies sold worldwide.

Vivienne Westwood


Claire Wilcox - 2005
    Published to accompany the hugely popular Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the V&A, this book is the first in-depth Vivienne Westwood retrospective. It studies her work as a groundbreaking fashion designer and celebrates her visual impact and iconic profile world-wide.

Anatomy for the Artist


Sarah Simblet - 2001
    This superb drawing guide helps you unravel its complexity and capture its aesthetic on paper. Packed with instructive illustrations and specially-commissioned photographs of male and female models, Anatomy for the Artist unveils the extraordinary construction of the human body and celebrates its continuing prominence in Western Art today. Through her detailed sketches, acclaimed artist Sarah Simblet shows you how to look inside the human frame to map its muscle groups, skeletal strength, balance, poise, and grace.Selected drawings superimposed over photographs reveal fascinating relationships between external appearance and internal structure. Six drawing classes guide you through human anatomy afresh, offering techniques for observing and drawing the skeleton, including the head, ribcage, pelvis, hands, and feet. By investigating a series of masterworks juxtaposed against photographs of real-life models, Dr. Simblet also traces the visions of different artists across time, from Holbein's Christ Entombed to Edward Hopper's Hotel Room.For any artist, learning about the human body is always a palpable delight. This imaginative reference guide will enhance your anatomical drawing and painting techniques at every level.

The King's Painter: The Life of Hans Holbein


Franny Moyle - 2021
    But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the age, Holbein was a multifaceted genius: a humanist, satirist, and political propagandist, and a deft man whose work was rich in layers of symbolism and allusion. In The King’s Painter, biographer Franny Moyle traces and analyzes the life and work of an extraordinary artist against the backdrop of an era of political turbulence and cultural transformation, to which his art offers a subtle and endlessly refracting mirror. It is a work of serious scholarship written for a wide audience.

The History of Western Art


Peter Whitfield - 2011
    What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief-systems of their age; religious, political and aesthetic.

500 Self-Portraits


Julian Bell - 2000
    A new version of Phaidon classic published in 1937, this evocative and fascinating book presents 500 of the world's greatest self portraits, arranged in a simple chronological sequence from ancient time to the late 20th century.

Oil Painting Techniques and Materials


Harold Speed - 1987
    — a painter's training, more. Speed also provides expert analysis of works by Velasquez, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hals, Rembrandt, and others. 64 photos. 5 line drawings.

Graffiti School: A Student Guide and Teacher Manual


Christoph Ganter - 2013
    The effects of the 1980s films Beat Street, Wild Style, and StyleWars are examined, as is the influence graffiti experts on today's subculture through books, magazines, and the Internet.The practical elements of graffiti are considered in later chapters, which combine tips on handling a spray can, creating a unique tag, and getting work up safely and legally with step-by-step diagrams that show how to achieve effects such as bubblestyle, blockbusters, oneliners, and wildstyle. A teacher’s manual features sample plans for a single lesson as well as guidance on structuring a longer course.

Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures


Abbot Suger - 1979
    Gerda Panofsky-Soergel has updated the commentary in the light of new material, and the bibliography that she has prepared reflects the scholarship on St.-Denis in the last three decades. She has obtained some additional and more recent photographs, and the illustrations include a new ground plan and a new section of the chevet of the Abbey Church, both drawn under the supervision of Sumner McKnight Crosby.

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism


T.J. Clark - 1999
    J. Clark rewrites the history of modern art. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he explains, the project called socialism may have come to an end at roughly the same moment as modernism. Did modernism and socialism depend on each other for their vitality—for their sense of the future and their wish to live in a fully material world? Have they died? Aware of modernism’s foibles and blind spots, but passionately attached to the movement’s wildness, Clark poses these fundamental questions in Farewell to an Idea. Modernism, Clark argues, was an extreme answer to an extreme condition—the one Max Weber summed up as “the disenchantment of the world.” Clark focuses on instances of maximum stress, when the movement revealed its true nature. The book begins with Jacques-Louis David, painting at the height of the Terror in 1793, then leaps forward to Pissarro a hundred years later, struggling to picture Two Young Peasant Women ina way that agreed with his anarchist politics. Next the author turns in succession to Cézanne’s paintings of the Grandes Baigneuses and their coincidence in time (and maybe intention) with Freud’s launching of psychoanalysis; to Picasso’s Cubism; and to avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution. Clark concludes with a reading of Jackson Pollock’s tragic version of abstraction and suggests a new set of terms to describe avant-garde art—perhaps in its final flowering—in America after 1945. Shifting between broad, speculative history and intense analysis of specific works, Clark not only transfigures our usual understanding of modern art, he also launches a new set of proposals about modernity itself.

Heads, Features and Faces


George B. Bridgman - 1936
    This volume, prepared by an expert in the field, is devoted exclusively to just that. With its clear, concise text, its almost 200 excellent illustrations, and its overall life-drawing approach, the book provides valuable guidelines on how best to portray faces, features, and heads. There is probably no better instructor to turn to than George B. Bridgman. He brings to the subject both his expertise as an artist and his fifty years' experience as lecturer and teacher at the Art Students League of New York. Throughout the book, he places as much emphasis on perspective and planes as on anatomy. In this way, you'll develop a more precise understanding of each feature, the head and face in general, the relationship between features, and the relationship between a specific feature and the face or head. Mr. Bridgman's consideration of the head includes such topics as the head at eye level and below eye level; planes of the head; and round and square forms. Four features — eye, nose, mouth, ear — are dealt with in detail. Sections on light and shade, comparative measurements, and principles of cube and oval construction further enhance the scope of the book. The finely executed drawings complement the textual material, illustrating all important concepts.  Of special value is the author's inclusion of the work of famous portrait artists. Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Louise Elisabeth LeBrun — these are the people who made portraiture a master art; and you'll be able to study, up close and at your leisure, the qualities that let their work achieve the status it did.

Hieronymus Bosch


Larry Silver - 1970
    The phantasmagoric imagery of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516) has been the source of widespread interest ever since the painter's lifetime, and is still so enigmatic that scholars have theorized that it contains hidden astrological, alchemical, or even heretical meanings. Yet none of these theories has ever seemed to provide an adequate understanding of Bosch's work. Moreover, the considerable professional success that the artist enjoyed in his native Hertogenbosch, not to mention his membership in a traditional religious organization, suggests that he pursued not a sinister secret agenda but simply his personal artistic vision.This intriguing new monograph by noted art historian Larry Silver interprets that artistic vision with admirable lucidity: it explains how Bosch's understanding of human sin, morality, and punishment, which was conceived in an era of powerful apocalyptic expectation, shaped his dramatic visualizations of hell and of the temptations of even the most steadfast saints. Silver's account of Bosch's artistic development is one of the first to benefit from recent technical investigations of the paintings, as well as from the reexamination of the artistGÇÖs drawings in relation to his paintings. Hieronymus Bosch is also unique in how securely it places its subject's work in the broader history of painting in the Low Countries: Silver identifies sources of BoschGÇÖs iconography in a wide range of fifteenth-century panel paintings, manuscript illuminations, and prints, and describes how, despite their own religiousness, Bosch's pictures helped inspire the secular landscape and genre scenes of later Netherlandish painters. Augmented by 310 illustrations, most in color, including many dramatic close-ups of BoschGÇÖs intricately imagined nightmare scenes, this is the definitive book on a perennially fascinating artist.

Impressionism


Phoebe Pool - 1967
    With imagination and insight, the author brings Impressionism into focus by showing it through the eyes of the artists and their contemporaries, using letters, critical reviews and reminiscences of the people who were part of the story. As we see in Bernard Denvir's compelling survey, the Impressionists had new ways of painting, but they also had a new world to paint: a world of stream tricycles, emergent photography, and modern ideas about perception. 195 illus., 17 in color.