Movements in Art since 1945: Issues and Concepts


Edward Lucie-Smith - 1969
    This revised text covers movements in art since 1945.

The Lives of the Artists


Giorgio Vasari
    Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Short Story of Art: A Pocket Guide to Key Movements, Works, Themes, Techniques (Art History Introduction, A Guide to Art)


Susie Hodge - 2017
    Simply constructed, the book explores 50 key works, from the wall paintings of Lascaux to Damien Hirst installations, and then links these to sections on art movements, themes and techniques.The design of the book allows the student or art enthusiast to easily navigate their way around key periods, artists and styles. Accessible and concise, it simplifies and explains the most important and influential concepts in art, and shows how they are connected. The book explains how, why and when art changed, who introduced certain things, what they were, where they were produced, and whether they matter. It demystifies artistic jargon, giving readers a thorough understanding and broad enjoyment of art.'Susie Hodge has culled through hundreds of art movements to highlight and present 36 that illustrate transitions of art, its ideas, representations, characteristics, and production from Prehistoric times up to the dynamic shifts of the 1960s and '70s. As complex as art history is, this book is a welcome, succinct introduction to some classic Western masters.' Cindy Helm, New York Journal of Books'Excellent introduction to the subject. A good quality book, tightly bound, and well illustrated.'– Colin, Amazon reviewer 'The Short Story of Art is an attractive volume that serves as a convenient introduction to major movements, works, themes, and techniques of Western art. The works within are featured more for their seminal or illustrative nature than their fame per se, so the "story" part of the title is apt. The cross referencing and "Other works by…" sections makes it clear that this book is encouraging the reader to explore art on his own.' –Tommy Grooms, Goodreads reviewer

The Body in Contemporary Art


Sally O'Reilly - 2009
    From painting and sculpture to installation, video art, and performance, it examines the roles played by the body in art, from being the subject of portraiture to becoming an active presence in participatory events.Organized thematically, the book focuses on subjects such as nature and technology, the grotesque, identity politics, and the place of the individual in society. Featuring work by artists such as Matthew Barney, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Oleg Kulik, and Ernesto Neto, it shows how the body continues to be pivotal to the understanding and expression of our place in the universe.

Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision


Ian Roberts - 2004
    These crippling fears are laid to rest through insightful discussions of personal experiences, the struggles of famous artists, and the rewards of producing art that comes from an authentic creative core. Providing sensitive reassurances that these struggles are normal, these essays encourage artists to focus on the development of their crafts and find inspiration to work through self-doubt.

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present


Eric R. Kandel - 2012
    Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art.   At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.   The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women’s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.   Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.

100 Days in Photographs: Pivotal Events That Changed the World


Nick Yapp - 2007
    These moments are crystallised in images that leap from the page revealing joy, anger, despairsand triumph. An insightful text by photography historian Nick Yapp supports these images, which are accompanied by journals, excerpts and 'on-site' notes that offer the backstory of the image and how it was captured.Major events that have shaped our erascaptured in the book include, from the Getty historic archive, the 1848-9 revolution and riots in Europe; President Lincoln's assassination in 1865; the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889; the Potemkin Mutiny (1905) that launched the Russians Revolution; the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916; the Wall Street crash of 1929; Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938; the Bristish leaving India in 1947; through to the dawn of the new millennium in 2000.The National Geographic archives are used to illustratescultural geography, the changes in landscape, contemporary conflicts, Native America, and the civil rights movement among others, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Scott and Amundsen reaching the South Pole in 1911; the Lascaux cave paintings discovered in 1940; the first heart transplant in 1967; the Chernobyl disaster of 1986; the cloning of sheep in 1997; the Twin Towers attack of 2001; and the global warming debate of 2007. The wonder of this book is in illustrating how an entire event or age can be captured in a single image - whether it be of a peasant's tears, two heads of state sharing a secret, or the triumph of an Olympic champion. Politics, war, crime, exploration, fashion and fads all make up these one hundred days: From the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the finished structure of the Three Gorges Dam in 2006.

Concepts of Modern Art


Nikos Stangos - 1974
    With Edward Lucie-Smith on Pop Art, Suzi Gablik on Minimal Art, Norbert Lynton on Expressionism, and Sarah Whitfield on Fauvism, to name a few, these scholarly essays illuminate each particular artistic movement of the century, and together form an entire history of modern art. 123 illus.

Francis Bacon: 1909-1992


Luigi Ficacci - 1999
    Mixing realism and abstraction, Bacon delves deep beneath the surfaces of things, opening up the human body to reveal the chaos that lies within and struggling with all that is inexplicable. Erotic and grotesquely beautiful is the work of this legendary painter whose haunting, distorted figures have inspired entire generations of painters who seek to emulate his highly original style.

Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics


Herschel B. Chipp - 1968
    Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book By Artists and Critics is a collection of texts from letters, manifestos, notes and interviews. Sources include, as the title says, artists and critics—some expected, like van Gogh, Gauguin, Apollinaire, Mondrian, Greenberg, just to name a few—and some less so: Trotsky and Hitler, in the section on Art and Politics. The book is a wonderful resource and insight into the way artists think and work.

Obey: Supply and Demand


Shepard Fairey - 2006
    Through the lens of esteemed writers and critics such as Carlo McCormick, Steven Heller and Roger Gastman, Fairey's work is seen for all its depth and placed in context as art, design, social experiment and "getting over". This massive book pulls no punches and all areas of the enigmatic artist's work, travels and travails are illuminated; from exhibitions, posters, flyers, silkscreens and stickers to high altitude pursuits, citations and police beatings, it's all documented in a museum quality layout and binding. The evidence is in, and it's clear that Shepard Fairey is not one to rest on his laurels, the work must go on. For both long time fans wanting the complete collection and those just curious to know what this OBEY business is all about Supply and Demand is the answer.

Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist


Reinhard Steiner - 1994
    After a short flirtation with Klimt's style, Schiele soon questioned the aesthetic orientation to the beautiful surface of the Viennese Art Nouveau with his rough and not easily accessible paintings. Many contemporaries found his expressive nudes and self-portraits, with their strange movements and morbid colours, to be ugly and even morally objectionable - criticism which culminated in criminalizing the painter as "obscene" and resulted in 1912 in an indictment and short jail sentence. However, not even his harshest critics could dispute however the artist's extraordinary drawing talent.

Surrealism


Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy - 2004
    Introduction with 30 photographs plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural, scientific and sporting events that took place during the movement; 35 most important works and artists included.

Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye


Rudolf Arnheim - 1954
    Gestalt theory and the psychology of visual perception form the basis for an analysis of art and its basic elements.

Just Looking: Essays on Art


John Updike - 2001
    Originally published in 1989 and until now unavailable in any edition, Just Looking had become one of Updike's rarest and most sought-after titles. It collects the best of the novelist and critic's multifarious musings on art and artists, museums and popular culture, the lives behind the works and the ways in which these works have informed his own life. Included here are pieces on Vermeer, Erastus Field, Modigliani, the major Impressionists, New Yorker cartoonist Ralph Barton, children's book illustrations, Fairfield Porter, and Jean Ipousteguy, among others, as well as extensive reflections on John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth, a critical examination of writers' art, and a long essay on his impressions of the Museum of Modern Art. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this edition of Just Looking -- the first ever in paperback -- brings back into print a key work of art criticism by one of the most respected and accomplished writers of our time and is the first in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's new reprint series.