Book picks similar to
How to Read Contemporary Art by Michael Wilson
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The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa
Michael Kimmelman - 2005
Readers have come to expect him not only to fill in their knowledge about art but also to inspire them to think about connections between art and the larger world - which is to say, to think more like an artist. Kimmelman's many years of contemplating and writing about art have brought him to this wise, wide-ranging, and long-awaited book.It explores art as life's great passion, revealing what we can learn of life through pictures and sculptures and the people who make them. It assures us that art - points of contact with the exceptional that are linked straight to the heart - can be found almost anywhere and everywhere if only our eyes are opened enough to recognize it. Kimmelman regards art, like all serious human endeavors, as a passage through which a larger view of life may come more clearly into focus. His book is a kind of adventure or journey.It carries the message that many of us may not yet have learned how to recognize the art in our own lives. To do so is something of an art itself. A few of the characters Kimmelman describes, like Bonnard and Chardin, are great artists. But others are explorers and obscure obsessives, paint-by-numbers enthusiasts, amateur shutterbugs, and collectors of strange odds and ends. Yet others, like Charlotte Solomon, a girl whom no one considered much of an artist but who secretly created a masterpiece about the world before her death in Auschwitz, have reserved spots for themselves in history, or not, with a single work that encapsulates a whole life.Kimmelman reminds us of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders - the rage in seventeenth-century Europe and a metaphor for the art of life. Each drawer of the cabinet promises something curious and exotic, instructive and beautiful, the cabinet being a kind of ideal, self-contained universe that makes order out of the chaos of the world. The Accidental Masterpiece is a kind of literary Wunderkammer, filled with lively surprises and philosophical musings. It will inspire readers to imagine their own personal cabinet of wonders.
How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art
Serge Guilbaut - 1983
. . . By insisting that art, even art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it, he forces us to think differently not only about art and art history but about society itself."—New York Times Book Review
The Americans
Robert Frank - 1958
There is no question that Robert Frank's The Americans is the most famous and influential photography book ever published. It was 1959 when the book first came out: a series of deceptively simple photographs that Frank took on a trip through America in '55 and '56, pictures of normal people, everyday scenes: lunch counters, bus depots, cars, and the stangely familiar faces of people we don't quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures that saw the "American way of life" as we hadn't yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condensed the entire life of a nation in classic images that still speak to us today, forty years and several generations later.
History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present
Beaumont Newhall - 1972
No other book has managed to relate the aesthetic evolution and technical innovations of photography with such an absorbing combination of clarity, scholarship and enthusiasm.
Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings
Yoko Ono - 1970
Back in print for the first time in nearly thirty years, here is Yoko Ono's whimsical, delightful, subversive, startling book of instructions for art and for life."A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.""Burn this book after you've read it." -- Yoko Ono"This is the greatest book I've ever burned." -- John Lennon
Art as Experience
John Dewey - 1934
Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.
Going South
Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) - 2021
It documents her experience visiting the continent of Antarctica in January 2019 with photos taken by New Zealand photographer Harriet Were. Lorde expressed an interest in exploring the region of Antarctica since she was old enough to read. In January 2019, she visited Scott Base and McMurdo Station, Antarctica, travelling as an Antarctic Ambassador. During her visit, she observed microscopic species in environmental laboratories and spoke with scientists. Lorde described the book as "sort of a perfect precursor" to her upcoming third studio album. It will feature over 100 pages of images taken by New Zealand photographer Harriet Were and writings from Lorde. All proceeds will be used to fund a postgraduate scholarship created by Antarctica New Zealand, a government agency.
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists
Sharon Louden - 2013
The forty essays collected in Living and Sustaining a Creative Life are written in the artists’ own voices and take the form of narratives, statements, and interviews. Each story is different and unique, but the common thread is an ongoing commitment to creativity, inside and outside the studio. Both day-to-day and big picture details are revealed, showing how it is possible to sustain a creative practice that contributes to the ongoing dialogue in contemporary art. These stories will inform and inspire any student, young artist, and art enthusiast and will help redefine what "success" means to a professional artist.
What Artists Wear
Charlie Porter - 2020
What we wear is a signaling of our beliefs, emotions, longings and intentions. But artists, in devoting their lives to creativity, show how our garments can become tools of expression: a canvas on which to show who we really are.In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on a playful, eye- opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists throughout the ages, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From extravagant costumes to functional wear, from John Singer Sargent to Cindy Sherman, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the outfits he encounters, piecing together a new way of seeing the world, of understanding art, and of dressing ourselves. Part detective story, part love letter, part guide to chic, featuring photographic spreads accompanied by insightful commentary and helpful sartorial glossaries, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the art world anew, and take deeper pleasure in the clothes we all wear.
The Art of Pixar
Amid Amidi - 2011
From classics such as Toy Story and A Bug's Life to recent masterpieces such as Up, Toy Story 3, and Cars 2, this comprehensive collection offers a behind-the-scenes tour of every Pixar film to date. Featuring a foreword by Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter, the complete color scripts for every film published in full for the first time as well as stunning visual development art, The Art of Pixar is a treasure trove of rare artwork and an essential addition to the library of animation fans and Pixar enthusiasts.
Creativegirl: Mixed Media Techniques for an Artful Life
Danielle Donaldson - 2015
Danielle Donaldson shows you how to draw the pretty pictures from your imagination, infuse your art with delightful color combinations and work through creative frustration with simple fixes. You'll learn how to paint with watercolor, tell visual stories with and without words and add depth with layers using mixed-media techniques and little details--all while finding inspiration and gaining confidence in your own artistic style.Draw, paint, layer and create!- More than 30 techniques and projects including drawing, painting and adding layers for artists and aspiring artists of all levels. - Learn how do draw and paint figures such as creativeGIRL, busyGIRL and tutuGIRL. Then create your own girl to channel your story. - Find even more inspiration in a gallery filled with extraLOVE from the artist.
Image Makers, Image Takers: Interviews with Today's Leading Curators, Editors and Photographers
Anne-Celine Jaeger - 2007
Who are the makers and who are the takers? Readers can judge from themselves?
Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces
Philip Steadman - 2001
Vermeer left no record of his method and indeed we know almost nothing of the man nor of how he worked. But by a close and illuminating study of the paintings Steadman concludes that Vermeer did use the camera obscura and shows how the inherent defects in this primitive device enabled Vermeer to achieve some remarkable effects--the slight blurring of image, the absence of sharp lines, the peculiar illusion not of closeness but of distance in the domestic scenes. Steadman argues that the use of the camera also explains some previously unexplainable qualities of Vermeer's art, such as the absence of conventional drawing, the pattern of underpainting in areas of pure tone, the pervasive feeling of reticence that suffuses his canvases, and the almost magical sense that Vermeer is painting not objects but light itself.Drawing on a wealth of Vermeer research and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtleties of the work itself, Philip Steadman offers in Vermeer's Camera a fresh perspective on some of the most enchanting paintings ever created.
Keys to Drawing
Bert Dodson - 1985
Anyone who can hold a pencil can learn to draw.In this book, Bert Dodson shares his complete drawing system--fifty-five "keys" that you can use to render any subject with confidence, even if you're a beginner.These keys, along with dozens of practice exercises, will help you draw like an artist in no time.You'll learn how to:Restore, focus, map, and intensifyFree your hand action, then learn to control itConvey the illusions of light, depth, and textureStimulate your imagination through "creative play"
Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
Brian O'Doherty - 1985
They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated—the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others. O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar. With an introduction by Thomas McEvilley and a brilliantly cogent afterword by its author, Brian O'Doherty once again leads us on the perilous journey to center to the art world: Inside the White Cube.