Book picks similar to
Black Light by Kehinde Wiley


for-the-love-of-art
new-york-city
visual-art
art

Concerning the Spiritual in Art


Wassily Kandinsky - 1947
    Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art.Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings.This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents


Tom McDonough - 2002
    The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith.Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI's reflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguistic and spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord (1932-1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of the Spectacle.

Film as a Subversive Art


Amos Vogel - 1974
    According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored." So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, "Film as a Subversive Art" analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.

Scum America: The Stupid Factor (The Factors Series Book 1)


Scott McMurrey - 2020
    

America


Jean Baudrillard - 1986
    In this, his most accessible and evocative book, France’s leading philosopher of postmodernism takes to the freeways in a collection of traveler’s tales from the land of hyperreality.

Drawn to New York: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Decades in New York City


Peter Kuper - 2013
    Through Kuper’s illustrations, this book depicts a climb to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, the homeless living in Times Square, roller skaters in Central Park, the impact of September 11, the luxury of Wall Street, street musicians, and other scenes unique to the city. With comics, illustrations, and sketches, this work of art portrays everything from the low life to the high energy that has long made people from around the world flock to the Big Apple.

Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven


Jonathan Biss - 2020
    Biss doesn’t just love Beethoven more than other music, he loves it more than most things. It’s the lens through which he understands the world, and has been since he can remember. But in Unquiet Biss reveals the full extent to which Beethoven is also a ruthless lens through which he views himself.Biss provides listeners front and center access to his long overdue confrontation with a painful truth: Living with Beethoven has essentially amounted to severing all meaningful ties with himself. As we learn in rich detail, amidst the treasures Beethoven’s music has gifted Biss also lies searing self-doubt and heaps of crippling anxiety. Biss’s raw self-reflection is delivered through pitch-perfect prose, delving deep into the fascinating paradox that the greatest pleasure in his life is also responsible for imprisoning him. Beethoven’s defining personal characteristic, for example—his unwavering self-conviction and weapons-grade callousness—only served to mock Biss’s own perceived shortcomings and vulnerabilities. This captivating combination of wit and wisdom Biss readily shares is only interrupted by something even more extraordinary—his new interpretations of movements from seven of Beethoven's sonatas, including the Pathetique and Tempest, and his groundbreaking, awe-inducing final sonatas.Unquiet both begins and ends with Jonathan Biss staring down the daunting complexity and infinite majesty of Beethoven's last piano sonatas. But between these two points, the singular pianist has traversed a world of healing. An immeasurable weight has been lifted from him—by him. And we have witnessed its dramatic rise. While his journey is a fantastically unique one, if we listen close, we can hear ours too. An endless battle to confront and quiet our greatest pain so that we can embrace something even greater. Take a moment, and heed the sound.

Mark Rothko


Jeffrey S. Weiss - 1998
    The catalogue for the first major American retrospective of the work of Mark Rothko in 20 years--scheduled to open at the National Gallery in May--this richly illustrated book reproduces 100 of Rothko's paintings, prints, and drawings in full color, and features commentaries by many noted art experts.

Formless: A User's Guide


Yve-Alain Bois - 1997
    In Formless: A User's Guide, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a job. The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

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.

Shapes: Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts


Philip Ball - 2008
    Where does this order and regularity come from? It creates itself. The patterns we see come from self-organization. Whether living or non-living, scientists have found that there is a pattern-forming tendency inherent in the basic structure and processes of nature, so that from a few simple themes, and the repetition of simple rules, endless beautiful variations can arise.Part of a trilogy of books exploring the science of patterns in nature, acclaimed science writer Philip Ball here looks at how shapes form. From soap bubbles to honeycombs, delicate shell patterns, and even the developing body parts of a complex animal like ourselves, he uncovers patterns in growth and form in all corners of the natural world, explains how these patterns are self-made, and why similar shapes and structures may be found in very different settings, orchestrated by nothing more than simple physical forces. This book will make you look at the world with fresh eyes, seeing order and form even in the places you'd least expect.

Anger Management for Beginners: A Self-Help Course in 70 Lessons


Giles Coren - 2010
    Star of BBC's Supersizers and hugely popular Times columnist's works through his anger about everything from dogs to cycle helmets.

Louis Kahn: Essential Texts


Louis I. Kahn - 2003
    Professor Twombly's introduction and headnotes offer incisive commentary on the texts.

Adobe Photoshop CC Classroom in a Book (2017 Release)


Andrew Faulkner - 2016
    The 15 project-based lessons in this book show users step-by-step the key techniques for working in Photoshop and how to correct, enhance, and distort digital images, create image composites, and prepare images for print and the web. In addition to learning the key elements of the Photoshop interface, this completely revised CC (2017 release) edition covers features like new and improved search capabilities, Content-Aware Crop, Select and Mask, Face-Aware Liquify, designing with multiple artboards, and much more! The online companion files include all the necessary assets for readers to complete the projects featured in each chapter as well as ebook updates when Adobe releases new features for Creative Cloud customers. All buyers of the book get full access to the Web Edition: a Web-based version of the complete ebook enhanced with video and interactive multiple-choice quizzes. As always with the Classroom in a Book, Instructor Notes are available for teachers to download.

Taster Projects (Twenty to Make)


Alistair MacdonaldCorinne Lapierre - 2014
    Once you have enjoyed experimenting with these fun taster projects, there are many more Twenty to Make books available on lots of different craft subjects.We hope that experimenting with these projects will inspire you to try out some of the Twenty to Make titles that these projects have been taken from, when you have had some fun making these tasters! There are projects both for beginners and more experienced crafters to try; from stitching a simple but effective Christmas place setting in felt, and making a lovely pair of button earrings using pretty shell buttons; to crocheting a flower, or a gorgeous beanie hat, and trying your hand at sugarcraft, with a cute dog, a hippopotamus, or a fairy. You could also knit a scarf for the special person in your life, or a cute and cuddly teddy bear for a child. These exciting projects are sure to appeal to a wide range of crafters and will make lovely gifts for family and friends alike. Have fun and happy crafting!Projects include Christmas bunting, sugar dogs and other animals, crocheted flowers, tiny bag made from Jelly Roll scraps, knitted mug hugs, granny squares, knitted baby bootees, a stitched fabric brooch, Steampunk style bracelet, friendship bracelets, earrings made from buttons and much more.