Book picks similar to
Rackstraw Downes by Sanford Schwartz


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The Portable February


David Berman - 2009
    His drawings invite the same deeper thought as his writings, making use of wordplay, cultural references, and offbeat observations. The sparse illustrations are complemented by poignant one-liners, and reveal moments of lightness within the author’s dark humor, providing a wry, erudite commentary on American culture.

The Lives of Lucian Freud: The Restless Years, 1922 - 1968


William Feaver - 2019
    The result is this a unique, electrifying biography, shot through with Freud's own words.In Youth, the first of two volumes, Feaver conjures Freud's early childhood: Sigmund Freud's grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho – consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret – Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age.

Drawings


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 2014
    This book brings together the finest examples of his funny, strange, and moving drawings in an inexpensive, beautifully produced gift volume for every Vonnegut fan. Kurt Vonnegut's daughter Nanette introduces this volume of his never before published drawings with an intimate remembrance of her father. Vonnegut always drew, and many of his novels contain sketches. Breakfast of Champions (1973) included many felt-tip pen drawings, and he had a show in 1983 of his drawings at New York's Margo Feiden Gallery, but really got going in the early 1990s when he became acquainted with the screenprinter Joe Petro III, who became his partner in making his colorful drawings available as silkscreens. With a touch of cubism, mixed with a Paul Klee gift for caricature, a Calder-like ability to balance color and line, and more than a touch of sixties psychedelic sensibility, Vonnegut's aesthetic is as idiosyncratic and defiant of tradition as his books. While writing came to be more onerous in his later years, making art became his joyful primary activity, and he made drawings up until his death in 2007. This volume, and a planned touring exhibition of the drawings, will introduce Vonnegut's legion of fans to an entirely new side of his irrepressible creative personality.

Fucking Adorable - Cute Critters with Foul Mouths: Sweary Adult Coloring Book


Heather Land - 2016
    From an adorable raccoon calling someone a -cumstain- to a -Cunt-A-Saurus Rex-, you'll love these filthy cuties! If you love to swear and love all things cute, you'll adore this book. The book has 30 different single sided pages to cover. Fucking Adorable-er, the sequel to this book, is now available!! Find it here! https: //www.amazon.com/Fucking-Adorable-er-Cr...

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930


Walter Benjamin - 2005
    Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

This Is for You


Rob Ryan - 2007
    This Is For You is a magical, romantic and touching story of thoughts and dreams, loneliness and longing, the personal and the universal. Each page has been cut out of paper using a scalpel, sprayed and photographed.

Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic


John Wilmerding - 2005
    Since then, critics and scholars have largely ignored him. Wyeth, however, who is age 88 at the date of publication, has continued to paint, to the delight of his admirers, collectors, and the art-loving public. Now, in association with the High Museum exhibition, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic takes a fresh look at the work of one of America's most beloved artists.In examining his entire oeuvre, the book celebrates the artist's ongoing love affair with everyday life-domestic, natural, and architectural. Found throughout Wyeth's work, these objects form patterns that illuminate core themes and reveal the artist wrestling with issues of memory, temporality, embodiment, and the metaphysical. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book explores how the artist's approach to these subjects was formed in his early career, and has been revisited in new and surprising ways in recent years.Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic comprises 150 tempera paintings and 50 drawings and watercolors-including his most-famous works, but also many published here for the first time.

Photographs


Robert Capa - 1969
    --Margarett Loke, "ARTnews""His coverage of the Spanish civil war established Capa's reputation as a peerless battlefield photojournalist... But he was also a man who loved making pictures of beautiful women, famous men and grand parties. Often overlooked when discussing the Capa legacy, those too, were his life's work. Both Capas--the raconteur of high society and the fearless witness to war--are evident in "Robert Capa: Photographs." The two sides of Capa's work may seem irreconcilable, but they're not. He was recording one world. His own."--Allison Adato, "Life Magazine"

Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters


Martin Gayford - 2018
    R. B. Kitaj’s proposal, made in 1976, that there was a “substantial School of London” was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley.Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint.

Scatterling of Africa: My Early Years


Johnny Clegg - 2021
    Suspended for a few seconds, they float in their own space and time with their own hidden prospects. For want of a better term, we call these moments “magical” and when we remember them they are cloaked in a halo of special meaning.’For 14-year-old Johnny Clegg, hearing Zulu street music as plucked on the strings of a guitar by Charlie Mzila one evening outside a corner café in Bellevue, Johannesburg, was one such ‘magical’ moment. The success story of Juluka and later Savuka, and the cross-cultural celebration of music, language, story, dance and song that stirred the hearts of millions across the world, is well documented. Their music was the soundtrack to many South Africans’ lives during the turbulent 70s and 80s as the country moved from legislated oppression to democratic freedom. It crossed borders, boundaries and generations, resonating around the world and back again. Less known is the story of how it all began and developed. Scatterling of Africa is that origin story, as Johnny Clegg wrote it and wanted it told. It is the story of how the son of an unconventional mother, grandson of Jewish immigrants, came to realise that identity can be a choice, and home is a place you leave and return to as surely as the seasons change.

Ways of Seeing


John Berger - 1972
    First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.

Chagall


Jacob Baal-Teshuva - 1995
    Page after page of rich reproductions capture his use of intense, glowing colors and the unique world he created full of magic, enchantment and fantasy.

Flashbacks: Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury


G.B. Trudeau - 1995
    This unique quarter - century anniversary anthology offers the essence of the strip - over 800 daily and Sunday strips that form the core of the "Doonesbury" saga, all fully annotated to document the strip's effect on the wider world. Acclaim and outrage, ire and impact are duly noted - "Doonesbury" has left an impressive and entertaining trail of fallout, and outlasted many of it's most vocal critics. In addition, the strip's creator logs on with an introduction, and in a Q&A series addresses some of the questions he has so adroitly evaded in the past.

The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication


E.H. Gombrich - 1999
    Central to these pivotal essays is a consuming interest in the functions of images, and how these functions, in addition to the images themselves, evolve over time. In wide-ranging studies of both so-called 'high' and 'low' art - from fresco painting, altar painting, the International Gothic Style and outdoor sculpture to doodles, pictorial instructions, caricature and political propaganda - Gombrich examines a broad spectrum of key questions.These include the role of supply and demand, competition and display, the 'ecology' of images, the idea of 'feedback' in the interplay of means and ends, and the ways in which developing skills in turn stimulate new demands. Gombrich explores in depth such specific aspects of the uses of images as the hanging of pictures and the use (or misuse) of images as historical evidence.Extensive in its scope and surgically precise in its focus, The Uses of Images signifies yet another landmark corpus of work by the prolific Professor Gombrich, in a subtle but striking tour de force.

Ward 81


Mary Ellen Mark - 1979
    While on set, Mark met the women of Ward 81, the only locked hospital security ward for women in the state: the inmates were considered dangerous to themselves or to others. In February of 1976, just before the ward closed (it ceased to exist in November of 1977, when it became the female section of a coeducational treatment ward), Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and social scientist, were given permission to make a more extended stay, living on the ward in order to photograph and interview the women. They spent 36 days on Ward 81, photographing and documenting. Jacobs recalls their slow, inevitable assimilation: "We felt the degeneration of our own bodies and the erosion of our self-confidence. We were horrified at the thought of what we might become after a year or two of confinement and therapy on Ward 81." This new hardcover edition adds 10 new pictures to the original. Ward 81 is a sobering investigation into the lives and treatment of the mentally ill.