Art Since 1900: 1900 to 1944 (Vol. 1)


Hal Foster - 2011
    Each turning point and breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism is explored in depth, as are the frequent anti-modernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art in a way that enables them to comprehend the many “voices” of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell


Deborah Solomon - 2004
    Legends about Cornell abound--as the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent--but never before Utopia Parkway has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions. Cornell was haunted by dreams and visions, yet the site of his imaginings couldn't have been more ordinary: a small house he shared with his mother and invalid brother in Queens, New York. In its cluttered basement, he spent his nights arranging photographs, cut-outs and other humble disjecta into some of the most romantic works to exist in three dimensions. Cornell was no recluse, however: admired by successive generations of vanguard artists, he formed friendships with figures as diverse as Duchamp, de Kooning, and Warhol and had romantically charged encounters with Susan Sontag and Yoko Ono--not to mention unrequited crushes on countless shop girls and waitresses. All this he recorded compulsively in a diary that, along with his shadow boxes, forms one of the oddest and most affecting records ever made of a life. It is from such documents, and from a decade of sustained attention to Cornell, that Deborah Solomon has fashioned the definitive biography of one of America's most powerful and unusual modern artists.

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.

The Elements of Color


Johannes Itten - 1961
    The Art of Color, this book covers subjective feeling and objective color principles in detail. It presents the key to understanding color in ltten's color circle and color contrasts.

After Modern Art, 1945-2000


David Hopkins - 2000
    This book sets out to provide the first concise interpretation of the period as a whole, clarifying the artists and their works along the way. Closely informed by new critical approaches, it concentrates on the relationship between American and European art from the end of the Second World War to the eve of the new millennium.Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst are among many artists discussed, with careful attention being given to the political and cultural worlds they inhabited. Moving along a clear timeline, the author highlights key movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and performance art to explain the theoretical and issue-based debates that have provided the engine for the art of this period.

The Lost Painting


Jonathan Harr - 2005
    Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn't alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others -- no one knows the precise number -- have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.Jonathan Harr embarks on a journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ -- its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.

Color Theory: An essential guide to color--from basic principles to practical applications


Patti Mollica - 2013
     Regardless of your medium, a solid understanding of color and its applications is essential. Petite in size but packed with information, this fresh, contemporary take on the subject of color features step-by-step projects and practical tips and techniques to put color knowledge to effective use. From pigment characteristics and color mixing to color psychology, you’ll find all the insight you need to make dynamic, harmonious, and meaningful color choices in your own works of art. You’ll find within: discussions and illustrations of the complexities of color and how to use it as a tool for communication; tips for creating vibrant mixes, lively blacks, realistic greens, and flesh tones; and an inspiring collection of fresh and contemporary artwork.Begin with an overview of color in the history of art and the science behind color.Then learn color basics: the color wheel; hue, saturation, and value; color and value; color temperature; color relativity; and color schemes.Everything you need to know about pigments and paints is detailed next.With these essentials covered, move on to integrate color with your compositions and painting style as a means of expression.Harness the power of color in your painting with Color Theory!

The Power of Art


Simon Schama - 2006
    "The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality. . . ."With the same disarming force, The Power of Art propels us on an eye-opening, breathtaking odyssey, zooming in on eight extraordinary masterpieces, from Caravaggio's David and Goliath to Picasso's Guernica. Jolting us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art forever.The embattled heroes—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko—each in his own resolute way, faced crisis with steadfast defiance, pitting passion and conviction against scorn and short-sightedness. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world.With vivid storytelling and powerfully evocative descriptive passages, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of Civil War Spain.Most compelling of all, The Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight "eye-popping" world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works "tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that, they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript . . . 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"

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.

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.

The Painted Word


Tom Wolfe - 1975
    He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. This is Tom Wolfe "at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Jenny Saville


Gagosian Gallery - 2005
    In 1992, the year she completed her studies at Glasgow School of Art, her graduation exhibition sold out. Most notably, one painting was bought by Charles Saatchi and, since then, her international reputation has grown at a rapid and steady pace.Jenny Saville is described as a "New Old Master" for the technical proficiency of her oversize nudes that have earned her comparisons to Rubens and Lucian Freud and universal praise from critics and art historians alike. For the conceptual underpinnings of her work, she has been hailed as one of the most interesting artists of the last decade. Her work has been shown alongside that of Damien Hirst and the other Young British Artists in the acclaimed and seminal survey of new British art Sensation at the Royal Academy (London, 1997) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York, 2000).This is the only monograph devoted to the critically acclaimed young artist and features all of Jenny Saville's paintings to date-including many previously unpublished. This volume is being published in association with the Gagosian Gallery in London. The power of her brilliant and relentless embodiment of our worst anxieties about our own corporeality and gender is what distinguishes Saville from other paint-obsessed representers of the naked human body. To my eye, no other artist in recent memory has combined empathy and distance with such visual and emotional impact. -Linda Nochlin, Art in America, March 2000

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.

The Shock of the New


Robert Hughes - 1980
    More than 250 color photos.

Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet


Stanley Donwood - 2019
    His influential work spans many practices over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installation work to printmaking. Here, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches, and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, each chapter is dedicated to a major work—whether an album cover, promotional piece, or a personal project—and is presented as a step-by-step working case study. Featuring commentary by Thom Yorke and never-before-seen archival material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood’s creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. It is a must-have for fans of the band and anyone interested in graphic design and popular culture.