Book picks similar to
Auguste Rodin: Drawings Watercolors by Antoinette Le Normand-Romain
art
favorites
storia
fashion-and-art
A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1881-1906
John Richardson - 1991
"To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius.Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work.Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon.This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement.Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.
Paint Watercolors That Dance with Light
Elizabeth Kincaid - 2004
Inside you will learn how to:Create paintings brimming with color using transparent layering techniquesInnovate with masking materials to create crisp edges and eye-catching light effectsUse tone and contrast to bring your paintings to lifePacked with practical information for using color and light, Paint Watercolors that Dance with Light will transform your art.
The History of Sonic the Hedgehog
William Audureau - 2012
You'll also find character profiles, promotional artwork, rare concept art, and a detailed look at the origins of the "Blue Blur".
Interaction of Color
Josef Albers - 1971
Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.
Francesca Woodman
Corey Keller - 2011
In 1972, the 13-year-old Woodman made a black-and-white photograph of herself sitting at the far end of a sofa in her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her face is obscured by her hair, light radiates from an unseen source behind her out at the viewer through her right hand. This photograph typifies much of what would characterize Woodman's work to come: a semi-obscured female form merging with or flailing against a somewhat bare and often dilapidated interior. In an oeuvre of around 800 photographs made in just nine years, Woodman performed her own body against the textures of wallpaper, door frame, baths and couches, radically extending the Surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun and creating a mood and language all her own. In the 30 years since her untimely death, Woodman has gained a following among successive generations of artists and photographers, a testament to her work's undeniable immediacy and enduring appeal Amid a renewed intensification of interest in Francesca Woodman, this volume is published for a major touring exhibition of her photographs and films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Containing many previously unpublished photographs, it is the definitive Francesca Woodman monograph.Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was born in Denver, Colorado, to the well-known artists George and Betty Woodman. In 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1979 she moved to New York, to attempt to build a career in photography. In 1981, at the age of 22, she committed suicide.
Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life
Roxana Robinson - 1989
"A profoundly human treatment of O'Keeffe and all the people who figured prominently in her life."-- "Los Angeles Times"
Rene Magritte, 1898-1967: Thought Rendered Visible
Marcel Paquet - 1992
Taking the form of the body in painting or of the relations between image and word, this book presents the poetic enigmas of the Belgian surrealist.
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art
Laney Salisbury - 2009
Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices. Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history. The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day. Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller, filled with unforgettable characters and told at a breakneck pace. But this is most certainly not fiction; Provenance is the meticulously researched and captivating account of one of the greatest cons in the history of art forgery.
Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives
Richard Brereton - 2009
Intimate and often unseen, sketchbooks document the sources of inspiration as well as the journey to final execution. They showcase ideas and how these evolve and change into accomplished works. Fresh and spontaneous, their style connects directly with current illustration trends. The material is complemented by interviews where artists explain how they use their sketchbooks and how these relate to finished works. These, along with the sketchbooks themselves, will give readers a direct and unmediated insight into the process of research and creation.
1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die
Stephen Farthing - 2006
A visually arresting reference for art lovers and students, it provides a truly comprehensive worldwide gazeteer of paintings organized chronologically by date of completion. Each entry includes the history of the painting, information about the artist or artistic movement, the current location of the painting (all are on view to the public), as well as other details. The works are also indexed by artist and by title, making for easy cross-referencing. Included are popular paintings, key works that are the most breathtaking for their extraordinary power and beauty, paintings that were turning points in the history of art, and rediscovered masterpieces, making 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die an art museum in its own right.
Arcimboldo
Werner Kriegeskorte - 1992
His talent soon caught the eye of 16th-century rulers, and he moved on to the imperial courts of Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II in Prague, where he created the scenes for his Seasons. In Arcimboldo's allegorical paintings, Spring appears as a young man composed entirely of flowers, Summer as a composition of fruits, Autumn as a head made of grapes, and Winter as a gnarled old man twined with ivy. Arcimboldo remained true to the allegorical principles informing the artistic and philosophical world view of the 16th century. His paintings are not only full of references to ancient classical gods and goddesses, but above all they reflect the courtly cosmos of the art chambers and wonder cabinets in which countless exotic and bizarre objects were housed. With the decline of this allegorical world vision between the Renaissance and Mannerism, Arcimboldo was forgotten- only to be rediscovered by modern artists.
The Shape of Content
Ben Shahn - 1957
He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.
Ansel Adams: A Biography
Mary Street Alinder - 1996
Here, Mary Street Alinder--who collaborated with Adams on his memoir and was his assistant in later life--is not reticent about the major emotional episodes in Adams's life, including his marriage and extramarital affairs, and his not-altogether-successful fatherhood. She explores the major artistic influences on his work and gives in-depth profiles of the significant figures in his circle. She also explains the technique and style Adams developed to obtain his unique vision, as well as his uneasiness at becoming a commodity. Ansel Adams: A Biography is an intimate and provocative portrait of the world's most famous photographer.
Keith Haring
Jeffrey Deitch - 2008
This is the book Haring wanted to make, based on the outline of a monograph that was never completed due to his untimely death in 1989.
Self Portrait
Lee Friedlander - 1992
Here Friedlander focuses on the role of his own physical presence in his images. He writes: "At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings." Here readers can witness this progression as Friedlander appears in the form of his shadow, or reflected in windows and mirrors, and only occasionally fully visible through his own camera. In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect--elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair. These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind. This reprint edition of Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait contains nearly 50 duotone images and an afterword by John Szarkowski, former Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.