Book picks similar to
Word And Image: French Painting Of The Ancien Régime by Norman Bryson
art-history
philosophy-theory
web-based
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Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop
Paul Kingsbury - 2001
Country musicians and magicians, professional wrestlers and rock stars, all have turned to Nashville's historic Hatch Show Print to create showstopping posters. Established in 1879, Hatch preserves the art of traditional printing that has earned a loyal following to this day (including the likes of Beck, Emmylou Harris, and the Beastie Boys). Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop is the first fully illustrated tour of this iconic print shop and also chronicles the long life and large cast of employees, entertainers, and American legends whose histories are intertwined with it. Complete with 190 illustrations--as well as a special book jacket that unfolds to reveal an original Hatch poster on the reverse--Hatch Show Print is a dazzling document of this legendary institution.
Earth Song: Inside Michael Jackson's Magnum Opus
Joseph Vogel - 2011
In both subject and sound, it was like nothing else on the radio. It defied the cynicism and apathy of Generation X; it challenged the aesthetic expectations for a "pop song" (or even a "protest song"), fusing blues, opera, rock and gospel; and it demanded accountability in an era of corporate greed, globalization and environmental indifference. A massive hit globally (reaching #1 in over fifteen countries), it wasn't even offered as a single in the United States. Yet nearly two decades later, it stands as one of Jackson's greatest artistic achievements. In this groundbreaking monograph, author Joseph Vogel details the song's context and evolution from its inception in Vienna in 1988, to its release and reception in 1995, to Jackson's final live performance in Munich in 1999. Based on original research, including interviews with the song's key participants, Earth Song: Inside Michael Jackson's Magnum Opus offers a fascinating reassessment of this prophetic musical statement.
The Meaning of Sarkozy
Alain Badiou - 2007
He argues that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President does not necessarily signal a crucial turning point in French politics, nor require a further rightward move from competing electoral forces.To understand the significance of Sarkozy, we have to look beyond the right-wing populism and vulgarity of the man himself, and ask what he represents: a reactionary tradition that goes back to the early nineteenth century, a tradition based on fear.Badiou argues that to escape from the atmosphere of depression and anxiety that currently envelops the Left, we need to cast aside the slavish worship of electoral democracy. In a characteristically doughty and wide-ranging conclusion, Alain Badioun maps out a ‘communist hypothesis’ that can lay the basis for a genuine emancipatory politics in the twenty-first century.
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
Laure-Anne Bosselaar - 1997
Old Europe still lives in Bosselaar's rich language: Entre chien et loup, as it's known in Flanders--the time at dusk when a wolf can be mistaken for a dog.Lyrical poetry that sings of farmers, families and nunneries in Belgium and Flanders.
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
E.H. Gombrich - 1960
It seeks to answer a simple question: why is there such a thing as style? The question may be simple but there is no easy answer, and Professor Gombrich's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration of the history and psychology of pictorial representation leads him into countless crucial areas. Gombrich examines, questions and re-evaluates old and new ideas on such matters as the imitation of nature, the function of tradition, the problem of abstraction, the validity of perspective and the interpretation of expression: all of which reveal that pictorial representation is far from being a straightforward matter. First published more than 40 years ago, Art and Illusion has lost none of its vitality and importance. In applying the findings of experimental science to a nuanced understanding of art and in tackling complex ideas and theoretical issues, Gombrich is rigorous.Yet he always retains a sense of wonder at the inexhaustible capacity of the human brain, and at the subtlety of the relationships involved in seeing the world and in making and seeing art. With profound knowledge and his exceptional gift for clear exposition, he advances each argument as an hypothesis to be tested. The problems of representation are forever fundamental to the history of art: Art and Illusion remains an essential text for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of art. For the sixth edition Professor Gombrich has written an entirely new 12-page preface, in which he makes use of the distinction between an image and a sign, so as to clarify his intentions in writing the book in the first place.
A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles
John McPhee - 1968
His inimitable style reveals the intricate details of his characters lives.
John James Audubon
Richard Rhodes - 2004
He had a talent for drawing and an interest in birds, and he would spend the next thirty-five years traveling to the remotest regions of his new country–often alone and on foot–to render his avian subjects on paper. The works of art he created gave the world its idea of America. They gave America its idea of itself. Here Richard Rhodes vividly depicts Audubon’s life and career: his epic wanderings; his quest to portray birds in a lifelike way; his long, anguished separations from his adored wife; his ambivalent witness to the vanishing of the wilderness. John James Audubon: The Making of an American is a magnificent achievement.
Goat Brothers
Larry Colton - 1993
Summary; The true-life American epic of five men who meet as fraternity brothers in the early 1960s and live out the dreams, failures, loves, and betrayals of their tumultuous generation. Subjects; Colton, Larry. United States -- Biography. Journalists -- United States -- Biography. Genre; Biography.
Audrey Hepburn: Fair Lady of the Screen
Ian Woodward - 1984
Ranked number 50 in Empire Magazine's 'Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time', her appeal as a screen icon is set to last for years to come.From her roles in such legendary films as Breakfast at Tiffany's and her Oscar-winning performance in Roman Holiday, to her lovers and the pain of losing a child, this revealing biography is essential reading for Hepburn and film fans alike.
This is Modern Art
Matthew Collings - 1999
A house cast in concrete. The London Underground map with all the station names changes - the Circle Line stations are comedians, the Northern Line stations are philosophers. A tent embroidered with the names of everyone the artist who set up the tent has ever slept with. But what does it all mean? What is Modern Art? Why do we like/hate it? Can anybody do it? Is it always modern? Who started it? In this refreshing and extremely accessible book Matthew Collings tells the story of modern art and our modern attitude to it. It combines hard information on major artists and movements - what really happened - with ordinary reflections: modern art is intimidating and unfathomable to many but Matthew Collings cuts through this barrier by asking all the kinds of questions many of us will have asked and been puzzled by. He will compare Goya to Duchamp and Picasso, Rothko to Yves Klein; he will look at the role of African tribal art in the rise of Modernism and Punk Rock in the rise of Post-Modernism. This will become a classic book of its kind, quirky, culty and great fun.
Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself
Salomon Grimberg - 2008
In "Song of Herself", Kahlo expert and child psychiatrist Salomon Grimberg introduces and contextualizes an intimate, deeply introspective interview that Kahlo gave towards the end of her life to her friend the psychologist Olga Campos for an unpublished book on the creative process. Kahlo comments directly and starkly as never before on her life, her loves and her art, and expresses her attitudes towards sexuality, her body, friendship, politics and death, among other personal concerns.The most revealing autobiographical text known on this singular woman, this startling interview is accompanied here by Campos' reflections on her relationship with Kahlo and a psychological assessment of Kahlo by Dr James Bridger Harris. The book is illustrated with selected photographs and works by Kahlo, including previously unseen and rarely seen drawings.
The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
Leo Damrosch - 2019
Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth‑century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750
Lorraine Daston - 1998
This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another.--From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment
Ernst Kris - 1934
Gombrich, in an introductory essay, calls ‘certain invariant traits of the human psyche.’”—Denis Thomas, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts“This book gathers together various legends and attitudes about artists, ancient and modern, East and West, and gives fascinating insights into attitudes toward artistic creation. It impinges on psychology, art history and history, aesthetics, biography, myth and magic, and will be of great interest to a wide audience in many fields…. A delightful and unrivalled study.”—Howard Hibbard“Thought provoking and valuable…. To all those interested in psychiatry and art from the perspectives of history, criticism, or therapy and to the wide audience concerned with the psychology of aesthetics and of artistic creation.”—Albert Rothenberg, American Journal of PsychiatryErnst Kris was a psychoanalyst who wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including art. Otto Kurz was librarian of the Warburg Institute in London.
La Folie Baudelaire
Roberto Calasso - 2008
Calasso ranges through Baudelaire's life and work, focusing on two painters—Ingres and Delacroix—about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay "The Painter of Modern Life." In Calasso's lavishly illustrated mosaic of stories, insights, close readings of poems, and commentaries on paintings, Baudelaire's Paris comes brilliantly to life. In the eighteenth century, a folie was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Following Baudelaire, Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic "Folie Baudelaire"—a place where the reader can encounter the poet himself, his peers, his city, and his extraordinary likes and dislikes, finally discovering that that place is situated in the middle of the land of "absolute literature."