Inferno


James Nachtwey - 1999
    Featuring brutally compassionate photographs taken from 1990-99, inspired by an overwhelming belief in the human possibility of change, this volume is a definitive selection from Nachtwey's astonishing portfolio. It documents today's conflicts and their victims, from Somalia's famine to genocide in Rwanda, from Romania's abandoned orphans and 'irrecoverables' to the lives of India's 'untouchables', from war in Bosnia to conflict in Chechnya. Inferno is an evocative visual insight into modern history, bringing it disturbingly close to our consciousness.

A Book of Surrealist Games


Mel Gooding - 1995
    Invented and played by such artists as André Breton, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst, these gems still produce results ranging from the hilarious to the mysterious and profound.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective


Henri Cartier-BressonPhilippe Arbaizar - 2003
    Born in 1908, he studied painting before embarking on a career in photography in the 1930s. In 1940 he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in prisoner-of-war camps before escaping to join the Paris underground. With Robert Capa, David Seymour and others, he founded the photographic agency Magnum in 1947. Since then his work has taken him all over the world - from Europe to India, Burma, Pakistan, China, Japan, Indonesia, Bali, Russia, the Middle East, Cuba, Mexico, the United States and Canada. This new collection of work by Cartier-Bresson, created on the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday, provides the ultimate retrospective look at a lifetime's achievement. It includes the first photographs taken by him, a significant number of which have never been published, rarely seen work from all periods of his life, classic photographs that have become icons of the medium, and a generous selection of drawings, paintings and film stills. The book also features personal souvenirs of Cartier-Bresson's youth, his family and the founding of Magnum. Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary images are shaped by an eye a

The Shock of the New


Robert Hughes - 1980
    More than 250 color photos.

Dali


Paul Moorhouse - 1999
    Superb reproductions of paintings by one of the 20th century's most famous artists: The Visage of War, The Enigma of Desire, the well-known Persistence of Memory, 13 others.

Paris Peasant


Louis Aragon - 1926
    publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, -a mythology of the modern.- The book uses the city of Paris as a stage, or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: cafe menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. Andre Breton wrote of this work: -no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .-

The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice


Kelli Russell Agodon - 2013
    Created by poets for poets, this calendar of exercises offers inspiration and a place to begin. Whether you are a novice or well-established author, The Daily Poet is an essential resource for poets, teachers, professors, or anyone who wants to jumpstart their writing practice. The Daily Poet is portable, coffeeshop tested, and offers quick warm-ups for any writing group or classroom. An excellent guide for students, The Daily Poet is also a handy reference for poets looking for fresh ideas to share in their writing workshops.

A History of Far Eastern Art


Sherman E. Lee - 1973
    Many of these new finds are included among the hundreds of reproductions.

Modern Art: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography


Sam Hunter - 1976
    It avoids the typical encyclopedic approach of surveys in favor of examining selected but highly representative works in greater depth and from an enlarged spectrum of critical discourse. Organized along chronological lines, topics explore the ideas, forms, events, artists, and works with each chapter devoted to a style, movement, or decade from Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh through Minimalism and the general reaction known as Post-Modernism. Ideal for readers with a "general" interest in art. "

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry


Harold Bloom - 1973
    Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between precursors and the individual artist. His argument that all literary texts are a strong misreading of those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of criticism and post-structuralist literary theory. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature.Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorable quotations, this second edition of Bloom's classic work maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded - neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. A new introduction, centering upon Shakespeare and Marlowe explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking, and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past quarter of a century.

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare


Stephen Greenblatt - 1981
    Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence. "No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

America


Andy Warhol - 1985
    Exploring his greatest obsessions - including image and celebrity - he photographs wrestlers and politicians, the beautiful wealthy and the disenfranchised poor, Capote with the fresh scars of a facelift and Madonna hiding beneath a brunette bob. He writes about the country he loves, wishing he had died when he was shot, commercialism, fame and beauty.An America without Warhol is almost as inconceivable as Warhol without America, and this touching, witty tribute is the great artist of the superficial at his most deeply personal.

Magritte


René Magritte - 1988
    In the search for the ""mystery"" in which things and organisms are enveloped, Magritte created pictures which, taking everyday reality as their starting point, were to follow a different logic from that to which we are accustomed. Magritte depicts the world of reality in such unsecretive superficiality that the beholder of his pictures is forced to reflect that the mystery of it is not evoked by some sentimental transfiguration, but rather by the logic of his thoughts and associations. Magritte thus invented an inimitable pictorial language which he uses to question our usual comprehension of pictures. In this book, Jacques Meuris traces Magritte's artistic development from its beginnings until the end of his life, and in doing so underlines the originality of this great Belgian Surrealist.

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art


Jacques Rancière - 2011
    The book comprises a string of dramatic and evocative locales, each embodying specific artistic tendencies and together spanning the modern era--from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, and visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and events--some famous, others forgotten--to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the distinctions between the different arts along with the borders separating them from ordinary experience.This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from conventional understandings of modernism.

Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas


Charles Harrison - 1991
    Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory, 1815–1900 and Art in Theory, 1900–1990, its primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures, and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.