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Art
Since she first came to the attention of the art world nearly ten years ago, Kara Walker has become one of the most important artists of her generation. Championed by the art world for her fearless embrace of challenging subject matter, Walker has created a body of work that looks unflinchingly at racial inequality in the United States. Known for her bold images using the traditional silhouette, Walker upends the genteel, Victorian origins of the medium by graphically portraying scenes from the antebellum South to explore the politics of slavery, race, and gender. Inspired by the tragedy that beset the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, Walker has created a volume exploring the interconnectedness of the subject of the sea, race, and poverty by juxtaposing examples of her work and historical works from the 19th century. This unique and important book capitalizes on Walker's deftness at graphic and visceral storytelling, affording the reader a deeply intimate experience of the difficult themes the artist explores.
The world was in ruin at the end of World War II: from the Blitz in London to the aftermath of the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A small group of Army soldiers witnessed it all.
They photographed Germany's last push, the Battle of the Bulge, and they rode into Germany to witness unimagined destruction. They documented the Burma Road, which opened Mainland China to supplies, and saw war atrocities as far away as the Philippines.
These soldier photographers are acclaimed for their war photographs, but their work showing the impact of total war has never been compiled in a book.
As towns fell and the result of years of war were being laid bare, the world began to comprehend the impact of the war. Ruined cities were unearthed. The gates of concentration camps were flung open. Former prisoners, captured soldiers, and desperate refugees scoured the landscape for food and shelter.
These GIs used cameras instead of guns, witnessing and capturing the loss and destruction on film. Their work is a remarkable record of pictures that is now housed at the National Archives. The photos they left behind are beautiful and brutal: cemeteries and churches. POWs and DPs. Surrenders and suicides. Liberators and prisoners.
Many of the photos have never before been seen. None have been seen like this--scanned directly from original negatives for this book. Aftershock is a permanent record that shows what these soldiers saw. And it tells the story of these young photographers, whose lives were changed forever because of 1945.
The Art Institute of Chicago, although renowned for its holdings of works by the French Impressionists, also houses a wealth of superb examples by American proponents of this distinctive style. The breadth of the museum's collection of American Impressionism is rich, with a substantial body of paintings and watercolors by Winslow Homer, who is seen today as a precursor to Impressionism, as well as impressive portfolios of work by Americans living in Europe, such as James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, and the only American who was officially part of the French group, Mary Cassatt. In addition, important paintings and watercolors by notable artists such as Cecilia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, George Inness, Mauric Prendergast, and John Twachtman are included, along with handsomely reproduced images by lesser-known artists who worked in the Impressionist vein.
Return to thetear-stained, melodramatic heyday of romance comics in this fantastic anthologyof the genre's best stories, covers, advice columns, and more! In a valentineto a bygone era, perfect for fans of modern love stories, Archie comics, and series like Strangers in Paradise, pop-culture expert Michael Barson celebrates the stories that captivated the Americanimagination during the 1950s and 1960s. Readers of books like From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Female Comics From Teens to Zines will be captivated by this one-of-a-kind look atfour-color female portrayals, while collectors of the history of Golden Agecomics will be entranced by crucial stories from Fawcett, Marvel, DC, and manymore comics publishing giants. Above all, however, the indelible pathos at theheart of every Agonizing Love story makes Barson'scollection more than a pop-culture artifact; it's also an unforgettable lookinto the heart of true romance.
Since constructing his own studio in 1999, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has designed or collaborated with other architects on a wide range of architectural projects. These collaborations were the subject of Ai Weiwei: Art/Architecture, a 2011 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, which this catalogue accompanies. A highlight of this overview is the widely celebrated "Bird's Nest" Beijing National Stadium, a collaboration between Ai and the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron that was constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games. Another feature is a new work based on a project titled "Ordos 10" for which Ai invited 100 young architectural firms worldwide to design single-family houses for Ordos City in Inner Mongolia. An essay in the catalogue examines the role of architecture in relation to Ai's political activities, an issue of particular relevance since his arrest and conditional release in 2011.
This book covers a recent sculptural installation by the Chinese artist, architect and radical intellectual, Ai Weiwei--who is currently being watched the world over for his work on China's 2008 Olympic Stadium, designed in collaboration with the Swiss Architects, Herzog & de Meuron. Fragments depicts a mysterious large-scale sculpture that hybridizes architectural elements from several Chinese temples. "Each architectural element in a temple has a precise order. The fragments in my installation are from three or four temples, so everything is wrongly connected and misfit. They serve no purpose to each other, and the whole structure serves no purpose at all. At the beginning, many of my carpenters quit, despite the fact that I paid them a high salary and never rushed them. They quit because they didn't know what their job was for--why the table needed to be cut a certain way, or why the patina should be kept and joints hidden.
Recent work of one of China's most important and outspoken contemporary artists is featured in this book. One of China's most controversial artists, Ai Weiwei is also one of the world's most prominent critics of the Chinese government. A critic of China's handling of such matters as the 2008 Olympic Games, and the tragedy of the 2008 earthquake, Ai Weiwei brings questions about tradition, history, modernity, and change to his works of sculpture, architecture, photography and his blog texts. This attractive volume includes images of Ai Weiwei's acclaimed Fairytale installation for the 2007 Documenta in Kassel, German, as well as illustrations of his furniture and woodwork, teapots and vases, video stills and his recent works for the exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. These include Remembering, an installation at the front facade at the Haus der Kunst with backpacks, which commemorates the Sichuan Earthquake and the thousands of children who died in their schools then. Other works are Soft Ground and Rooted Upon. In addition to illustrations of Ai Weiwei's three-dimensional work, there are numerous photographs, images of installations in situ, and blog entries and poems by the artist.
An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of The Whale. In 1520, Albrecht Dürer, the most celebrated artist in Northern Europe, sailed to Zeeland to see a whale. A central figure of the Renaissance, no one had painted or drawn the world like him. Dürer drew hares and rhinoceroses in the way he painted saints and madonnas. The wing of a bird or the wing of an angel; a spider crab or a bursting star like the augury of a black hole, in Dürer's art, they were part of a connected world. Everything had meaning. But now he was in crisis. He had lost his patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was moorless and filled with wanderlust. In the shape of the whale, he saw his final ambition. Dürer was the first artist to truly employ the power of reproduction. He reinvented the way people looked at, and understood, art. He painted signs and wonders; comets, devils, horses, nudes, dogs, and blades of grass so accurately that even today they seem hyper-real, utterly modern images. Most startling and most modern of all, he painted himself, at every stage of his life. But his art captured more than the physical world, he also captured states of mind. Albert and the Whale explores the work of this remarkable man through a personal lens. Drawing on Philip's experience of the natural world, and of the elements that shape our contemporary lives, from suburbia to the wide open sea, Philip will enter Dürer's time machine. Seeking his own Leviathan, Hoare help us better understand the interplay between art and our world in this sublimely seductive book.
While best-known for his spindly, attenuated figures, Giacometti also created brilant work in two dimensions. This book offers a scholarly assessment of his entire oeuvre and underscores the continity between the two phases of his career: the pre-1935 works, which included his Surrealist scupltures, and his post-war masterpieces. It details Giacometti's artistic crisis, when he returned to working from the model and broke with the Surrealists, and reveals how he began tackling the problem of situating figures in space in an entirely new way. This book discusses the relationship between his two- and three-dimensional works, showing Giacometti to have been as great a painter as he was a sculptor. Featuring extraordinary images of the artist at work, this book includes photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ugo Mulas, and Man Ray.
The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities of Albertus Seba (1665-1736) is one of the 18th century's greatest natural history achievements and remains one of the most prized natural history books of all time.
Though scientists of Seba's era often collected natural specimens for research purposes, the Amsterdam-based pharmacist was unrivaled in his passion. His amazing collection of animals, plants, and insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of every specimen and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalogue. The nature Wunderkammer featured everything from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, birds, and butterflies, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. Many illustrations mixed plants and animals into a single scenic plate.
This reproduction is taken from a rare hand-colored original and features an introduction to the natural history and collecting traditions in which Seba played such an important role.
Millions buy albums and cds, and millions adore their albums not just for the music, but also for the sleeve artwork which becomes by association the visual representation of everything the album represents for the listener. Album is unique - the first visual history of this phenomenon and of the designers, art directors, recording artists, and record companies associated with the greatest music graphics of all time. Structured chronologically, the book focuses on individuals, music scenes, and subcultures, including: Punk, Surfers, Psychedelia in London, Tamla Motown, Disco Divas, and DJ Culture.
The nearly 400 WWII photographs in this book were taken primarily by German soldiers; some by civilians; some by professionals embedded with the troops. Consequently, many of them depict everyday life: jobs, weddings, dinners, musical and other social events--men and women at work and play as well as at war, a war that nearly consumed Europe. It is precisely the seemingly ordinary aspect of these snapshots--taken for family albums and for friends--that makes them so disturbing, because some of the subjects who smile benignly at the camera are the very same people who participated in the murder of millions of European civilians: Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Roma, intellectuals, homosexuals, clergy, adults, children, and infants. And they killed with apparent equanimity, without hesitation, without doubt, without regret. Album of the Damned contains pictures mostly never seen before, the majority of which were once in family albums and are pictured here with their original paper frames. Their impact is deeply disturbing precisely because they are so pedestrian. Thus, in this book, the questions once again arise as they have for so many decades: How could such ordinary people commit such brutal acts? How was it possible? The questions remain unanswerable, as they ever will be. The author acquired these photographs from some fifteen countries during a five-year research effort, reviewing more than 100,000 images from which he made his selection. He bid in auctions against museums and private collectors to create a WWII photo history unlike perhaps any other.
A fantastical journey through the pictorial world of alchemy and mysticism, the Cabbala and magic, freemasons and Rosicrusians. This unique selection of illustrations with commentaries and source texts guides us on a fascinating journey through the representations of the secret arts.
For decades, painter Alex Katz has split his time between New York and Maine, and the two very different locales have left their marks on his work. This collection, drawing on the large collection of Katz s paintings held by the Colby College Museum of Art, is the first to highlight the distinctions between the works created in each place.
After attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1949, Katz bought a studio in the rural town of Lincolnville, Maine in 1954 and began to spend his summers there. The effect on his work was immediately apparent. While he continued to produce striking New York cityscapes, he also began to paint the quieter landscape he saw in Maine. The elegance of New York interiors, meanwhile, gave way in the Maine months to paintings of outdoor leisure activities. And close-up portraits of urban faces of which Katz was a master were replaced with portraits of memorable trees, thickets against late-evening light, and flower-strewn meadows.
A fully comprehensive survey of Katz s work, this beautifully produced volume offers a new way to understand the whole of his remarkable career.
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After attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1949, Katz bought a studio in the rural town of Lincolnville, Maine in 1954 and began to spend his summers there. The effect on his work was immediately apparent. While he continued to produce striking New York cityscapes, he also began to paint the quieter landscape he saw in Maine. The elegance of New York interiors, meanwhile, gave way in the Maine months to paintings of outdoor leisure activities. And close-up portraits of urban faces of which Katz was a master were replaced with portraits of memorable trees, thickets against late-evening light, and flower-strewn meadows.
A fully comprehensive survey of Katz s work, this beautifully produced volume offers a new way to understand the whole of his remarkable career.
"
The man who launched the Golden Age of album cover design
"I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music." --Alex Steinweiss Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover as we know it, and created a new graphic art form. In 1940, as Columbia Records' young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months its record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia--combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations--took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold. Over three decades, Steinweiss made thousands of original artworks for classical, jazz, and popular record covers for Columbia, Decca, London, and Everest; as well as logos, labels, advertising material, even his own typeface, the Steinweiss Scrawl. He launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow. Less well known--but included here--are his posters for the U.S. Navy; packaging and label design for liquor companies; film title sequences; as well as his fine art. Includes essays by three-time Grammy Award-winning art director/designer Kevin Reagan and graphic design historian Steven Heller; Steinweiss' personal recollections from an epic career; and extensive ephemera from the Steinweiss archive. Record collectors and graphic designers rejoice! Previously available in a limited edition, the book is finally available in an affordable trade version.
Brooklyn is one of the most dynamic and ethnically diverse places on the planet. In fact, it's estimated that one in every eight US families had relatives come through Brooklyn when settling in the country. Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb have been photographing this New York City borough for the past five years, creating a profound and vibrant portrait. Alex Webb has traversed every corner of the borough, exploring its tremendous diversity. This parallels his work made in the past forty years, traveling to photograph different cultures around the world--all of which are represented in the place he now calls home. Contrasting with this approach, Rebecca Norris Webb photographed "the city within the city within the city," the green heart of Brooklyn--the Botanic Garden, Greenwood Cemetery, and Prospect Park, where Brooklynites of all walks of life cross paths as they find solace. Together, their photographs of Brooklyn tell a larger American story, one that touches on immigration, identity, and home.
Alexander Calder is one of the most important and most popular American artists of the twentieth century. This lavishly illustrated volume accompanies an exhibit at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf that focuses on Calder s works of the 1930s and 40s, a period in which the sculptor experimented with a number of wildly different artistic directions.In addition to showcasing a large number of Calder s early abstract sculptures, this book also presents key works by his contemporaries, artists such as Piet Mondrian, Joan Miro, and Jean Arp. By setting Calder s work alongside that of other artists, the volume establishes not only lines of influence and differentiation, but also the larger context in which he created his sculptures. Beautiful full-page images of Calder s iconic mobiles and stabiles give a rare sense of Calder s often playful use of space, and enable readers to study his work in detail. An accompanying DVD includes historical and experimental films, avant-garde music, interviews, and a walk through the exhibition, bringing the whole of Calder s achievement to life in unprecedented fashion."