"Arcimboldo, a 16th century Italian artist [working in Vienna and Prague] is an artist with an indisputable claim, he single mindedly pursued his invention, the so-termed "composite head", applying it to numerous and varied subjects. Apt and witty combinations of animals, fish, fruit, vegetables, and a variety of other objects, all painted with meticulous realism, are fitted together into head and shoulder figures that sometimes have the look of portraits. He also devised compositions that can be hung upside down as well as right side up. Arcimboldo's major works were his numerous series on allegorical themes, especially the Four Seasons and the Four Elements."--Amazon.
In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance art’s most striking oeuvres. The first major study in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings, Arcimboldo tells the singular story of their creation. Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo’s life and work, exploring the artist’s early years in sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in Vienna and Prague. Arcimboldo then trains its focus on the celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with serious underpinnings—images that poetically display pictorial wit while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces, Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator’s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realized—a finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads. Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these works to natural history and still-life painting, Arcimboldo finally restores the artist’s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.
Newbery Medal-winning author Nancy Willard's trilogy of adventure tales, now in one volume. Children won't be able to put down these stories of the journeys of a boy and his orange cat, Plumpet. Anatole has a knack for seeking and finding adventure, often with Plumpet, his orange cat, who is accustomed to ghost trains, amnesiac soldiers, flying horses, and wallpaper portals, just a few of the enchantments encountered along the way. From his perilous search for wild fennel to cure his grandmother’s asthma, to his high-stakes game of checkers to save his uncle from a wizard’s evil spell, Anatole’s missions will keep young readers turning the pages of this omnibus edition of the Newbery Medal–winning author Nancy Willard’s trilogy of fantasy tales: Sailing to Cythera, The Island of the Grass King, and Uncle Terrible. David McPhail’s pen-and-ink illustrations throughout are beautifully detailed engagements with Willard’s world of make-believe. Anatole may be small but he is determined to right the wrongs he finds in each of the lands he enters. Whether kindness or evil will prevail is a matter of suspense, but Anatole is always on the side of the light.
Art and Food is a collection of essays exploring a range of research topics relating to the representation of food in art and art in food, from iconography and allegory, through class and commensality, to kitchen architecture and haute cuisine.
Explores Dali's experiments with perspectives, offering more than one hundred color and sixty-one black and white illustrations of the artist's optical illusions.
Expanded to twice as many entries as the 1985 edition, and updated with new publications, new editions of previous entries, titles missed the first time around, more of the artists' own writings, and monographs that deal with significant aspects or portions of an artist's work though not all of it. The listing is alphabetical by artist, and the index by author. The works cited include analytical and critical, biographical, and enumerative; their formats range from books and catalogues raisonnes to exhibition and auction sale catalogues. A selection of biographical dictionaries containing information on artists is arranged by country. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The concept of poesie critique - poetry that possesses both a poetic and a critical function - has an extensive history in modern literature. Written in response to another work of art, be it a painting, a film, a poem, or a piece of music, the critical poem comments on the latter in various ways but refuses to abandon its poetic mission. Marvelous Encounters examines surrealist poets writing in French, Spanish, and Catalan who experimented with this intriguing genre. The first three chapters are concerned with the French surrealists, who began to cultivate critical poetry toward the end of World War I. Chapter 2 considers how Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault appropriated the critical poem, as they reviewed books of poetry and films starring Charlie Chaplin. Chapter 3, which examines how Benjamin Peret and Paul Eluard conceived of critical poetry, analyzes their response to poems by Tristan Tzara and paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Joan Miro. Chapter 4 is devoted entirely to Andre Breton.
"This selection of thirty letters and two postcards, written between September 2, 1969, and September 12, 1972, includes most of Pizarnik's correspondence with Spanish writer-editor-artist Antonio Beneyto. From these informative letters we learn about her influences, the artists, poets, and writers she preferred, and her reactions to them. She collaborated on various projects and cultivated many literary and personal ties with writers of the stature of Julio Cortazar, Olga Orozco, Octavio Paz, Pieyre de Mandiargues, Silvina Ocampo, and Luisa Sofovich, among others." "Although the corpus of Pizarnik's writing available in English has expanded in the last twelve years, it is still far from adequate. This is the first time that a selection of letters from Alejandra Pizarnik to Antonio Beneyto has been published in English. The translators hope that this volume will serve English-speaking audiences as a new bridge to her work."--BOOK JACKET.
