How do we judge what is good in art? Or more to the controversial point, can we judge art? Acclaimed museum director Maxwell Anderson, newly named Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, enters the fray with The Quality Instinct. Part personal memoir, part thinking person's guide to the museum, The Quality Instinct is filled with wit and humor, anecdotes, and insights from the author's 30 years in the highly competitive, often contentious art world. Anderson takes us on a grand tour of ancient and contemporary art, sharing five simple metrics of quality that help us to increase our "visual literacy" as we learn to see, not simply look and judge.
An address book in which each alphabetical divider-page opens with a detail from a Van Gogh painting and is followed overleaf by an image of the complete work and a quotation from one of the artist's letters. The spiral binding enables the book to be laid open at any page.
This monumental new book is the first to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings from the encyclopedic collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive volume's broad sweep of material, all from a single museum, makes it at once a universal history of painting and the ideal introduction to the iconic masterworks of this world-renowned institution. More than 1,000 lavish color illustrations and details of 500 masterpiece paintings, created over 5,000 years in cultures across the globe, are presented chronologically from the dawn of civilization to the present. These works represent a grand tour of painting from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity and prized Byzantine and medieval altarpieces, to paintings from Asia, India, Africa and the Americas, and and the greatest European and North American masters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art includes and introduction and illuminating texts about each artwork written specially for this volume by Kathryn Calley Galitz, whose experience as both curator and educator at the Met makes her uniquely qualified. European and American artists include Duccio, El Greco, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Turner, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Vermeer, David, Renior, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Sargent, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Warhol. The artworks are arranged in rough chronological order, without regard to geography or culture, offering a visual timeline of the history of painting, from the earliest examples on pottery jars made over five thousand years ago to canvases on which the paint has barely dried. Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the Museum, the paintings resonate anew; and this chronological framework reveals unexpected visual affinities among the works. For those wishing to experience the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Met's collection, or study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, this important volume is sure to become a classic cherished by art lovers around the world.
Modern Architecture is a landmark text--the first book in which America's greatest architect put forth the principles of a fundamentally new, organic architecture that would reject the trappings of historical styles while avoiding the geometric abstraction of the machine aesthetic advocated by contemporary European modernists. One of the most important documents in the development of modern architecture and the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture is a provocative and profound polemic against America's architectural eclecticism, commercial skyscrapers, and misguided urban planning. The book is also a work of savvy self-promotion, in which Wright not only advanced his own concept of an organic architecture but also framed it as having anticipated by decades--and bettered--what he saw as the reductive modernism of his European counterparts. Based on the 1931 original, for which Wright supplied the cover illustration, this beautiful edition includes a new introduction that puts Modern Architecture in its broader architectural, historical, and intellectual context for the first time. The subjects of these lively lectures--from "Machinery, Materials and Men" to "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper" and "The City"--move from a general statement of the conditions of modern culture to particular applications in the fields of architecture and urbanism at ever broadening scales. Wright's vision in Modern Architecture is ultimately to equate the truly modern with romanticism, imagination, beauty, and nature--all of which he connects with an underlying sense of American democratic freedom and individualism.
The Museum Tinguely, opened in Basel in 1996, is dedicated to the work of the artist Jean Tinguely (1925 –1991). The collection can for the most part be traced back to a donation by Tinguely’s widow, Niki de Saint Phalle, and contains sculptures, drawings, sketches and archived documents that record the accomplishments of the important avant-garde artist up until his later work. As a Swiss artist in Paris, Tinguely was a member of the Nouveaux Réalistes along with Yves Klein, Christo and Daniel Spoerri. His kinetic sculptures helped to shape the artistic awakening of his time, and with happenings such as Homage to New York, and the Studies for an End of the World he can be said to have been partially responsible for a radical expansion of the definition of art in the early 1960s. The catalog depicts all the sculptures in the collection as well as a generous selection of drawings and sketches. It encompasses a thorough biography, a text on the happenings and events in which Tinguely was involved, recently compiled directories as well as an essay on the restoration of the machine sculptures in the museum.
This is the long-awaited coloring book from illustrator Yuko Higuchi. Follow a brother and sister on their magical, and at times surreal, trip through Yuko Higuchi's museum, where they are transformed into the creatures they encounter — plants, mushrooms, mammals, reptiles, molluscs, stones, and ancient creatures. Let your imagination run riot by adding color to the illustrations. Created by cult Japanese illustrator Yuko Higuchi, this is a must for lovers of all things fantastical and bizarre.
The San Francisco Exploratorium squeezed between the covers of a book! The "pages" reflect, magnify, or grow as you follow the instructions. Seven subjects are covered, including light wave craziness, ouchless physics, and hair dryer science.
The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European sculpture featured in this volume ranges in date from the late fifteenth century to the very early twentieth and includes a wide variety of media: marble, bronze, alabaster, terracotta, plaster, wood, ivory, and gold. The earliest sculpture represented is the mysterious Saint Cyricus by Francesco Laurana; the latest is a shield-like portrait of Medusa by the eccentric Italian sculptor Vincenzo Gemito. Among the more than forty works included in this handsomely illustrated volume are sculptures by Antico (Bust of a Young Man); Cellini (a Satyr designed for Fontainebleau); Giambologna (a Female Figure that may represent Venus); Bernini (Boy with a Dragon); and Carpeaux (Bust of Jean-Léon Gérôme). Well represented here is the Museum’s splendid collection of Mannerist and early Baroque bronzes, including such masterpieces as Johann Gregor van der Schardt’s Mercury and two superb works by Adriaen de Vries: Juggling Man and Rearing Horse. These works are indicative of the extraordinary quality of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of post-Classical European sculpture.
Philippe Daverio is one of Italy’s most important contemporary art historians, whose discerning comments about art are voraciously consumed by the public through his writing as editor of the famed magazine Art e Dossier and his platform on a leading Italian television program Passepartout. Now, in his first full-length work of narrative nonfiction, Daverio uses the conceit of creating his own perfect museum gallery and in the process reexamines major artistic masterpieces of Western art. Daverio turns his critical eye on the place of Western art in contemporary twenty-first-century culture and how we relate to art generally. According to Daverio, we relate to the history of art based on views that crystallized in the nineteenth century, and so we look to the past to understand the present, though the present is what truly matters to everyone. Daverio means to challenge this perspective, and guided by his curiosity and personal taste, he examines key masterworks to rediscover the true meaning and power they had before they became commoditized and clichéd. Some distinctive features of this illustrated eBook are: • 800+ full size and detailed images of paintings and drawings. • 280+ artworks with pop-up ability. • 160 thumbnails with links showing the setting of the work and location in its home museum, with informational text. • 92 links to museum websites that house the real works. The Italian-language edition of The Ideal Museum ebook has been awarded the QED Seal (Quality, Excellence, Design)—the premier award for ebooks and book apps—by the council of the Publishing Innovation Awards. This award recognizes the title’s portability and readability, providing the best reading experience possible.
