This striking book explores contemporary portraiture from the past decade. The selection features cutting-edge new work from the international art community and reflects an increasing interest in identity worldwide. Organised thematically, the book examines seven key strands of portraiture: The Body; The Self-Portrait; The Invented Portrait; The Anonymous Portrait; Social Identity; The Celebrity Portrait. With an essay by Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, that locates contemporary portraiture within a historic tradition, 21st Century Portraits examines current trends, showcasing the wide range of media today's artists are using. This book includes an extensive bibliography and is an essential reference work in the field of twenty-first-century portraiture. It will present many images to academic, curatorial and general audiences, including museum and gallery visitors and general art book buyers in the trade for the first time.
This book examines the ways in which China’s universities have changed in the dramatic move to a mass stage which has unfolded since the late 1990s. Twelve universities in different regions of the country are portrayed through the eyes of their students, faculty and leaders. The book begins with the national level policy process around the move to mass higher education. This is followed by an analysis of the views of 2,300 students on the 12 campuses about how the changes have affected their learning experiences and civil society involvement. The 12 portraits in the next section are of three comprehensive universities, three education-related universities, three science and technology universities, and three newly emerging private universities. The final chapter sketches the contours of an emerging Chinese model of the university, and explores its connections to China’s longstanding scholarly traditions
Portraits of the Mind follows the fascinating history of our exploration of the brain through images, from medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, allowing us to see the fantastic networks in the brain as never before. These black-and-white and vibrantly colored images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but most have never before been seen by the general public. Each chapter addresses a different set of techniques for studying the brain as revealed through the images, and each is introduced by a leading scientist in that field of study. Author Carl Schoonover's captions provide detailed explanations of each image as well as the major insights gained by scientists over the course of the past 20 years. Accessible to a wide audience, this book reveals the elegant methods applied to study the mind, giving readers a peek at its innermost workings, helping us to understand them, and offering clues about what may lie ahead. Praise for Portraits of the Mind: "An odyssey through the brain, illuminated by a rainbow" --New York Times "Stunning images" --Scientific American "The collection of images in the new book Portraits of the Mind is truly impressive . . . The mix of history, science and art is terrific." -Wired.com "History, science, and art come together to provide a unique perspective on what's going on upstairs." --New Yorker.com "No knowledge of the source or subject matter of these images is necessary; the book is justified by their beauty alone." --Science "A remarkable new book" - -Discover.com "John Keats's insistence that truth is beauty is exemplified by Carl Schoonover's wonderful book Portraits of the Mind. Since one cannot understand the present without examining the past, this book offers a delightful and instructive way of accomplishing just that. I enthusiastically recommend this beautiful book both to students of brain science and to lovers of art." -Eric R. Kandel, MD, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2000; University Professor at Columbia; Fred Kavli Professor and Director, Kavli Institute for Brain Science; Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and author of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind "Portraits of the Mind achieves a rare combination of beauty and knowledge. Its images of the brain are mesmerizing, from medieval engravings to modern visualizations as gorgeously abstract as anything by Rothko or de Kooning. And in explaining the nature of these images, this book also delivers an enlightening, up-to-date history of neuroscience." -Carl Zimmer, author of Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain-and How It Changed the World and The Mind's Eye Goes Blind: Fifteen Journeys Through the Brain "Portraits of the Mind is a remarkable book that combines beautifully reproduced illustrations of the nervous system as it has been visualized over the centuries, as well as lively and authoritative commentaries by some of today's leading neuroscientists. It will be enjoyed by professionals and general readers alike." --Dale Purves, MD, Professor of Neurobiology, Psychology and Neuroscience; and Philosophy at Duke University
Portrait painting is inherently difficult and requires a unique understanding of and sensitivity to the sitter. This practical book considers the historical context of portrait painting and its contemporary practice. Written by a professional portrait painter, it describes the intricacies of making a portrait not just for the technically minded but also for those who are interested in a painter's perspective on the role and importance of portraiture.Step-by-step demonstrations of portraits and self-portraits.Techniques that use colour to introduce subtleties and presence.Advice on catching a likeness and overcoming difficulties.Discussion about the significance of copying and photography.Insights into the artistic process of the portrait painter.Work of contemporary and distinguished painters.'What fascinates me most, much much more than anything else in painting, is the portrait, the modern portrait.' Vincent van Gogh. A practical guide that considers the historical context of portrait painting and its contemporary practice.Aimed at beginners and more experienced; untutored groups and individual artists of portrait painters.Gives step-by-step demonstrations of portraits and self-portraits.Covers use of colour to introduce subtleties and presence.Superbly illustrated with 180 colour illustrations.Anthony Connolly is a professional portrait painter and won the prestigious Prince of Wales Award for Portrait Drawing in 2004.
"The Book of Portraiture "is a postmodern epic in writing and images. A desert nomad struggles at the close of the ancient world to inscribe himself into life, and centuries later a Renaissance artist attempts to overcome his lowly origins by painting nobility. Throughout Steve Tomasula's arresting tour de force, human beings seek to become what they are by representing it. An early twentieth-century psychoanalyst in search of a cure for sexual neurosis discovers the reflection of his own yearning in a female client, and an accidental community of twenty-first century image-makers connects the pixels to bring their group portrait into focus. Across a canvas that spans centuries, the several narrators of this novel look through the lens of their own time and portray objects of desire in paint, dreams, photography, electronic data, and genetic code. Together their portraits comprise a collage of styles and habits of mind. "The Book of Portraiture" is a novel about the irrepressible impulse to picture ourselves, and how, through this picturing, we continually re-create what it means to be human. "Once again, Steve Tomasula has fabricated an incisive and sly commentary on art's way of being in the world, and the manner in which it intersects, and conflicts, with our perceptions. Virtuosic in its execution, and sublime in its discernment, "The Book of Portraiture" is an able continuation of Tomasula's ongoing project to redraw the boundaries of contemporary fiction."--Christopher Sorrentino "Tomasula's five interlocking chapters cross continents and centuries and aesthetic sensibilities to build to a dazzling and dizzying whole. "The Book of Portraiture" is one of those rare books that manage to be at once emotionally and theoretically satisfying."--Brian Evenson "Think of Swift, Groddeck, Lautreamont, and George Carlin conversing together in a large wastebin--up to their chins in 21st century sweepings--and you will begin to have an idea of Tomasula's very funny, very smart and downright scary epic vision."--Rikki Ducornet Steve Tomasula is the author of the acclaimed novels IN & OZ "(Ministry of Whimsy)" and "VAS: An Opera in Flatland." Among the venues where his short fiction has appeared are "McSweeney's" and "The Iowa Review, " where he received the distinguished Iowa Prize. His writings on body art and culture have appeared in "Leonardo" and numerous arts journals.
The world's most famous portraits and the hidden stories behind their subjects are explored in this fascinating and highly entertaining book. Portraiture is one of the oldest and most studied genres of art. While most scholars will look at a painting's composition, style, and themes, often questions remain unanswered--who were these people and why were they painted? This entertaining book reveals the identities and lives of some of the most famous characters that populate art history--from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Readers will learn how the fifteen-year-old subject of da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine nearly destroyed a marriage; that van Dyck's depiction of Prudence in wild clothes is actually one of the most controversial aristocrats of the seventeenth century; and that Francis Bacon's character George Dyer was a man he met in a Soho nightclub. These and other stories behind works by Picasso, Klimt, Rubens, Warhol, and dozens of other artists show how portraiture remains one of the most enthralling genres. Based on art scholarship and conveyed in an accessible tone, these fascinating tales of power, lust, intrigue, jealousy, vengeance, and romance will help readers understand masterpieces of art history in an entirely new light.
I am down to a pencil, a pen, and a bottle of ink. I hope one day to eliminate the pencil. Al Hirschfeld redefined caricature and exemplified Broadway and Hollywood, enchanting generations with his mastery of line. His art appeared in every major publication during nine decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as on numerous book, record, and program covers; film posters and publicity art; and on fifteen U.S. postage stamps. Now, The Hirschfeld Century brings together for the first time the artist’s extraordinary eighty-two-year career, revealed in more than 360 of his iconic black-and-white and color drawings, illustrations, and photographs—his influences, his techniques, his evolution from his earliest works to his last drawings, and with a biographical text by David Leopold, Hirschfeld authority, who, as archivist to the artist, worked side by side with him and has spent more than twenty years documenting the artist’s extraordinary output. Here is Hirschfeld at age seventeen, working in the publicity department at Goldwyn Pictures (1920–1921), rising from errand boy to artist; his year at Universal (1921); and, beginning at age eighteen, art director at Selznick Pictures, headed by Louis Selznick (father of David O.) in New York. We see Hirschfeld, at age twenty-one, being influenced by the stylized drawings of Miguel Covarrubias, newly arrived from Mexico (they shared a studio on West Forty-Second Street), whose caricatures appeared in many of the most influential magazines, among them Vanity Fair. We see, as well, how Hirschfeld’s friendship with John Held Jr. (Held’s drawings literally created the look of the Jazz Age) was just as central as Covarrubias to the young artist’s development, how Held’s thin line affected Hirschfeld’s early caricatures. Here is the Hirschfeld century, from his early doodles on the backs of theater programs in 1926 that led to his work for the drama editors of the New York Herald Tribune (an association that lasted twenty years) to his receiving a telegram from The New York Times, in 1928, asking for a two-column drawing of Sir Harry Lauder, a Scottish vaudeville singing sensation making one of his (many) farewell tours, an assignment that began a collaboration with the Times that lasted seventy-five years, to Hirschfeld’s theater caricatures, by age twenty-five, a drawing appearing every week in one of four different New York newspapers. Here, through Hirschfeld’s pen, are Ethel Merman, Benny Goodman, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, the Marx Brothers, Barbra Streisand, Elia Kazan, Mick Jagger, Ella Fitzgerald, Laurence Olivier, Martha Graham, et al. . . . Among the productions featured: Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, Rent, Guys and Dolls, The Wizard of Oz (Hirschfeld drew five posters for the original release), Gone with the Wind, The Sopranos, and more. Here as well are his brilliant portraits of writers, politicians, and the like, among them Ernest Hemingway (a pal from 1920s Paris), Tom Wolfe, Charles de Gaulle, Nelson Mandela, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Sumptuous and ambitious, a book that gives us, through images and text, a Hirschfeld portrait of an artist and his age.
Though he works with an omnivorous 8x10 camera, Richard Renaldi has the roving eye of a street photographer, always searching for the brief encounter, the fleeting moment when a stranger will open his or her life to him, and, consequently, to the viewer. Richard Renaldi's "Figure and Ground," drawn from more than seven years of work, presents portraits, landscapes and, most importantly, the portraits in situ that meld those two classic photographic genres, in which he embraces not only individuals but the environment that encompasses them. These images were made across the United States, and take in not only those who might seem traditionally American-a blonde carrying a Louis Vuitton bag through a Greyhound terminal, or a rodeo cowboy, arms akimbo, standing determinedly against an all-dirt horizon-but also a woman in a burqa and Timberland boots on a faded Newark street and a transgender girl working a fast-food counter under the sad-glamorous glow of fluorescent lighting. If there is truly a center to the changing American social landscape, it can be found here, in these precisely rendered portraits.
