Diego Rivera (1886–1957) is a loud presence on the art historical stage. With devout political principles and a turbulent romantic history, he was at once husband and paladin of Frida Kahlo, advocate and adversary of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and liberator and traitor of Leon Trotsky.
Vibrant, graphic, and often monumental, Rivera’s paintings carry the same live political and passionate charge ...
Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork.
Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from ...
When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artist’s Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in a gallery, sent shock waves through the art world establishment that reverberate right through to today.
This essential introduction distills all the daring and the scandal of Duchamp’s practice ...
The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.
Pollock’s most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel ...
The Case Study House program (1945–1966) was a unique event in the history of American architecture. Sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, the program sought to respond to the postwar building boom with prototype modern homes that could be both easily replicated and readily affordable to the average American.
Concentrated on the Los Angeles area, the Case Study Houses included ...
Bradburne J., Duncombe S., Funnel P., Nori F.
The visual rhetoric of charisma and power in photographic portraiture renews itself endlessly, and this volume assesses its recent expressions--both propagandistic and deconstructed--in the works of Tina Barney, Clegg & Guttman, Nick Danziger, Rineke Dijkstra, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Trevor Paglen, Martin Parr, Daniela Rossell, Jules Spinatsch, Hiroshi Sugimoto and The Yes Men among others.
Frida Kahlo died in 1954, but it wasn't until the early eighties that her colorful paintings began to draw the attention they have long deserved.
Kahlo's intense emotional works reflect her philosophy of nature and life, which was intertwined with the revival of Indian culture in the Mexico of her time. Wrote Diego Rivera of his wife: "She is the ...
The major paintings of iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) presented together in an accessible volume.
Andrew Wyeth is an essential introduction to the enduring masterworks of this profoundly popular American artist.
Published on the occasion of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this handsome book highlights works spanning the entirety of the artist’s seven-decade career painting the landscapes and ...
This book was produced both to honor the centenary of Rodchenko's birth and to accompany an exhibition of the works of two of the principal founders of Russian constructivism. This husband-and-wife team's various theories, manifestos, and chronological activities are well explicated. Their chief accomplishment is the offering of important information, illustrations, and writings from previously obscure Russian sources. Rodchenko's pioneering ...
Examining Edvard Munch’s influence on his Austrian and German contemporaries, this book offers a fascinating new look at the Norwegian artist, whose painting The Scream has become a symbol of modern angst. Edvard Munch came of age during an artistic period that celebrated beauty and design. But in his own art, Munch explored darker themes―alienation, sin, and human vulnerability. His ...
An intriguing collection of unposed and engaging color portraits of people from all backgrounds and corners of the globe by an award-winning photographer includes the famous "Afghan Girl" photograph and equally memorable images ranging from a bejewelled Indian bride to a Paraguayan cowboy--255 photos in all.
LOOKING AT ANSEL ADAMS is a personal and penetrating study that explores Ansel's life as an artist by looking closely at the stories behind 20 of his most significant images. Immediately recognizable photographs like Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, and Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake are turned on their axes and seen from a new angle, along with ancillary photographs, alternative ...
Artless presents some of the most compelling images created by contemporary artists and illustrators using the simplest of tools, such as color pencils, crayons, watercolor, scissors, and glue.
Work produced in this manner represents a growing and particularly resilient trend in the visual arts world. Through individual interviews with over 50 artists, Artless looks at how and why these particular ...
In 1883 Paul Gauguin abandons his prominent banking career and decides that from now on I will pai nt every day. The co - founder of Synthetism and trailblazer of Expressionism turns his back on the bourgeois world, leaves his wife and children, and, in 1891, sets out for the South Sea, financing his journey through the sale of thirty ...
