Edward Saywell Livres

Albert Henry Munsell (1858-1918) was an American painter, teacher of art, and the inventor of the Munsell color system. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, attended and served on the faculty of Massachusetts Normal Art School, and died in nearby Brookline. As a painter, he was noted for seascapes and portraits. Munsell is famous for inventing the Munsell color system, an early attempt at creating an accurate system for numerically describing colors. He wrote three books about it: A Color Notation (1905), Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915) and one published posthumously, A Grammar of Color: Arrangements of Strathmore Papers in a Variety of Printed Color Combinations According to The Munsell Color System (1921).

Contemporary art is a vast and complex field representing artists, ideas and trends from every imaginable cultural and geographical background. This book introduces the art of our times by taking the reader through a tour of some 70 examples from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Thematic chapters present artistic categories, concepts and propositions that offer a path toward understanding the different subjects, forms, styles, purposes and techniques of contemporary art. Some, such as portraiture, are long-standing notions in the history of art; others, such as site appropriation, raise provocative questions and may be less immediately obvious. But it is the works themselves--brilliantly conceived by some of the most creative minds of our times--that make the case for embracing contemporary art in all its diversity.