Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations and compositional devices using as little depth as possible.
During the 1870s and 1880s, a group of French artists, including Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, adopted a style of painting and subjects that challenged the art of the Academie Francaise where “official” assumptions about the meaning of painting prevailed. This compact, well-priced survey of the movement features sixty reproductions of some of the most renowned works, and a highly readable introductory text.
Among the pictorial genres, still life, which depicts in detail the common objects of domestic life, holds an important place. It is an art form which gives us valuable insights into changes of mentality and philosophy. This work features some sixty works since antiquity and analyzes the history and significance of each.
Post-Impressionism is a movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that styles inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of late 19th-century painters. Most of these painters began as Impressionists.
The representation of the female body has inspired some of the finest works in art history. This volume, which aims to offer a fascinating visual survey of the nude, features nearly fifty paintings and sculptures—often celebrated masterpieces—spanning from classic to contemporary art.
This book on the art of the twentieth century is published almost ten years after the end of the so-called “short century“―which, in terms of art, was anything but short―and is a valuable tool for reflection. The author has placed a series of works in sequence, accompanied by easy to understand critical commentary. With concise introductions devoted to every significant art movement and more than 400 color illustrations, this volume enables the reader to become familiar with the fascinating and complex world of contemporary art from futurism to pop-art, dada to conceptual. Presented are some of the most famous artists of the twentieth-century―from Arp to Brancusi, Bacon to Basquiat, Gris to Koons, Gaudi to Schnabel, Warhol to Grant Wood―and their greatest masterworks―never before have they been so accessible as they are in this format.
Surrealism is an art movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement. Like Dada, it was shaped by theories on our perception of reality.
A richly illustrated and extremely enjoyable reference book on the historical evolution of the nude. From the Paleolithic "great mothers" to the Greek athletes, from the Venus of Urbino by Titian to Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, from the Odalisque by Boucher to those by Ingres, to the Amazons of Helmut Newton and the desolate, lifeless bodies of Andres Serrano, the nude is the theme of artistic representation par excellence. The nude body as the incarnation of perfect beauty and the suspicions concerning its sensuality imposed by Christian culture; the renewed triumph of ancient beauty in the Renaissance and the study of anatomy; the visual licentiousness of the eighteenth century and the photographic nude; ideal beauty, eroticism, pornography; the nude also as representation of the ugly and its flaunted truthfulness in the art of the twentieth century; the nude that itself becomes a work of art in the avant-garde of the post-WWII period, with performance, body art and experimental theater. These threads of the narration make for a deeply informative historical exploration of the nude in Western art, all conducted around a rich apparatus of images.
Piero Manzoni was one of the most radically inventive artists of the twentieth century whose work continues to challenge the definitions of artistic sovereignty and virtuosity to this day.
