Download or read book The Vexations of Art written by Svetlana Alpers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback A major art historian reflects on a great tradition of European painting. "The Vexations of Art is an engrossing, passionate attempt to re-engage with painting as a mode of thought at a time when 'it is not clear in what form the resource of painting?for surely painting has been a singular resource of the greater European culture?will continue."?Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times "[A] fascinating book that will surely generate discussion for some time to come."?Mindy Nancarrow, Renaissance Quarterly
Download or read book The Vexations written by Caitlin Horrocks and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "enthralling" debut novel and Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of the Year circles the life of eccentric composer Erik Satie in La Belle Époque Paris and examines love, family, genius, and the madness of art (New York Times Book Review). Erik Satie begins life with every possible advantage. But after the dual blows of his mother's early death and his father's breakdown upend his childhood, Erik and his younger siblings -- Louise and Conrad -- are scattered. Later, as an ambitious young composer, Erik flings himself into the Parisian art scene, aiming for greatness but achieving only notoriety. As the years, then decades, pass, he alienates those in his circle as often as he inspires them, lashing out at friends and lovers like Claude Debussy and Suzanne Valadon. Only Louise and Conrad are steadfast allies. Together they strive to maintain their faith in their brother's talent and hold fast the badly frayed threads of family. But in a journey that will take her from Normandy to Paris to Argentina, Louise is rocked by a severe loss that ultimately forces her into a reckoning with how Erik -- obsessed with his art and hungry for fame -- will never be the brother she's wished for. With her buoyant, vivid reimagination of an iconic artist's eventful life, Caitlin Horrocks has written a captivating and ceaselessly entertaining novel about the tenacious bonds of family and the costs of greatness, both to ourselves and to those we love.
Download or read book Walker Evans written by Svetlana Alpers and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903–75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans’s work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans’s practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans’s dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists—from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner—underscoring how Evans’s travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style. A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world—to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.
Download or read book Rembrandt s Enterprise written by Svetlana Alpers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on and furthering the enterprise of Rembrandt scholars, who have been reinterpreting the artist and his work over the past 25 years, Alpers presents new considerations about Rembrandt's handling of paint, his theatrical approach to his models, his use of his studio as an environment under his control, and his relationship to those who bought his work. Her study is timely in light of recent research showing that well-known works attributed to Rembrandt are by followers instead. Alpers developed her text from a lecture series, and the prose gains readability by retaining some of the flavor of a talk. Still, this will find its audience chiefly among scholars and specialists in the field. Kathryn W. Finkelstein, M. Ln., Cincinnati Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- From Library Journal.
Download or read book Roof Life written by Svetlana Alpers and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebrated art historian who has spent a lifetime looking at art writes about looking as a way of being in the world This is not a memoir. It does not take the form of a story. It is instead a kind of self-portrait, or perhaps several self-portraits. Svetlana Alpers had been keeping files: records of what she saw out the windows of her loft in New York; records of art sold, bought, or seen on her walls; records of foods found in markets and prepared in places where she lived; and records of herself seen in photographs, drawings, and paintings made by others. In solving the question of her father's place and date of birth, she reconstructs the life of her Russian grandfather in a distant and tumultuous Europe of a century ago. It was Roof Life that made it all come together. The title refers to what one discovers looking out from high windows with distant and distinctive views. In addition, it refers to the way one's attention is heightened and sharpened by confronting things that are unfamiliar, or that are made to appear unfamiliar by circumstances. It describes the immediacy of distance. Renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers assembles in these pages descriptions of things that mattered in a life that began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, continued in Berkeley, California, and is now lived in New York City. The experience of Europe informs it all.
Download or read book Picturing Science Producing Art written by Peter Galison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book London s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant Garde written by David Curtis and published by John Libbey Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of two short-lived artist-run spaces that are associated with some of the most innovative developments in the arts in Britain in the late 1960s. The Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967–69) was home to the first UK screenings of Andy Warhol's twin-screen 3 hour film Chelsea Girls, challenging exhibitions (John and Yoko / John Latham / Takis / Roelof Louw), poetry and music (first UK performance of Erik Satie's 24-hour Vexations) and fringe theatre (People Show / Freehold / Jane Arden's Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven / Will Spoor Mime Theatre). The Robert Street 'New Arts Lab' (1969–71) housed Britain's first video workshop TVX, the London Filmmakers Co-op's first workshop and a 5-days-a-week cinema devoted to showing new work by moving-image artists (David Larcher / Malcolm Le Grice / Sally Potter / Carolee Schneemann / Peter Gidal). It staged J G Ballard's infamous Crashed Cars exhibition and John & Dianne Lifton's pioneering computer-aided dance/mime performances. The impact of London's Labs led to an explosion of new artist-led spaces across Britain. This book relates the struggles of FACOP (Friends of the Arts Council Operative) to make the case for these new kinds of space and these new art-forms and the Arts Council's hesitant response – in the context of a popular press already hostile to youth culture, experimental art and the 'underground'. With a Foreword by Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern & Contemporary British Art and Archives, Tate Gallery.
Download or read book Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence written by Svetlana Alpers and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Tiepolo's works as examples of the specifically pictorial as distinct from the verbal intelligence. This study aims to show that Tiepolo's greatness lies not in stories told, or in meanings pursued, but in the use of the visual medium - drawing, painting, and natural light.
Download or read book The Studio Reader written by Mary Jane Jacob and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist’s studio. Examples abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a “factory,” artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices. The Studio Reader pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist’s practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually—at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines. A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, The Studio Reader reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.
Download or read book The Making of Rubens written by Svetlana Alpers and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau, the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France, where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow, art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin, and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender. Finally, Alpers considers creativity itself and how, as a man and as a painter, Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy, intoxicated, and, following Virgil's account, disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal.
Download or read book The Book of Tea written by Kakuzo Okakura and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2006 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book of Tea is a brief but classic essay on tea drinking, its history, restorative powers, and rich connection to Japanese culture. Okakura felt that "Teaism" was at the very center of Japanese life and helped shape everything from art, aesthetics, and an appreciation for the ephemeral to architecture, design, gardens, and painting. In tea could be found one source of what Okakura felt was Japan's and, by extension, Asia's unique power to influence the world. Containing both a history of tea in Japan and lucid, wide-ranging comments on the schools of tea, Zen, Taoism, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony and its tea-masters, this book is deservedly a timeless classic and will be of interest to anyone interested in the Japanese arts and ways. Book jacket.
Download or read book Minimalism Origins written by Edward Strickland and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-22 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term Minimalism appeared in the mid-1960s, primarily with reference to the stripped down sculpture of artists like Donald Judd. This volume investigates the origins of Minimalism in post-war American culture. The author redefines it as a movement that developed reductive stylistic innovations.
Download or read book The Memory Arts in Renaissance England written by William E. Engel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-18 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.
Download or read book Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature written by Andrew Hiscock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the lively debate of memory, this book maps how radical cultural and political changes shaped early modern England.
Download or read book Painting as an Art written by Richard Wollheim and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the twentieth century’s most influential texts on philosophical aesthetics Painting as an Art is acclaimed philosopher Richard Wollheim’s encompassing vision of how to view art. Transcending the traditional boundaries of art history, Wollheim draws on his three great passions—philosophy, psychology, and art—to present an illuminating theory of the very experience of art. He shows how to unlock the meaning of a painting by retrieving—almost reenacting—the creative activity that produced it. In order to fully appreciate a work of art, Wollheim argues, critics must bring a much richer conception of human psychology than they have in the past. This classic book points the way to discovering what is most profound and subtle about paintings by major artists such as Titian, Bellini, and de Kooning.
Download or read book Information Arts written by Stephen Wilson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the work and ideas of artists who use—and even influence—science and technology. A new breed of contemporary artist engages science and technology—not just to adopt the vocabulary and gizmos, but to explore and comment on the content, agendas, and possibilities. Indeed, proposes Stephen Wilson, the role of the artist is not only to interpret and to spread scientific knowledge, but to be an active partner in determining the direction of research. Years ago, C. P. Snow wrote about the "two cultures" of science and the humanities; these developments may finally help to change the outlook of those who view science and technology as separate from the general culture. In this rich compendium, Wilson offers the first comprehensive survey of international artists who incorporate concepts and research from mathematics, the physical sciences, biology, kinetics, telecommunications, and experimental digital systems such as artificial intelligence and ubiquitous computing. In addition to visual documentation and statements by the artists, Wilson examines relevant art-theoretical writings and explores emerging scientific and technological research likely to be culturally significant in the future. He also provides lists of resources including organizations, publications, conferences, museums, research centers, and Web sites.
Download or read book This Is Not Your City written by Caitlin Horrocks and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven women confront dramas both every-day and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks’ This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language; the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates; and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks’ women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.
