Download or read book Counterpoint A Memoir of Bach and Mourning written by Philip Kennicott and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer’s greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach’s compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?
Download or read book The Washington Post Pulitzers Phil Kennicott Criticism written by Phil Kennicott and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. For critic Philip Kennicott, the line between art and social criticism is a thin one. In a voice both knowledgeable and compassionate, Kennicott joins his readers in contemplating the much deeper meaning underlying aesthetics. From his examination of violence and war in his review of a Taryn Simon photographic project, to his analysis of corporate America in an exhibit for architect Kevin Roche, Kennicott not only interprets art, but captures and conveys its meaning and significance in a manner that invites readers in, and encourages us to look closer.
Download or read book Architecture s Odd Couple written by Hugh Howard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In architectural terms, the twentieth century can be largely summed up with two names: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson. Wright (1867–1959) began it with his romantic prairie style; Johnson (1906–2005) brought down the curtain with his spare postmodernist experiments. Between them, they built some of the most admired and discussed buildings in American history. Differing radically in their views on architecture, Wright and Johnson shared a restless creativity, enormous charisma, and an outspokenness that made each man irresistible to the media. Often publicly at odds, they were the twentieth century's flint and steel; their repeated encounters consistently set off sparks. Yet as acclaimed historian Hugh Howard shows, their rivalry was also a fruitful artistic conversation, one that yielded new directions for both men. It was not despite but rather because of their contentious--and not always admiring--relationship that they were able so powerfully to influence history. In Architecture's Odd Couple, Howard deftly traces the historical threads connecting the two men and offers readers a distinct perspective on the era they so enlivened with their designs. Featuring many of the structures that defined modern space--from Fallingwater to the Guggenheim, from the Glass House to the Seagram Building--this book presents an arresting portrait of modern architecture's odd couple and how they shaped the American landscape by shaping each other.
Download or read book Seeing Differently The Phillips Collects for a New Century written by David C. Driskell and published by Giles. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive collection catalogue that offers a multiplicity of fresh perspectives on recent modern and contemporary art acquisitions in The Phillips Collection
Download or read book Nanotecture written by Rebecca Roke and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most wide-ranging, comprehensive and inclusive book on small-scale architecture ever published An inspiring, surprising and fun collection of 300 works of small-scale architecture including demountable, portable, transportable and inflatable structures as well as pavilions, installations, sheds, cabins, pods, capsules and tree houses.
Download or read book Pilgrimage written by Annie Leibovitz and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A striking collection by the eminent photographer encompasses her visual translations of how people live and do their work, showcasing her images of historically and culturally relevant homes belonging to such famous figures as Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Louisa May Alcott.
Download or read book Mad Enchantment written by Ross King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claude Monet's water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The dramatic history behind these paintings is little known; Ross King's Mad Enchantment tells the full story for the first time and, in the process, presents a compelling and original portrait of one of our most popular and cherished artists. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Monet, then in his mid-seventies, was one of the world's most famous and successful painters, with a large house in the country, a fleet of automobiles and a colossal reputation. However, he had virtually given up painting following the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and the onset of blindness a year later. Nonetheless, it was during this period of sorrow, ill health and creative uncertainty that – as the guns roared on the Western Front – he began the most demanding and innovative paintings he had ever attempted. Encouraged by close friends such as Georges Clemenceau, France's dauntless prime minister, Monet would work on these magnificent paintings throughout the war years and then for the rest of his life. So obsessed with his monumental task that the village barber was summoned to clip his hair as he worked beside his pond, he covered hundreds of yards of canvas with shimmering layers of pigment. As his ambitions expanded with his paintings, he began planning what he intended to be his legacy to the world: the 'Musée Claude Monet' in the Orangerie in Paris. Drawing on letters and memoirs and focusing on this remarkable period in the artist's life, Mad Enchantment gives an intimate portrayal of Claude Monet in all his tumultuous complexity, and firmly places his water lily paintings among the greatest achievements in the history of art.
Download or read book You Say to Brick written by Wendy Lesser and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life. Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Rather than focusing on corporate commissions, he devoted himself to designing research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, and other structures that would serve the public good. But this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. Kahn himself, however, is not the only complex subject that comes vividly to life in these pages. His signature achievements—like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad—can at first seem as enigmatic and beguiling as the man who designed them. In attempts to describe these structures, we are often forced to speak in contradictions and paradoxes: structures that seem at once unmistakably modern and ancient; enormous built spaces that offer a sense of intimate containment; designs in which light itself seems tangible, a raw material as tactile as travertine or Kahn’s beloved concrete. This is where Lesser’s talents as one of our most original and gifted cultural critics come into play. Interspersed throughout her account of Kahn’s life and career are exhilarating “in situ” descriptions of what it feels like to move through his built structures. Drawing on extensive original research, lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students, and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive genius, revealing the mind behind some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated architecture.
Download or read book A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters written by Homi K. Bhaba and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2012 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is divided into eighteen chapters. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: an annotation, a large portrait series depicting bloodline members and a second series containing photographic evidence. 817 portraits are systematically arranged within their chapters. Simon includes empty portraits, representing living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are provided in the captions and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever and women not granted permission to be photographed. Simon's presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents. These narratives are recognisable as variants (versions, renderings, adaptations) of historical or future episodes. In contrast to the systematic ordering of a bloodline, the seductive elements of these stories - violence, resilience, corruption and survival - disorient the work's highly structured appearance. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, will accompany an exhibition of the same name at Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Like the exhibition, the book will also be broken into eighteen chapters. Each chapter will house photographs of the work and extended captions and texts by Simon. Critical essays within the tome are by Geoffrey Batchen and Homi Bhabha.
Download or read book Music in Willa Cather s Fiction written by Richard Giannone and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music is everywhere in Willa Cather's fiction: as a subject, in the background, slyly commenting on the action, connecting characters to a distant world, or revealing their interior worlds. Not merely incidental or ornamental, though, music is intrinsic to Cather's work, a distinctive quality of her creation and expression, and it is in this light that Richard Giannone considers Cather's art. Music in Willa Cather's Fiction is the definitive study of its subject. The first work to examine the complex thematic and structural forms that music acquires in Cather's narratives, Giannone's book uses this musical approach as a way of seeing into the author's artistic sensibility, the evolution of her art, and her total achievement. ø Progressing chronologically, Giannone shows how Cather's view and use of music changed over time. From what her early journalistic pieces on music and musicians reveal about her attitude and anticipate in her later work, Giannone moves to Cather's early stories to identify the trend of some of her artistic choices, the direction of her stylistic development, and the complication of her moral interest as these are manifested in musical references. In her novels and later stories, he emphasizes the contribution of music to the individual work, as well as the allusions and connections that sound throughout her oeuvre.
Download or read book Nation to Nation written by Suzan Shown Harjo and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nation to Nation explores the promises, diplomacy, and betrayals involved in treaties and treaty making between the United States government and Native Nations. One side sought to own the riches of North America and the other struggled to hold on to traditional homelands and ways of life. The book reveals how the ideas of honor, fair dealings, good faith, rule of law, and peaceful relations between nations have been tested and challenged in historical and modern times. The book consistently demonstrates how and why centuries-old treaties remain living, relevant documents for both Natives and non-Natives in the 21st century.
Download or read book Shirin Neshat written by Steven Henry Madoff and published by Smithsonian Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Shirin Neshat: Facing History, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian institution, Wahington DC May18- September 20, 2015"--Title page verso.
Download or read book L ger written by Christian Derouet and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful look at the dynamic relationship between modern art and modern urban life in 1920s Paris through the lens of Fernand Léger's masterpiece The City With his landmark 1919 painting The City, Fernand Léger (1881-1955) inaugurated a vitally experimental decade during which he and others redefined the practice of painting in confrontation with the forms of cultural production that were central to urban life, ranging from graphic and advertising design to theater, dance, film, and architecture. This catalogue casts new light on the painting (reproducing all of its studies together for the first time), the avant-garde use of print media, and Léger's fascination with cinema and architecture, and contextualizes a network of international avant-gardes--including Blaise Cendrars, Le Corbusier, Jean Epstein, Piet Mondrian, Amédée Ozenfant, Francis Picabia, and Theo van Doesburg--in relation to Léger. Featuring nearly 250 images of paintings, architectural designs, models, posters, set designs, and film stills and an anthology of relevant historical texts not previously published in English, this handsome volume conveys the spirit of experimentation of the 1920s. Scholars in the fields of art, architecture, and film history offer a deeper understanding of the relationship between art and the modern urban experience that defined this significant chapter in the history of modern art. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (10/14/13-01/05/14)
Download or read book World War I and American Art written by Robert Cozzolino and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -World War I and American Art provides an unprecedented look at the ways in which American artists reacted to the war. Artists took a leading role in chronicling the war, crafting images that influenced public opinion, supported mobilization efforts, and helped to shape how the war's appalling human toll was memorialized. The book brings together paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, posters, and ephemera, spanning the diverse visual culture of the period to tell the story of a crucial turning point in the history of American art---
Download or read book Yayoi Kusama written by Seattle Art Museum and published by Prestel. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms are filled with a multiplicity of lights that reflect endlessly, projecting the illusion of infinite space. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors traces these installations over five decades, revealing the ways in which they developed from a strategy of "self-obliteration" and political liberation during the Vietnam War to a means of social harmony in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent ethereal atmospheres, this volume aims to historicize her pioneering work amidst today's renewed interest in experiential practices"--
Download or read book Slow Art written by Arden Reed and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : marking time -- What is slow art? (when images swell into events and events condense into images) -- Living pictures -- Before slow art -- Slow art emerges in modernity I : secularization from Diderot to Wilde -- Slow art emerges in modernity II : the great age of speed -- Slow fiction, film, video, performance, 1960 to 2010 -- Slow photography, painting, installation art, sculpture, 1960 to 2010 -- Angel and devil of slow art
Download or read book Angels Demons and Savages written by Klaus Ottmann and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published on the occasion of the exhibition Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet, co-organized by The Phillips Collection and the Parrish Art Museum.
