This book is a comprehensive study of visual humour in ancient Greece, with special emphasis on works created in Athens and Boeotia. Alexandre Mitchell brings an interdisciplinary approach to this topic, combining theories and methods of art history, archaeology, and classics with the anthropology of humour, and thereby establishing new ways of looking at art and visual humour in particular. Understanding what visual humour was to the ancients and how it functioned as a tool of social cohesion is only one facet of this study. Mitchell also focuses on the social truths that his study of humour unveils: democracy and freedom of expression, politics and religion, Greek vases and trends in fashion, market-driven production, proper and improper behaviour, popular versus elite culture, carnival in situ, and the place of women, foreigners, workers, and labourers within the Greek city. Richly illustrated with more than 140 drawings and photographs, as well as with analytical tables of comic representations according to different themes, painters, and techniques, this study amply documents the comic representations that formed an important part of ancient Greek visual language from the 6th through 4th centuries BC.

From Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grand Jatte to Hopper’s Nighthawks, one of the world's greatest collections of paintings in the palm of your hand.

The Art Institute of Chicago houses some of the most celebrated paintings from the nineteenth century to the present. Included in this collection are numerous masterpieces of realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and contemporary art. Today a number of these paintings are revered as icons of modern culture, emblems of the inspired experimentation that has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic, and around the world.

For the last century, the Art Institute has supported the achievements of the most distinguished artists from Europe and America, acquiring and exhibiting now-beloved works of Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and others. This folio is presented as both an introduction to this collection and as a survey of the styles, subjects, and themes of Western art of the last two centuries, from the linear classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres through the optical studies of Claude Monet and the Impressionists; from the lyrical, colorful abstractions of Vasily Kandinsky to the fractured picture planes of Pablo Picasso and the Cubists; from the enigmatic compositions of Salvador Dali and the Surrealists to the media-appropriated Pop-art portraits of Andy Warhol. These magnificent paintings eloquently narrate the discussions of the nature of art, quality, innovation, style, and form that have defined the modern era in art history.

This 1998 collection is a specialised study to deal with the important question of Lewis's aggression. The eight contributors consider Lewis's career, from its inception to his final novels, within a major focus on the First World War and the interwar period. Their chapters examine Lewis's First World War art, his postwar politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s and the connections between modernism, war and aggression. Overall, the volume offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.

This volume represents a long overdue reassessment of the Neapolitan painter Paolo de Matteis, an artist largely overlooked in English language scholarly publications, but one who merits our attention for the quality of his work and the originality of its iconography, as well as for his remarkable ability to respond creatively to his patrons' aesthetic ideals and agendas. Following a meticulous examination of the ways in which posterity's impression of de Matteis has been conditioned by a biased biographical and literary tradition, Livio Pestilli devotes rich, detailed analyses to the artist's most significant paintings and drawings. More than just a novel approach to de Matteis and the Neapolitan Baroque, however, the book makes a significant contribution to the study and understanding of early eighteenth-century European art and cultural history in general, not only in Naples but in other major European centers, including Paris, Vienna, Genoa, and Rome.

Phaidon's classic illustrated monograph on Raphael, updated with an elegantly crafted design for today's burgeoning art aficionados. Reviving a much beloved group of artist monographs from the Phaidon archive, the new Phaidon Classics bring to life the fine craftsmanship and design of Phaidon books of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Updated with a contemporary "classic" design, full color images and new introductions by leading specialists on the work of each artist, these elegantly crafted volumes revive the fine bookmaking of the first half of the twentieth century, making Phaidon Classics instant collectors' items. A magnificent study of Raphael (1438-1520), one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, whose brief career produced such masterpieces as The School of Athens and The Three Graces. The large-format images bring to life Raphael's radiant colors and brushwork in the religious paintings of the Madonna and saints, mythological paintings, and portraits ranging from Pope Julius II to Baldassare Castiglione.

Known worldwide for his architecture and interior designs, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was also an extremely gifted painter. Towards the end of his life, he gave up his principal career as an architect and moved to the south of France where he devoted himself to painting in watercolour. Meticulously executed and brilliantly coloured, these landscape watercolours are conceived with a sense of design and an eye for pattern in nature, which owes much to his brilliance as an architect and designer. This book charts Mackintosh's time in France and explores his career as a landscape painter, placing his work in the context of the modern movement. The forty-four paintings Mackintosh is known to have completed while in France are illustrated, and are supported by documentary photographs of the places he painted as well as extracts from his letters written to his wife and friends. This new, revised edition of an enduringly popular title on one of Scotland's best-loved artists contains a new foreword by the Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, Sir John Leighton, and will feature a new cover design, updated to feature the popular flexicover binding.

A brilliant, concise account of the painting often described as the most important work of art produced in the twentieth century, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission in 1937 to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris World Fair when news arrived of the assault by the German Condor Legion on the undefended Basque town of Guernica, in which hundreds of civilians died. James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and many-stranded afterlife of Picasso's Guernica. He explores the historical context from which it sprang; the artistic influences that informed its execution; the critical responses that it elicited; its journeyings across Europe and America in the late 1930s; its post-war adoption by new generations of anti-war protestors; and its eventual return to Spain following the death of Franco.

For centuries, artists have learnt from the art that came before them. This book explains how to make paint meaningful and imaginative responses to the works of the masters. There are step by step examples to illustrate how to get started and how to use thumbnail pencil sketches. Advice is given on how to make larger and slower drawings, and then oil-sketch copies of the masters' work. The author studies the composition, rhythms and colours of the masters and uses their work as a source to practise and understand paintings, and as a springboard for your own discovery and invention. This book explores how a brave and imaginative use of colour can reinterpret paintings to achieve a greater and more expressive effect. Images from the earliest art to the twentieth century are included to feed your creative imagination, and examples of contemporary interpretations to show you the way. With over two hundred inspiring images, it is a unique guide to developing your own artistic voice while studying and enjoying some of the art world's greatest treasures.

The Cambridge Companion to Giotto serves as an introduction to one of the most important masters of early Italian art. Providing an overview of his life and career, this 2003 volume offers essays by leading authorities on the critical reception of the artist, an analysis of workshop practices of the period, the complexities of religious and secular patronage, Giotto's innovations in painting and architecture, and close readings of his most celebrated work, the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua. Designed to serve as an essential resource for students of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, The Cambridge Companion to Giotto also provides a chronology of the artist's life and a select but comprehensive bibliography.

Filling notebook after notebook with sketches, inventions, and theories, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) not only stands as one of the most exceptional draftsmen of art history, but also as a mastermind and innovator who anticipated some of the greatest discoveries of human progress, sometimes centuries before their material realization. From the smallest arteries in the human heart to the far-flung constellations of the universe, Leonardo saw nature and science as being unequivocally connected. His points of inquiry and invention spanned philosophy, anatomy, geology, and mathematics, from the laws of optics, gravitation, heat, and light to the building of a flying machine. In his painting, Leonardo steered art out of the Middle Ages with works such as The Last Supper and the world-famous La Gioconda or Mona Lisa depicting not only physical appearances, but a compelling psychological intrigue and depth which continues to draw crowds of mesmerized visitors to masterpieces in Paris, Milan, Washington, London, and Rome. This book brings together some of Leonardo's most outstanding work to introduce a figure of infinite curiosity, feverish imagination, and sublime artistic ability, often described as having "not enough worlds for to conquer, and not enough lives for to live" (Alan Woods). About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Conservation of Easel Paintings, Second Edition provides a much-anticipated update to the previous edition, which has come to be known internationally as an invaluable and comprehensive text on the history, philosophy and methods of the treatment of easel paintings. Including 49 chapters written by more than 90 respected authors from around the world, this volume offers the necessary background knowledge in technical art history, artists' materials and scientific methods of examination and documentation. Later sections of the book provide information about the varying approaches and methods for treatment and issues of preventive conservation, as well as valuable reflections on storage, shipping, and exhibition. Including exciting developments that have taken place since the last edition was published, the book also covers new techniques of examination, especially MacroXRF scanning and Reflectance Transmission Imagery. Drawing on research presented at recent professional conferences, information about innovative methods for cleaning modern and contemporary paintings and insights into modern oil paints is also included. Incorporating the latest regulations and understanding of health and safety practices and integrating theory with practice throughout, Conservation of Easel Paintings, Second Edition will continue to be an indispensable reference for practicing conservators. It will also be an essential resource for students taking conservation courses around the world.

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), perhaps the most famous of all German artists, embodies the modern ideal of the Renaissance man--he was a remarkable painter, printmaker, draftsman, designer, theoretician, and even a poet. More is known about his thoughts and his life than about any other Northern European master of his time, since he wrote extensively about himself, his family's history, his travels, and his friends. His woodcuts and engravings were avidly collected and copied across Europe, and they quickly established his reputation as a master. Praised in life and elegized in death by such thinkers as Martin Luther and Erasmus, he served Emperor Maximilian and other leading church and secular princes in the Holy Roman Empire.Although there is a vast specialized literature on the Nuremberg master, "The Essential Durer" fills the need for a foundational book that covers the major aspects of his career. The essays included in this book, written by leading scholars from the United States and Germany, provide an accessible, up-to-date examination of Durer's art and person as well as his posthumous fame. The essays address an array of topics, from separate and detailed studies of his paintings, drawings, printmaking, and sculpture, to broader concerns such as his visits to and interactions with Venice and the Netherlands, his personal relationships, and his relationships with other artists. Collectively these stimulating essays explore the brilliance of Durer's creativity and the impact he had on his world, exposing him as an artist fully engaged with the tumultuous intellectual and religious challenges of his time.

"Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years" offers a definitive survey of the life and work of a singularly appealing and mysterious Surrealist painter. Born and raised in Spain, Remedios Varo received her earliest training in Madrid before fleeing the Spanish Civil War in 1937 to join Surrealist circles in Paris. The outbreak of World War II forced her to take refuge in Mexico, where she remained until her untimely death in 1963, and where she created her most enduring work. Known as one of the three "brujas" (witches) active in the Mexico City art milieu, Varo shared an interest in esotericism with fellow painter Leonora Carrington and a range of interests in science, philosophy and the literature of German Romanticism with the photographer Kati Horna. For some ten years, from the mid-1950s until her death in 1963, Varo devoted herself to creating an extraordinary dreamlike oeuvre, on the threshold between mysticism and modernity. Her beautifully crafted images of medieval interiors, occult workshops and androgynous figures engaged in alchemical pursuits evoke the eerie allegories of Hieronymus Bosch, esoteric engravings and the charm and lure of fairytales. This catalogue includes a complete illustrated chronology with never before published images and describes Varo's role in the Mexican Surrealist movement and her relations with Luis Bunuel, Octavio Paz, Benjamin Peret, Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen and many others.
Remedios Varo (1908-1963) fled the Spanish Civil War and then World War II to settle in Mexico where she helped establish a Mexican Surrealist movement and painted visions that combined modernism with mysticism. She was married to the leading French Surrealist Benjamin Peret.

Writing the Lives of Painters explores the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. During this period artists gradually distanced themselves from artisans and began to be recognised for their imaginative and intellectual skills. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, as well as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. This social redefinition of the status of artists in Britain was shaped by a thriving print culture. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms, including exhibition reviews, art-critical pamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns. Biographical accounts of modern artists emerged in a dialogue with these other types of writing. This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers artistic biography as a malleable generic framework for investigation. Indeed, while the lives of painters in Britain did not completely abandon traditional tropes, the genre significantly widened its scope and created new individual and social narratives that reflected and accommodated the needs and desires of new reading audiences. Writing the Lives of Painters also argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting. Finally, by focusing on the emergence of individual biographies of British artists, the book examines how and why the art historiographic model established by Georgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period.

Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie-whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous-often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time. Wylie's source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual representation itself, in line with the paintings she has become known for over the course of her career. A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has "spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston." Part of David Zwirner Books's Spotlight Series, this book features Wylie's newest paintings and drawings and is published on the occasion of the artist's 2020 solo exhibition of these works at David Zwirner Hong Kong.

Caterpillage is a study of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting. It develops an interpretive approach based on the author's previous studies of portraiture, and its goal is to offer its readers a new way to think and talk about the genre of still life. The book begins with a critique of iconographic discourse and particularly of iconography's treatment of vanitas symbolism. It goes on to argue that this treatment tends to divert attention from still life's darker meanings and from the true character of its traffic with death. Interpretations of still life that focus on the vanity of human experience and the mutability of life minimize the impact made by the representation of such voracious pillagers of plant life as insects, snails, and caterpillars. The message sent by still life's preoccupation with these small-scale predators is not merely vanitas. It is rapacitas. Caterpillage also explores the impact of this message on the meaning of the genre's French name. We use the conventional term nature morte ("dead nature") without giving any thought to how misleading it is. Because so many portrayals of still life involve cut flowers, which, although still in bloom, are dying, it would be more accurate to name the genre nature mourant. The subjects of still life are plants that are still living, plants that are dying but not yet dead.

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation. This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by shocking juxtapositions of color, light, and line. Artists abandoned the conventions of brush and easel and played with new materials and methods of artistic gesture: commercial paints and housepainter's brushes, working on unstretched and unprimed canvases, moving the canvas to the floor, and applying paint with hands. This essential introduction spans the international breadth, conceptual depth, and seismic impact of abstract art with a thorough survey not only of the big names such as Picasso, Klee, Kline, Rothko, and Pollock, but also lesser-known figures who made equally significant contributions, including Antoni Tapies, K. O. Goetz, Ad Reinhardt, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

What France's ancient cave drawings may reveal about the origin of language, art, and human thought--insights into one of the greatest mysteries in anthropology They roam deep underground in the recesses of French (and some Spanish) caves: Bulls and bison. Horses and stags. Rhinos, bears, human-like creatures, and more. Painted, drawn, or engraved, these incredible images are 32,000 years old, yet they seem full of personality and life. Who were the artists? How did they make these paintings miles into labyrinthine caves with only stone candles to light the way? Why did the artists make them and what do they mean? What about the undecipherable signs accompanying the art? Popular science writer Amir Aczel examines the cave drawings and the theories scientists have put forward to explain them, including religious iconography, hunting trophies, and a leap in human brain development. Drawing on years of research and his own visits to Paleolithic caves, Aczel takes us underground on an unforgettable journey of discovery at the crossroads of art, science, and history in the quest to solve the mysteries of this Stone Age art and deepen our understanding of human evolution. Amir D. Aczel (Brookline, MA) is a research fellow in the history of science at Boston University and former visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the author of 14 books, including Fermat's Last Theorem (978-0-385-31946-1), Descartes's Secret Notebook (978-0-7679-2034-6), and The Jesuit and the Skull (978-1-59448-956-3). He has appeared on the CBS Evening News, CNN, CNBC, and ABC's Nightline, as well as NPR's Weekend Edition and Morning Edition.

This examines how Poussin cultivated a poetics of painting from the literary culture of his own time, and especially through his response to the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's poetic discourses were the most important source for Poussin's theory of painting. The poet's ideas on artistic imitation, novelty, and plot structure and unity, which are exemplified in his epic La Gerusalemme liberata, proved to be fundamental to the artist's conception of narrative painting, culminating in the Israelites Gathering Manna. In the paintings after the Gerusalemme, Poussin does not merely illustrate Tasso's verse, but cultivates pictorial means to refashion the poet's metaphors of desire. The interplay of poetic and painterly imagery also animates Poussin's Ovidian masterpieces, the Echo and Narcissus and the Realm of Flora. Offering interpretations of these works, this book also investigates Poussin's larger literary culture and how this context illuminates the artist's response to contemporary poetic texts.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) occupies a prominent position in Canada's national culture and has become a celebrated icon for his magnificent landscapes as well as for his brief life and mysterious death. The shy, enigmatic artist and woodsman's innovative painting style produced such seminal Canadian images as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, while his untimely drowning nearly a century ago is still a popular subject of fierce debate.

Originally a commercial artist, Thomson fell in love with the forests and lakes of Ontario's Algonquin Park and devoted himself to rendering the north country's changing seasons in a series of colourful sketches and canvases. Dividing his time between his beloved wilderness and a shack behind the Studio Building near downtown Toronto, Thomson was a major inspiration to his painter friends who, not long after his death, went on to change the course of Canadian art as the influential - and equally controversial - Group of Seven.

This book examines the critical writing and journalistic reportage on Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, from the time of his renunciation of the Salon in 1834 until his large retrospective at the 1855 Universal Exposition, the crucial middle decades of his career. This massive body of writing demonstrates how Ingres shaped his career in the rapidly evolving art world of mid-nineteenth century Paris. Enjoying the benefits of his affiliation with the Academy, the artist also employed certain modes of presentation, most notably the single-artist exhibition and illustrated monograph, through which he distanced himself and his work from the embattled world of artistic officialdom. Pursuing both paths, he assumed the new modernist ideal of a self-generating creative genius. The fluctuation in Ingres's critical persona - between puffed-up academician and unassuming artiste-maudit - provides a new context through which the formal qualities of his work, which vacillate between academic banality and modernist bizarrerie, can be understood.

Focussing on the period from 1930 to 1960, this fascinating publication considers the transition of Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) from one of Britain's leading figurative painters to one of its foremost exponents of abstract art. From Pasmore's own writings and those of his contemporaries, a fascinating picture emerges of the years in the late 1940s and early 1950s when lyrical landscapes - incorporating increasingly suggestive formal structures - were suddenly superseded by abstract paintings and collages, and then by constructed reliefs. Seeking to explore these decades and later years, the book's visual narrative traces a path from the artist's earliest canvases through to his engagement in the 1960s with the controversial Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, County Durham. This important publication will renew interest in an important period in British art history and shed new light on a crucial stage in Pasmore's long career.

A fascination with an artwork's materiality remains one of the hallmarks of the visual arts and modernism during the 20th century. This critical text examines the role of materiality primarily within the context of modernist painting. The book encompasses a number of different historical and artistic contexts including the Russian avant-garde, Greenberg's aesthetic positivism, the significance of gesture in Abstract Expressionism and the art criticism of Michael Fried. A strong addition to scholarship on the nature of painting in the last century.

Cezanne's painting The Eternal Feminine, painted in 1878, has been given considerable attention in the literature on this artist, though it has generally embarrassed scholars because it suggests aspects of the artist's personality that many connoisseurs in the past would rather have repressed. The painting has been known by a variety of titles and, as Wayne Andersen has discovered, has also been altered. He traced these alterations to an art dealer who made them in an effort to render the painting more marketable. This volume is the first to interrogate the original state of The Eternal Feminine and to resolve its mysterious importance to Cezanne and, more broadly, the history of art. Devoting a separate chapter to each of the titles by which the picture has been known, Andersen resolves its hidden meaning while providing a fresh look at Cezanne's artistic process.