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Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Iconography, subjects depicted in art > Nature in art, still life, landscapes & seascapes > General
From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf,
children's stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of
animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as
metaphors, stories, and images--as well as scientific
theories--throughout history remind us that humans often act like
animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we'd
like to pretend.
Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to
demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between
humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those
interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us
on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian
physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of
Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist
anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings
of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from
Kipling's "The Jungle Book," exhibit the behaviors of the beasts
who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to
refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we
think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people,
and vice versa.
Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod
to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, "The Human Animal in
Western Art and Science" is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of
our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.
Introducing the first collection of art books with detachable prints to decorate your walls. Everything you need to create your own private gallery at home!
Each book contains a curated selection of twenty-one high-quality reproductions that can be easily removed from the book, framed in a standard-size frame, and displayed in the home. Step-by-step tips for grouping the works to create a harmonious gallery add an interior designer’s touch to the ensemble. Graphic, colourful, or abstract; paintings, engravings, or drawings―each work of art is explained on the back of the print. Interesting details about the style of painting, the particular work of art, and biographical information about the artist are accompanied by a “frameable fact” that helps you understand the context of that particular work in the history of art. In addition, suggestions for where you can go to see additional examples of the artists’ works allow the reader to expand their experience and learning.
A collection of landscapes and representations of nature from the tropical paradise of Le Douanier Rousseau’s jungle to Monet’s water lilies. Artists include: Hokusai, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gustav Klimt, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Edward Hopper.
Works by Prosek and others are juxtaposed with natural objects in
an illuminating interrogation of the artificial boundaries we
create between art and nature Award-winning artist, writer, and
naturalist James Prosek (b. 1975) has gained a worldwide following
for his deep connection with the natural world, which serves as the
basis for his art and numerous popular books. In this
cross-disciplinary catalogue, Prosek poses the question, What is
art and what is artifact-and to what extent do these distinctions
matter? Drawing on the collections of the Yale University Art
Gallery and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Prosek
places man- and nature-made objects on equal footing aesthetically,
suggesting that the distinction between them is not as vast as we
may believe. In more than 150 full-color plates, objects such as a
bird's nest, dinosaur head, and cuneiform tablet are juxtaposed
with Asian handscrolls, an African headdress, modern masterpieces,
and more. Artists featured include Albrecht Durer, Helen
Frankenthaler, Vincent van Gogh, Barbara Hepworth, Pablo Picasso,
and Jackson Pollack, as well as Prosek himself, whose works depict
fish, birds, and endangered wildlife. Also included are an incisive
essay by Edith Devaney and texts by Prosek that explore the
magnificent productions of our wondrous interconnected world.
With a powerful juxtaposition of portraiture and landscape
photography, this book explores Dawoud Bey's vivid evocations of
race, history, time, and place Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) is an American
photographer best known for his large-scale portraits of
underrepresented subjects and for his commitment to fostering
dialogue about contemporary social and political topics. Bey has
also found inspiration in the past, and in two recent series,
presented together here for the first time, he addresses African
American history explicitly, with renderings both lyrical and
immediate. In 2012 Bey created The Birmingham Project, a series of
paired portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of
the Ku Klux Klan's bombing of Birmingham, Alabama's 16th Street
Baptist Church, a site of mass civil rights meetings, and the
violent aftermath. Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a group of
large-scale black-and-white landscapes made in 2017 in Ohio that
reimagine sites where the Underground Railroad once operated. The
book is introduced by an essay exploring the series' place within
Bey's wider body of work, as well as their relationships to the
past, the present, and each other. Additional essays investigate
the works' evocations of race, history, time, and place, addressing
the particularities of and resonances between two series of
photographs that powerfully reimagine the past into the present.
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art Exhibition Schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(February 15-October 12, 2020) High Museum of Art, Atlanta
(November 7, 2020-March 14, 2021) Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York (April 16-October 3, 2021)
This book of photographs by Swedish photographer Christer Loefgren
explores the diverse and multifaceted world in which we live, from
north to south. In comparing photographs of various cultures,
diversity is more noticeable: the colours, clothes, and food point
to the identity of each place. The further north or south of the
equator you travel, colours are paler, and the food is milder and
less spicy. The more extreme nature is, the more difficult the
lifestyle. These vibrant photographs ask us to broaden our vision
and grasp the complexity and beauty of the world as a global whole.
This deluxe edition consists of three hardcover books in a
slipcase.
Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy centers on the
still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and
Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in
the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores
how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks,
musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute
links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge.
Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas
and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations,
these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their
patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers,
aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of
this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time
these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these
fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low".
Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical
artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and
Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries,
intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time.
In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social,
aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of
absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and
artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.
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