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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles
THE POWER OF ART is an epic work of non-fiction that will transform
our understanding of the world by unlocking the human stories
behind millennia of art. Taking readers from ancient Babylon to
contemporary Pyongyang, the eminent curator Caroline Campbell
explains art's power to illuminate our lives, and inspires us to
benefit from its transformative and regenerative power. Unlike the
majority of art history, this book is about much more than the cult
of personality. Instead, each chapter is structured around a city
at a particularly vibrant moment in its history, describing what
propelled its creativity and innovation. The emotions and societies
she evokes are recognisable today, showing how great art resonates
powerfully by transcending the boundaries of time.
George Barbier (1882-1932) is one of the great French illustrators
of the early twentieth century. He is famous for his elegant art
deco works that were heavily influenced by orientalism and Parisian
couture. Born in Nantes, France in 1882, he skyrocketed to fame and
notoriety after his first exhibition in 1911. Known as one of "the
knights of the bracelet" for his luxurious and glamorous lifestyle
and work, George Barbier also received renown for costumes and set
designs he did for theater, film, and ballet. Even today, his
modern and stylish illustrations are popular all over the world.
With critical essays on such topics as coloration and composition,
this volume is a complete compendium of Barbier's work. This
valuable reference book is categorized by Barbier's major projects
in fashion, book illustration, theater art, and editorial design
and is perfect for illustrators and graphic designers as well as a
beautiful gift for someone very special.
Omega has become the watchmaker with the highest name recognition
in timekeeping for personal and sports events worldwide. If the
father owned an Omega, so does the son. This important, color
illustrated, new book presents, an illustrated description of all
the watch movements manufactured by the Omega Watch Co. since the
registration of its trademark in 1894. Over 400 watches are shown
in 80 color and 334 black and white photographs. Started as a small
watchmaker shop in Biel, Switzerland in 1848, the company expanded
to Geneva and has made precision pocket and wristwatches including
the world famous chronometer wristwatch Constellation, the diver's
watch Seamaster, and the chronograph wristwatch Speedmaster
Professional.
-- Stunning watercolour paintings by one of Sweden's best-loved
artists -- Fascinating insight into Swedish rural and artistic life
in the late nineteenth century -- Accompanied by an explanatory
text giving more detail about his life and techniques Carl Larsson
is one of Sweden's best-loved artists. His stunning watercolours of
his home and family from the end of the nineteenth century are
acclaimed as one of the richest records of life at that time. The
paintings in this book are a combined collection which depict
Larsson's family -- his wife Karin and their eight children -- his
home in the village of Sundborn, and his farm, Spadarvet. The
accompanying text provides a fascinating insight into Larsson
family and farm life, and his painting techniques. Today, over
60,000 tourists a year visit Sundborn to admire Larsson's home and
work. Also published as three separate volumes: A Home, A Family,
and A Farm.
The walls of medieval churches were brightly painted with religious
imagery and colourful patterns, and although often shadows of their
former selves, these paintings are among the most enigmatic art to
survive the Middle Ages. This beautifully illustrated book is an
ideal introduction to this fascinating subject. It tells the
stories behind the paintings and explains their purpose, the
subjects they showed, how they were made and by whom, and what
happened to these works of art during and after the enormous
upheavals of the Reformation. It also compares and contrasts
religious and domestic wall paintings and explores modern
approaches to their conservation and care. A comprehensive
gazetteer provides an invaluable guide to where the best British
examples can be seen. Roger Rosewell is a Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries and a leading expert on medieval wall paintings. He is
also the Features Editor of Vidimus, the online magazine about
medieval stained glass and a professional lecturer and
photographer. Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, he has
also written Stained Glass and The Medieval Monastery for Shire.
Published as part of Liverpool Biennial 2016, The Two-Sided Lake
brings together a wide range of contributors to explore the idea of
the 'episode' in film, literature and computation. The book
reflects the on multiple ways that stories can be told, and how
thinking differently about space and time can open up new
conversations about the past, the present, race, migration, trauma
- and exhibition-making. Including texts by Zian Chen (TW), Mark Z
Danielewski (US), Denise Ferreira da Silva (BR), Matthew Garrett
(US) Xiaolu Guo (CN), Ranjit Hoskote (IN), Joasia Krysa (PL), Lars
Bang Larsen (DK), Francesco Manacorda (IT), Andrew Pickering (UK),
Denise Riley (UK), Will Slocombe (UK), Juliana Spahr/C.O. Grossman
(US) and Jocelyn Penny Small (US) alongside contributions by all of
Liverpool Biennial 2016's artists, The Two-Sided Lake is the
essential companion to the UK's largest contemporary art festival.
This volume investigates performance cultures as rich and dynamic
environments of knowledge practice through which distinctive
epistemologies are continuously (re)generated, cultivated, and
celebrated. Epistemologies are dynamic formations of rules, tools,
and procedures not only for understanding but also for doing
knowledges. This volume deals in particular with epistemological
challenges posed by practices and processes of interweaving
performance cultures. These challenges arise in artistic and
academic contexts because of hierarchies between epistemologies.
European colonialism worked determinedly, violently, and often with
devastating effects on instituting and sustaining a hegemony of
modern Euro-American rules of knowing in many parts of the world.
Therefore, Interweaving Epistemologies critically interrogates the
(im)possibilities of interweaving epistemologies in artistic and
academic contexts today. Writing from diverse geographical
locations and knowledge cultures, the book's
contributors-philosophers, political scientists as well as
practitioners and scholars of theater, performance, and
dance-investigate prevailing forms of epistemic ignorance and
violence. They introduce key concepts and theories that enable
critique of unequal power relations between epistemologies.
Moreover, contributions explore historical cases of interweaving
epistemologies and examine innovative present-day methods of
working across and through epistemological divides in
non-hegemonic, sustainable, creative, and critical ways. Ideal for
practitioners, students and researchers of theater, performance,
and dance as well as of philosophy and history (of science),
Interweaving Epistemologies emphasizes the urgent need to
acknowledge, study and promote epistemological plurality and
diversity in practices of performance making as well as in
scholarship on theater and performance around the globe today.
Take your pens, pencils, art supplies, and other accessories on the
go, and bring a bit of magic to your life with this charming pencil
pouch featuring Harry PotterTM, Hermione GrangerTM, and the owls of
Eeylops Owl EmporiumTM. Show your love of Harry Potter(TM)
Celebrate all eight Harry Potter films with this official pencil
pouch. Travel size to fit most purses and backpacks, this pouch is
perfect for storing pens, pencils, accessories, and other
keepsakes. High-quality cotton canvas with interior nylon lining:
This cotton blend accessory pouch is made to last with a nylon
interior and a durable zipper. Unique, beautiful design: Featuring
beautiful and fun full-color designs from the acclaimed book Harry
Potter: Exploring Diagon Alley, illustrated by Studio Muti, this
pencil pouch is perfect for all Harry Potter fans. Perfect for all
ages: Whether you're a student just watching Harry Potter for the
first time or a seasoned fan rewatching the movies for the tenth
time, this accessory pouch is great for all Harry Potter fans.
Designed to be tough, practical and good value for money, the Rough
Guide maps aim to forge a new standard in city maps. Apart from
travel information and the city's sites, monuments and attractions,
the map shows every shop, restaurant, bar and hotel listed in the
Rough Guide travel guide to Cuba, together with their opening
times, and, in many cases, phone numbers. The map covers the main
area of Cuba on one side and an enlarged downtown city-centre maps
on the reverse.
The newly revised and updated Charleston: A Bloomsbury House &
Garden is the definitive publication on the Bloomsbury Group's
rural outpost in the heart of the Sussex Downs. "It's absolutely
perfect...", wrote the artist Vanessa Bell when she moved to
Charleston in 1916. For fifty years, Vanessa and her fellow painter
Duncan Grant lived, loved and worked in this isolated Sussex
farmhouse, together transforming the house and garden into an
extraordinary work of art and creating a rural retreat for the
Bloomsbury group. Now, Vanessa's son, Quentin Bell, and her
granddaughter Virginia Nicholson tell the inside story of their
family home, linking it with some of the pioneering cultural
figures who spent time there, including Vanessa's sister Virginia
Woolf, the economist Maynard Keynes, the writer Lytton Strachey and
the art critic Roger Fry. Taking readers through each room of the
house - from Clive Bell's Study, the Dining Room, the Kitchen and
the Garden Room, through to individual bedrooms, the Studios and
the Library - Quentin Bell relives old memories, including having
T.S. Eliot over for a dinner party and staging plays in the Studio,
while Virginia Nicholson details the artistic techniques
(stencilling, embroidery, painting, sculpture, ceramics and more)
used to embellish and enliven the once simple farmhouse. In this
refreshed edition of the original 1997 publication, Gavin
Kingcombe's specially commissioned photographs breathe life into
the colourful interiors and garden of the Sussex farmhouse, while
updated text and captions by Virginia Nicholson capture the
evolution of Charleston as it continues to inspire a new
generation. For lovers of literature, decorative arts, and all
things Bloomsbury, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House & Garden
offers a window onto a truly unique creative hub.
The book combines an extensive review of art actions, classifying
and anchoring them in contemporary urban theories. It reviews
trends and describes numerous art projects in the public space, and
is interspersed with multiple photographs, hence it may be
attractive to any reader who wishes to become involved in his
community and urban environment.
A vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle
Ages to the present day The castle has long had a pivotal place in
British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military
might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But
castles have never been merely impressive fortresses-they were hubs
of life, activity, and imagination. John Goodall weaves together
the history of the British castle across the span of a millennium,
from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, through the voices
of those who witnessed it. Drawing on chronicles, poems, letters,
and novels, including the work of figures like Gawain Poet, Walter
Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse, Goodall explores the
importance of the castle in our culture and society. From the
medieval period to Civil War engagements, right up to modern
manifestations in Harry Potter, Goodall reveals that the castle has
always been put to different uses, and to this day continues to
serve as a source of inspiration.
A Galaxy of Things explores the ways in which all puppets, masks,
and makeup-prosthetic figures are "material characters," and uses
Star Wars creatures, droids, and helmeted-characters to illustrate
what makes the good ones not only compelling, but meaningful. The
book begins with author Colette Searls' Star Wars thing aesthetic,
described through a release-order overview of what creatures,
droids and masked characters have brought to 45+ years of
live-action Star Wars. Building on theories from the burgeoning
field of puppetry and material performance, it sees these "material
characters" as a group and describes three specific powers that
they share - distance, distillation, and duality - using the
ubiquitously recognizable Star Wars characters to illustrate them.
The book describes Distance, Distillation, and Duality as material
character powers, using characters like C-3PO and Jabba the Hutt to
illustrate how all three work to generate meaning. An in-depth
exploration of the original Empire Strikes Back Yoda and "Baby"
Yoda (Grogu) reveals how these two puppets use those powers to
transform their human companions: Luke Skywalker, and then Din
Djarin. Searls provides an in-depth analysis of Darth Vader's mask
trajectory across three trilogies (1977 - 2019), revealing its
contribution as a "performing thing." Finally, the book presents
problematic uses of material character powers by critiquing droids
in service, and the historical use of racial stereotypes in
characters like Jar Jar Binks, before offering a hopeful analysis
of how early 2020s live-action Star Wars began centering the non-,
semi-, and concealed human in redemptive ways. This is an
accessible exploration for students and scholars of theatre, film,
media studies and popular culture who want to better understand
puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic characters. Its terms and
concepts will be useful to scholarly explorations of non-, semi-,
and concealed human portrayals for a range of other fields,
including posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, ethnic studies,
and material culture.
Using five case studies of contemporary art, this book uses ideas
of systems and dispersion to understand identity and experience in
late capitalism. This book considers five artists who exemplify
contemporary art practice: Seth Price; Liam Gillick; Martin Creed;
Hito Steyerl and Theaster Gates. Given the diversity of materials
used in art today, once-traditional artistic mediums and practices
have become obsolete in describing what artists do today. Francis
Halsall argues that, in the face of this obsolescence, the ideas of
system and dispersion become very useful in understanding
contemporary art. That is, practitioners now can be seen to be
using whatever systems of distribution and display are available to
them as their creative mediums. The two central arguments are first
that any understanding of what art is will always be underwritten
by a related view of what a human being is; and second that these
both have a particular character in late capitalism or, as is named
here, the Age of Dispersion. The book will be of interest to
scholars and students working in art history, contemporary art,
studio art, and theories of systems and networks.
Mount Fuji has long been a centerpiece of Japanese cultural
imagination, and nothing captures this with more virtuosity than
the landmark woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The renowned printmaker
documents 19th-century Japan with exceptional artistry and
adoration, celebrating its countryside, cities, people, and serene
natural beauty. Produced at the peak of Hokusai's artistic
ambition, the series is a quintessential work of ukiyo-e that
earned the artist world-wide recognition as a leading master of his
craft. The prints illustrate Hokusai's own obsession with Mount
Fuji as well as the flourishing domestic tourism of the late Edo
period. Just as the mountain was a cherished view for travelers
heading to the capital Edo (now Tokyo) along the Tokaido road,
Mount Fuji is the infallible backdrop to each of the series' unique
scenes. Hokusai captures the distinctive landscape and provincial
charm of each setting with a vivid palette and exquisite detail.
Including the iconic Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa (also The
Great Wave), this widely celebrated series is a treasure of
international art history. Among only a few complete reprints of
the series, this XXL edition pays homage to Hokusai's striking
colors and compositions with unprecedented care and magnitude.
Bound in the Japanese tradition with uncut paper, Thirty-six Views
of Mount Fuji presents the original 36 plates plus the additional
10 later added by the artist. The perfect companion piece to
TASCHEN's One Hundred Views of Edo and The Sixty-Nine Stations
along the Kisokaido, this publication paints an enchanting picture
of pre-industrial Japan and is itself a stunning monument to the
art of woodblock printing.
This handsome catalogue accompanies an exhibition celebrating the
bicentenary of the 60-year reign of King George III. It presents
one mezzotint portrait for each year of his reign. Mad about
Mezzotint traces the history of mezzotint in the reign of King
George III by looking at three aspects of the art form: the
astonishing method of mezzotint, the absorbing history of the form
in the late eighteenth century and Regency period and the endless
fascination with London as a subject. Although the mezzotint
originated in Germany as early as 1642, its golden age came in
England in the eighteenth century. Its beauty lay in its ability to
create the subtlety of tone found in an oil painting. Crowds
marvelled at the new technique and seized upon the opportunity to
popularize their work and disseminate their images more widely.
Conditions in eighteenth-century London were ripe for this
revolution in printing. England had a new king and queen on the
throne, an ever-expanding court and flourishing commercial
interests overseas. The city of London was expanding at an
astonishing rate and money was pouring into the capital. This fully
illustrated publication includes an introduction on the history of
mezzotint and full catalogue of the works, as well as indexes of
artists and persons depicted. Artists featured include Valentine
Green, John Hoppner, John Jones, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and
Charles Turner. People depicted include King George, George, Prince
of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Admiral Horatio
Nelson and Earl and Lady Spencer.
35 meditative knitting patterns that use colour, repetition and
texture to help you unwind and destress. The relaxing rhythm and
hand movements of knitting make it the perfect activity to absorb
your attention and distract you from unwanted thoughts. As well as
being beautiful makes, these 35 projects are specially designed to
be a form of mindfulness practice. Suitable for beginners through
to experienced knitters, the patterns will help you stitch away
stress by incorporating calming repetition and different textures,
as well as mood-boosting bright colours and soothing pastel shades.
Many of the projects make ideal gifts, bringing you satisfaction
and positivity as you knit them for other people. There are also
homewares including a mandala pillow and a meditation garland so
that you can create an inspiring environment, as well as cosy
accessories and garments to allow you to focus on yourself. All of
the techniques and stitches you will need are explained with
easy-to-follow instructions and step-by-step artworks. Let the
click of the needles and the rhythm of the stitches help you to be
in the moment, bringing you calmness and a sense of wellbeing.
Written by a scholar of satire and politics, Trump Was a Joke
explains why satire is an exceptional foil for absurd political
times and why it did a particularly good job of making sense of
Trump. Covering a range of comedic interventions, it analyzes why
political satire is surprisingly effective at keeping us sane when
politics is making us crazy. Its goal is to highlight the unique
power of political satire to encourage critical thinking, foster
civic action, and further rational debate in moments of political
hubris and hysteria. The book has been endorsed by Bassem Youssef,
referred to as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, and Srdja Popovic, author
of Blueprint for Revolution, who used satirical activism to bring
down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. With a foreword by
award-winning filmmaker, satirist and activist Michael Moore, this
study will be of interest to readers who follow politics and enjoy
political comedy and will appeal to the communications, comedy
studies, media studies, political science, rhetoric, cultural
studies, and American studies markets.
Replete with interviews with key practitioners (both in the book
and online) will give up-to-date information on the techniques,
forms and concepts used by leading figures in contemporary Live
Visuals.
Lali Khalid is an immigrant artist grappling with issues of
identity, home, family and diaspora. In her photographs captured
over a span of ten years, she illustrates complex challenges
exploring new ways of retaining her identity in an environment of
changing ideologies and perspectives. Khalid successfully bridges
two ends of spectrum: the fading past and the vague future. The
images viewed without a predetermined perception explain the
evolving narrative through the veiled stories imbedded in them.
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