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Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Iconography, subjects depicted in art > Human figures depicted in art
Ceramics are an unparalleled resource for women's lives in ancient Greece, since they show a huge number of female types and activities. Yet it can be difficult to interpret the meanings of these images, especially when they seem to conflict with literary sources. This much-needed study shows that it is vital to see the vases as archaeology as well as art, since context is the key to understanding which images can stand as evidence for the real lives of women, and which should be reassessed. Sian Lewis considers the full range of female existence in classical Greece - childhood and old age, unfree and foreign status, and the ageless woman characteristic of Athenian red-figure painting.
Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent
women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their
representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing
Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on
the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet,
Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her
riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin
documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout
the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of
an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art
historians who investigate the work before their eyes while
focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its
feminist spirit.
Brings together, for the first time, Lucian Freud's oil on copper
paintings, including his lost portrait of Francis Bacon and two
works that have never been reproduced before In the early 1950s,
Lucian Freud produced several works in oil paint on copper, a
technique favored by 17th-century artists such as Rembrandt and
Frans Hals, but unusual for a 20th-century painter. Originally
thought to be only a handful, Freud in fact painted more than a
dozen copper works-all small-scale, enamel-smooth and astonishingly
intense. Based on a decade of research, this book, for the first
time, brings together all of Freud's "coppers," including two works
that have never been reproduced before. Among these paintings is
Freud's famous portrait of Francis Bacon, labeled by Nicholas
Serota as "the most important portrait of the 20th century." The
work was stolen in 1988-its whereabouts still unknown-but during
research for the book a rare photograph was discovered that shows
the work just minutes before the theft, and it is published here
for the first time. Distributed for Less Publishing
Contents: 1. Naked truths about classical art: An introduction 2. 'Ways of seeing' women in antiquity: An introduction to feminism in classical archaeology and ancient art history 3. Female beauty and male violence in early Italian society 4. divesting the female breast of clothes in classical sculpture 5. When painters execute a murderess: the representation of clytemnestra on attic vases 6. Sappho in attic vase painting 7. Gender and sexuality in the Parthenon frieze 8. Naked and limbless: Learning about the feminine body in ancient Athens 9. Nursing mothers in classical art 10. Making a world of difference: Gender, Asymmetry, and the Greek nude 11. The only happy couple: Hermaphrodites and gender 12. Violent stages in two Pompeian houses: Imperial taste, aristocratic response and messages of male control 13. Epilogue: gender and desire
What does it mean to be nude? What does the nude do? In a series of
constantly surprising reflections, Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico
Ferrari encounter the nude as an opportunity for thinking in a way
that is stripped bare of all received meanings and preconceived
forms. In the course of engagements with twenty-six separate
images, the authors show how the nudes produced by painters and
photographers expose this bareness of thought and leave us naked on
the verge of a sense that is always nascent, always fleeting, on
the surface of the skin, on the surface of the image. While the
nude is a symbol of truth in philosophy and art alike, what the
nude definitively and uniquely reveals is unclear. In Being Nude:
The Skin of Images, the authors argue that the nude is always
presented as both vulnerable in its exposure and shy of
conceptualization, giving a sense of the ultimate ineffability of
the meaning of being. Although the nude represents the revealed
nature of truth, nude figures hold a part of themselves back,
keeping in reserve the reality of their history, parts of their
present selves, and also their future possibilities for change,
development, and demise. Skin is itself a type of clothing, and
stripping away exterior layers of fabric does not necessarily lead
to grasping the truth. In this way, the difference between being
clothed and being nude is diminished. The images that inspire the
authors to contemplate the nudity of being show many ways in which
one can and cannot be nude, and many ways of being in relation to
oneself and to others, clothed and unclothed.
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Bombshells!
(Paperback)
Sal Quartuccio, Dave Dunstan, Pelaez
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R250
Discovery Miles 2 500
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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Putting the "leather" in Leathernecks and the "Gee" in GI's, SQP is
delighted to present a new wing in the vast Gallery Girls museum,
this time showcasing the women of wartime! From the naughty
nose-art girls of WW2 to the hell-bent hellions of modern combat,
Bombshells! contains mega-tons of magnificent warrior maidens, with
artists like Pelaez, Mitch Byrd, Pedro Cuevas, J.L. Czerniawski,
and a mighty battalion of others! Oh, you'll stand at full
attention even while seated, this band of sisters are so hot!
Tennnnn HUT! Cover art by Dave Dunstan. 64 pages black and white
plus color covers.
Throughout his career, Gustav Klimt completed hundreds of paintings
and thousands of drawings of delicate beauty, many of them
featuring the female form. Designed to imitate an artist's
sketchbook, this gorgeous volume reproduces Klimt's most beautiful
erotic sketches and watercolors. The experience of viewing them
will awaken the senses and afford the reader the guilty pleasure of
leafing through an artist's most private visions.
The man behind the paintings: the extraordinary life of J. M. W
Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated
artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter.
Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man
himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his
mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to
effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose
to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in
his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was
considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute
adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British,
astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set
against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French
Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing
portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art and a
vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.
Julia Kay's Portrait Party is an international collaborative
project in which artists all over the world make portraits of each
other and share them online. After years of exchanging portraits,
tips and techniques within the group, in Portrait Revolution these
artists are now sharing their art, their words, and their
inspiration with everyone who is interested in or would like to get
started with portraiture. Here you can find information on using
different media, how to handle difficult portrait issues, and more.
Portrait Revolution showcases 450 portraits by 200 artists, in a
wide variety of media from oil painting to iPad art, watercolour to
ballpoint, linocut to mosaic. There are a range of styles from
realistic to abstract and interpretations by multiple artists of
the same subject.
Sketches and drawings are the foundations of great art, where
thoughts and concepts first come to life as an image. In Sketching
from the Imagination: Characters, fifty talented artists share
their sketches, inspirations, and approaches to creating
characters. This book is a visually stunning collection packed with
useful tips and creative insights--an invaluable resource that will
inspire artists of all abilities.
Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the
Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De
Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having
gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting
powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into
oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De
Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella
are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode
of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the
sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as
wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that's nothing
compared to her husband, for in De Clerck's paintings Albert is
transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ
himself. Hendrick De Clerck's mastery of ingenious pictorial
strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious
projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read
them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and
grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of
image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a
monarch you're only as important as you make yourself.
Many loved The Big Book of Legs but some found it just too darn
big, weighing in at nearly seven pounds. True, it was packed with
shapely legs spanning six decades, from the first shy emergence of
the ankle in the 1910s, through the rolled stockings and rouged
knees of the 1920s, to the Betty Grable '40s, the stockinged and
stilettoed '50s, on into the sexually liberated '60s and '70s, but
it could still put a dent in your own thighs if you sat reading for
too long. Fortunately here at TASCHEN we listen to your groans of
agony as well as your moans of ecstasy; thus, this light and
portable new edition, packing over 100 of the choicest photos from
the original volume, as well as 38 new photos, into a compact (and
frankly adorable) package. From Betty Grable to Bettie Page, the
greatest legs of the 20th Century can be found within, shot by
Irving Klaw, Bunny Yeager, and the incomparable Elmer Batters,
father of leg art. There are silk and nylon stockings, high heels
in abundance, curvy calves, taut thighs, playful toes and towering
arches-with no bothersome text to get in the way. Could leg love
get any sweeter?
Hollywood honeys and classic movie monsters. Sci-Fi femmes and
Hammer horror queens. Lady vampires and creatures that go "rub" in
the night It's all part of the imagination and twisted joy Carlos
Valenzuela brings to every one of his paintings. Bring your own
popcorn
Newly revised and expanded, this second edition of Timon Screech's
definitive "Sex and the Floating World" offers a real assessment of
the genre of Japanese paintings and prints today known as shunga.
Changes in Japanese law in the 1990s enabled erotic images to be
published without fear of prosecution, and many shunga
picture-books have since appeared. There has, however, been very
little attempt to situate the imagery within the contexts of
sexuality, gender or power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether
shunga deserve a place in the official history of Japanese art,
have dominated, and the question of the use of these images has
been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in a
proper historical frame of culture and creativity. Shunga prints
are not like any other form of picture for the simple fact that
they are overtly about sex. And once we begin to examine them first
and foremost as sexual apparatus, then we must be prepared for some
surprises. The author opens up for us the strange world of sexual
fantasy in the Edo culture of eighteenth-century Japan, and
investigates the tensions in class and gender of those that made
and made use of shunga.
Despite his posthumous fame as a painter of flowers, still-lifes,
gardens, landscapes and city scenes, during his lifetime Vincent
van Gogh believed that his portraits constituted his most important
works. Although as an artist he was `touched by so many different
things', he was nevertheless committed to the art of portraiture -
a quality that distinguished him from his contemporaries. Van Gogh
was passionate in his avoidance of bland, photographic
resemblances, in the hope of capturing the essential character of
his models by means of expressive colour and brushwork. Showcasing
a dramatic set of portraits created during Van Gogh's ten-year
career, this book reflects the strong visual impact with which the
artist captured the diversity of contemporary life. In his many
portraits, we can discern the artist's desire to record
expressively a number of themes, from the plight of the
agricultural workers in his native Brabant and the destitution of
prostitutes and their children in urban Europe, to the lives of his
cosmopolitan acquaintances in Paris, including cafe owners and art
dealers. It was here that he began his remarkable sequence of
self-portraits. With reference to Van Gogh's extensive
correspondence, Skea elaborates how the artist perceived his chosen
subjects as would a writer, and how he felt that his portraits
should somehow evoke what he considered to be the spiritual
underpinning of human existence
Text in English & German. As a photographer, the challenge is
in capturing the very moment that a fluid substance interacts with
the body in a way that will take the viewer on a sensual adventure,
inviting not only to their visual sense but also invoking
sensations of touch, taste, and imagination. When successful, the
result is a unique moment frozen in time, never to be repeated. The
result is photographic imagery that is sensual, provocative and
erotic. Living close to Washington DC, Jim spent many years
photographing landscapes, monuments, masonry and still lifes, and
his stunning images have adorned the offices of doctors, lawyers
and dentists. It was not until his daughter requested Jim capture a
few maternity images for her that he turned his sights to portrait
photography. With this new found passion, Jim completely immersed
himself in the study of lighting, posing, and the business of
photography, and soon found himself perfecting what was quickly
becoming his specialised genre, the fine art nude. Always striving
to aim higher, to always improve, and, yes, to push the envelope
even further. When asked to pick his best image, Jim says "the best
is yet to come".
The collection of pictures at Wilton has been celebrated since the
seventeenth century; and its historic arrangement is uniquely well
documented in a series of catalogues of which the first, issued in
1731, was the earliest such publication about any private
collection in England. Of successive owners of the house, three
made significant contributions: William, 4th Earl of Pembroke, who
commissioned van Dyck's monumental portrait of his family that
dominates the Double Cube Room he had created; his grandson,
Thomas, 8th Earl of Pembroke who assembled what was in some
respects a pioneering collection of old master pictures for the
house; and his grandson, Henry, 10th Earl of Pembroke, patron of
Reynolds and Wilson, among others. Such masterpieces as Lucas van
Leyden's Card Players, Cesare da Sesto's Leda - long attributed to
Leonardo - and Ribera's Democritus are matched by remarkable
portrait drawings by Raphael and Holbein. These are complemented by
a substantial deposit of family portraits and other pictures that
attest to the tastes and interests of successive generations of the
Herbert family.
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