This generously illustrated book provides a complete overview of current knowledge about the sculptures of the Parthenon and suggests new interpretations of the ancient temple's sculptural creations. Margaretha Lagerlof steps back from viewing the fragments of the sculptures that remain today to focus more clearly on their meanings in the light of classical Athenian knowledge and society. She considers what the sculptures reveal about the Greek sense of democracy and how they characterize women's lives in a warrior culture. Using Plato's philosophy and the visually oriented similes of his myths, Lagerlof offers a new decoding of the aesthetic structure of the Parthenon's entire sculptural ensembles.

The book compares the sculptures of the pediments to those of the metopes and the frieze, uncovering subtle differences in both the nature and the content of the images. Whereas the pediments represent divine elements, for example, the frieze is seen as the domain of human beings, representing events and also the stage of history when humans no longer have direct access to the presence of the gods. The frieze can be interpreted as an invocation of this presence, a means of regaining closeness with the gods. Using a multifaceted and imaginative approach to the sculptures of the Parthenon, Lagerlof finds powerful new meaning in them as well as an enhanced appreciation of their Athenian creators.

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) was, with Calder, Noguchi and David Smith, one of the great American sculptors of the 20th century. She created extraordinary work, from room-size installations composed of boxes to gnarled and majestic steel structures. Her life story is no less interesting. She was born in czarist Russia, but her family emigrated to the States and she grew up in Maine. Nevelson endured a repressive marriage to a New York millionaire, whom she escaped to pursue the life of an artist. She gained recognition as an abstract sculptor at the age of 59, and spent the next 30 years taking the art world by storm, becoming a colourful New York personality and minor celebrity. Laurie Wilson, who knew Nevelson personally, draws extensively on her own research in this crisp new biography. She conducted interviews not just with Nevelson but with her siblings, son, and gallery owner Arne Glimcher. Wilson has also had complete access to Glimcher's archives, Nevelson's personal assistant, Diana Mackown, and Lippincott studios, where much of Nevelson's work was cast, among others

Statues of important Romans frequently represented them nude. Men were portrayed naked holding weapons. The naked emperor might wield the thunderbolt of Jupiter, while Roman women assumed the guide of the nude love-goddess, Venus. When faced with these strange images, modern viewers are usually unsympathetic, finding them incongruous, even tasteless. They are mostly written off as just another example of Roman `bad taste'. This book offers a new approach. Comprehensively illustrated with black and white photographs of its subjects, it investigates how this tradition arose, and how the nudity of these portraits was meant to be understood by contemporary viewers. And, since the Romans also employed a range of costumes for their statues (toga, armour, Greek philosopher's cloak), it asks, `What could the nude images express that other costumes could not?' It is Christopher Hallett's claim that - looked at in this way - these `Roman nudes' turn out to be documents of the first importance for the cultural historian.

Luisa Lambri's art revolves around the human condition and its relationship with space, touching on areas such as the politics of representation, architecture, the history of abstract photography, modernism, feminism, identity and memory. The title of the exhibition presented at PAC, in Milan, is a tribute to Carla Lonzi who, in 1969, published "Autoritratto", a collection of interviews with avant-garde artists that revealed their private sides. In the same way, Lambri constructs personal and intimate readings of the subjects of her photographs and encourages a dialogue between the observer, the work of art and the space. Light, time and movement play an important role in her work, where slight differences reflect the artist's movement within the space. Lambri uses architecture to create her images, rather than images to document architecture, revealing negligible details of modernist architecture or iconic minimalist sculptures. At PAC, her works relate to the unique qualities of the architecture designed by Ignazio Gardella, for which the exhibition was specifically developed. Text in English and Italian.

Although originally trained as a painter, Shingu became interested in sculpture when he saw one of his shaped canvases turning softly in the wind. The work that followed relied on natural forces to make it move or make sound, and he began using more sophisticated materials for outdoor works. By the time of Expo '70 in Osaka, Shingu had been commissioned to create a piece for the plaza. It contained many of the elements he would use later: parts of it were moved by both wind and water, in some ways harnessing their power but also buffeted by it. His work walks the fine line between complementing nature and being an integral part of it. The pieces, though large, colorful, and usually made of modern materials, adopt nature's rhythms in their movement. Shingu's sculpture is found around the world, from Japan to France, Italy, and the United States. In addition to creating sculptures, he has written and illustrated several children's books and designed several theater pieces that integrate his sculptures and installations with dramatic stories. All of these endeavors are collected here - along with the artist's comments on many of the sculptures, essays by Pierre Restany and Renzo Piano, and an interview with Joseph Giovannini - in a monograph that provides a complete portrait of Shingu's diverse career.

Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954) is one of the leading figures of modern art. His unparalleled cut-outs are among the most significant of any artist's late works. When ill health first prevented Matisse from painting, he began to cut into painted paper with scissors as his primary technique to make maquettes for a number of commissions, from books and stained glass window designs to tapestries and ceramics. Taking the form of a 'studio diary', the catalogue re-examines the cut-outs in terms of the methods and materials that Matisse used, and looks at the tensions in the works between finish and process; fine art and decoration; contemplation and utility; and drawing and colour.

Transform miraculous beeswax into environmentally friendly household cleaners, personal care products, candles and crafts Features over 100 step-by-step recipes, this book presents easy-to-follow recipes that utilize the amazing flexibility of beeswax for crafting safe, highly effective home products. From lotions and salves to candles and cleaners, The Beeswax Workshop shows you how to make organic alternatives to chemically-laden store bought items. You will love stocking first aid kits with natural sunburn salve and antimicrobial ointment; making beeswax-based beauty products like lip balm, blush, perfume, shampoo, and hair pomade; and even waterproofing gardening tools and camping equipment. The Beeswax Workshop provides you with a wonderful collection of new and creative ways to use sustainable beeswax.

When first invited to give talks and demonstrations on carving techniques to school children, Howard K. Suzuki quickly found out that wood was not the most suitable medium. It took too long to show much progress in the limited time available. He decided to use bars of soap to demonstrate basic techniques on carving and sculpturing. Soap is an inexpensive and very desirable carving medium. Soon demonstrations developed into hands-on experiences for his students. In this book, Dr. Suzuki describes and illustrates with color photographs how to make safe and simple wooden carving tools. He demonstrates basic soap-carving techniques using several stepwise how-to examples, from a simple heart to a more complex turtle. Dr. Suzuki integrates art and science into his instructions and combines them to produce a super learning experience for children (of all ages) who do learn to carve through his methods.

This book is designed to be a valuable reference for wargamers and modellers who build and paint models of the armoured cars used during World War II. It includes extensive information on the many different types, some well known and others less so, with photographs of vintage vehicles to help create realistic models. It is aimed at new entrants to this hobby, as well as those who wish to widen their field of interest. With over 220 colour photographs, this book includes hints and tips on modelling tools and accessories; British, Commonwealth, German, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, American, Soviet and French armoured cars, and more. There are guidelines for building plastic, resin and metal models in 1/76, 1/72, 1/48 and 1/35 scales. Real-life reference pictures and a 3D-printed model is featured.

The work of the Japanese sculptor Toshimasa Kikuchi (born in 1979) is somehow bewilderingly obvious. Trained in the restoration of Buddhist statues, mastering to perfection the techniques of classical Japanese statuary, he carves pure forms in wood - geometric, hydrodynamic or figurative. His scientific repertory is of all time (mathematics, engineering, natural history), but his preferred materials and techniques are firmly grounded in tradition (Japanese hinoki cypress, urushi lacquer, kinpaku gold leaf). The installation he presents for his Carte Blanche at the musee Guimet in Paris, brings together a series of slender sculptures in lacquered wood of mathematical objects, in the tradition of the celebrated photographs that Man Ray took of them. These abstract forms, hanging from the ceiling like mobiles or laid on the floor like devotional objects, take shape through a virtuosity and craftsmanship seldom found in contemporary art. The book is lavishly illustrated by the Japanese photographer Tadayuki Minamoto, who was able to capture the magnificence of the mathematical abstraction of the works of Kikuchi; by photographs and paintings by Man Ray; and with fascinating mathematical objects from the Institut Henri Poincare, Paris, photographed by the French photographer Bertrand Michau. It is essential reading for lovers of surrealism and of the early years of twentieth-century abstraction as well as for all who are intrigued by the close relationship between art and mathematics.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller through a brief history of the subject class, highlighting differences between sisterships and changes in their appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and camouflage, featuring colour profiles and highly-detailed line drawings and scale plans. The modelling section reviews the strengths and weaknesses of available kits, lists commercial accessory sets for super-detailing of the ships, and provides hints on modifying and improving the basic kit. This is followed by an extensive photographic survey of selected high-quality models in a variety of scales, and the book concludes with a section on research references - books, monographs, large-scale plans and relevant websites. This volume is devoted to the famous ships of Admiral Hipper's First Scouting Group. Slower but more robust than their British equivalents, German battlecruisers enjoyed a reputation for absorbing punishment, and although Lutzow was sunk at Jutland, Seydlitz and the rest of the Scouting Group survived heavy damage.This book concentrates on the seven completed ships but coverage extends to the 'proto-battlecruiser' Blucher and the ships building or designed by the end of the war.

This text explores three of Bernini's baroque chapels to show how Bernini achieved his effects. Careri examines the ways in which the artist integrated the disparate forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into a coherant space for devotion, and then shows how this accomplishment was understood by religious practitioners. In the Fonseca Chapel, the Albertoni Chapel and the church of Saint Andrea al Quirinale, all in Rome, Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links each to a particular spiritual journey. Using contemporary theories in anthropology, film and reception aesthetics, he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms.

You will be amazed by what you can create with polymer and air-dry clay. These affordable, easy-to-find clays present endless possibilities for artisan-quality home decor and gifts. Francesca Stone, creator of the decor blog Fall For DIY, presents simple step-by-step techniques for shaping and decorating clay with just a few household tools. All final pieces can be air-dried or baked in a standard home oven. Featuring a gorgeous, modern palette of natural colours, these projects are deceptively easy and effortlessly chic. Personalize your home with practical and beautiful items like the Terra-Cotta Jewellery Dish, Hanging Herb Garden Planter and Salt-and-Pepper Pinch Pot. Get creative with colour and geometric shapes in home accents such as the Colour-Block Photo Holder and Abstract Floral Block Platter. This book is the perfect primer to start making beautiful clay pieces at home and get that handmade ceramic look without the expenses and challenges of traditional pottery.

Stano Filko is considered as an influential utopian and polyartist, who understood art and life universally and cosmologically as a unity beyond geographical attributions of East and West. Filko was one of the most important representatives of the Central European neo-avant-gardes, whose work has remained current. Early on, he designed hybrid objects and environments, extending them into unfamiliar terrains with his basic conceptual approach. Again and again, the focus of the work changes: assemblages are followed by text-based works and performances that attempt to circumvent state repression, and later by large-scale gestural painting, characterized by artistic self-assertion, and finally by a final phase, which he dedicates to his increasingly complex "System SF". The publication approaches the multi-layered œuvre from various perspectives and takes a fresh look at this exuberant oeuvre. After achievements in the 1960s, Stano Filko (1937-2015) became persona non grata as a result of the Prague Spring, which led to a daring escape from the "Eastern Bloc", his participation in Documenta, and him eventually moving to New York. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he returned to Bratislava and transformed the studio house Snezienková into a multi-dimensional, colorful "gesamtkunstwerk".

For nearly seven decades the ebullient art of Joan Miro (1893-1983), Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramist and mythmaker, has intrigued and enchanted art lovers worldwide. This collection of his writings presents a portrait of the artist in his own words. Miro's notebooks, letters, and interviews reveal the work and life of a brilliant artist revered for his uncanny expression of the subconscious. "Joan Miro" centres on Paris during the vibrant era between the wars, when Miro became the intimate of almost everyone in that scene - boxing with young Hemingway, working with Max Ernst on the Ballets Russes, drinking, painting and arguing with Picasso, Braque, Dubuffet, Matisse, Breton and many others. Miro engagingly recounts all of this, as well as stories of his exile during World War II. Miro's virtuosity encompassed drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, poetry, stage sets, costumes, murals and tapestries; he vividly describes the creation of these artworks in these pages.

In this volume, Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper investigates the impact of Greek art on the miniature figure sculptures produced in Babylonia after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia were used as agents of social change, by visually expressing and negotiating cultural differences. The scaled-down quality of figurines encouraged both visual and tactile engagement, enabling them to effectively work as non-threatening instruments of cultural blending. Reconstructing the embodied experience of miniaturization in detailed case studies, Langin-Hooper illuminates the dynamic process of combining Greek and Babylonian sculpture forms, social customs, and viewing habits into new, hybrid works of art. Her innovative focus on figurines as instruments of both personal encounter and global cultural shifts has important implications for the study of tiny objects in art history, anthropology, classics, and other disciplines.

Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholarship on Classical Art, few notions appear to be as elusive as that of “small sculpture”, often treated with a certain degree of diffidence well summarized in the formula Klein, aber Kunst? In fact, a large and heterogeneous variety of objects corresponds to this definition: all kinds of small sculpture, from statuettes to miniatures, in a variety of materials including stone, bronze, and terracotta, associated with a great array of functions and contexts, and with extremely different levels of manufacture and patronage. It would be a major misunderstanding to think of these small sculptures in general as nothing more than a cheap and simplified alternative to larger scale statues. Compared with those, their peculiar format allowed for a wider range of choices, in terms, for example, of use of either cheap or extremely valuable materials (not only marble and bronze, but also gold and silver, ivory, hard stones, among others), methods of production (combining seriality and variation), modes of fruition (such as involving a degree of intimacy with the beholder, rather than staging an illusion of “presence”). Furthermore, their pervasive presence in both private and public spaces at many levels of Greek and Roman society presents us with a privileged point of view on the visual literacy of a large and varied public. Although very different in many respects, small-sized sculptures entertained often a rather ambivalent relationship with their larger counterparts, drawing from them at the same time schemes, forms and iconographies. By offering a fresh, new analysis of archaeological evidence and literary sources, through a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume helps to illuminate this rather complex dynamic and aims to contribute to a better understanding of the status of Greek and Roman small size sculpture within the general development of ancient art.

The Ashmolean Museum houses one of the most extensive collections of wood engravings in the world. The collection effectively began with the gift in 1964, by Arthur Mitchell, of over 3,000 prints, including a large group of wood engravings. During the 1980s and 1990s, it expanded remarkably with acquisitions of large groups of prints, often as gifts from the artists, resulted in a succession of monographic exhibitions on some of the most important wood engravers. They included John Farleigh (1986), John Buckland Wright (1990), Clare Leighton (1992), Monica Poole (1993) and Anne Desmet (1998). A key point in this period of expansion was the acquisition of a comprehensive body of work by Gertrude Hermes and Blair Hughes-Stanton in 1995 from the artists' family, which resulted in a memorable exhibition organised by Katharine Eustace. More recently, the Ashmolean has formed a close partnership with the SWE, and has been keeping the collection up to date by acquiring work by members, both at the Society's annual exhibition and privately.

This comprehensive sourcebook is destined to become a lasting and definitive resource on the art and aesthetic philosophy of the American artist David Smith (1906-1965). A pioneer of twentieth-century modernism, Smith was renowned for the expansive formal and conceptual ambitions of his broadly diverse and inventive welded-steel abstractions. His groundbreaking achievements drew freely on cubism, surrealism, and constructivism, profoundly influencing later movements such as minimalism and environmental art. By radically challenging older conventions of monolithic figuration and refuting arbitrary distinctions between painters and sculptors, Smith asserted sculpture's equal role in advancing modern art. A compilation of Smith's poems, sketchbook notes, essays, lectures, letters to the editor, reviews, and interviews, these previously unpublished texts underscore the varied ways in which his writing functioned as a means to examine and articulate his private identity and to promote the social ideals that made him a key participant in contemporary discourses surrounding modernism, art and politics, and sculptural aesthetics. All the documents in David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews have been newly corrected against the original manuscripts, typescripts, and audiotapes. Each text in this collection is annotated with historical and contextual information that reflects Smith's own process of continually reviewing and revising his writings in response to his evolving aspirations as a visual artist.

<div>One of the most important sculptors of this century, Richard Serra has been a spokesman on the nature and status of art in our day. Best known for site-specific works in steel, Serra has much to say about the relation of sculpture to place, whether urban, natural, or architectural, and about the nature of art itself, whether political, decorative, or personal. In interviews with writers including Douglas and Davis Sylvester, he discusses specific installations and offers insights into his approach to the problem each presents. Interviews by Peter Eisenman and Alan Colquhoun elicit Serra's thoughts on the relation of architecture to contemporary sculpture, a primary component in his own work. From essays like "Extended Notes from Sight Point Road" to Serra's extended commentary on the <i>Tilted Arc</i> fiasco, the pieces in this volume comprise a document of one artist's engagement with the practical, philosophical, and political problems of art.</div>