|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of On Chapel Sands, a
stunning new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and
what a shared love of a painting can come to mean. 'No one writes
art like Laura Cumming' Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the
Whale 'I shall never look at any painting in the same way again'
Polly Morland, author of A Fortunate Woman _____________________
'We see with everything that we are' On the morning of 12 October
1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The
thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities
was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only
his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known
paintings. For the explosion that killed him also buried his
reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and
career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster
is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the
relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura
Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and
the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Thunderclap takes the
reader from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary
London; from Fabritius's goldfinch on its perch to de Hooch's blue
and white tile and the smallest seed in a loaf by Vermeer. This is
a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your
life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. For the explosion
of the title speaks not only to the precariousness of our
existence, but also to the power of painting: the sudden
revelations of sight. _____________________ Praise for Laura
Cumming: 'Cumming skilfully withholds key twists in the tale,
revealing them at just the right moment' The Times 'Outstanding . .
. A peerless detective story that keeps you guessing to the end'
Sunday Times 'Superb and original' Sunday Times 'Sumptuous . . . A
gleaming work of someone at the peak of her craft' New York Times
Focusing on the art of self-portraiture, this effortlessly engaging
exploration of the lives of artists sheds fascinating light on some
of the most extraordinary portraits in art history. Self-portraits
catch your eye. They seem to do it deliberately. Walk into any art
gallery and they draw attention to themselves. Come across them in
the world's museums and you get a strange shock of recognition,
rather like glimpsing your own reflection. For in picturing
themselves artists reveal something far deeper than their own
physical looks: the truth about how they hope to be viewed by the
world, and how they wish to see themselves. In this beautifully
written and lavishly illustrated book, Laura Cumming, art critic of
the Observer, investigates the drama of the self-portrait, from
Durer, Rembrandt and Velazquez to Munch, Picasso, Warhol and the
present day. She considers how and why self-portraits look as they
do and what they reveal about the artist's innermost sense of self
- as well as the curious ways in which they may imitate our
behaviour in real life. Drawing on art, literature, history,
philosophy and biography to examine the creative process in an
entirely fresh way, Cumming offers a riveting insight into the
intimate truths and elaborate fictions of self-portraiture and the
lives of those who practise it. A work of remarkable depth, scope
and power, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered about
the strange dichotomy between the innermost self and the self we
choose to present for posterity - our face to the world.
**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA
BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 'A modern masterpiece' Guardian Uncovering the
mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming,
prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her
family story. Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach.
Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in
a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and
at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. Decades later, Laura
Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's
disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to
letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and
lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community
and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 'A moving,
many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a
revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times Shortlisted for
the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the
Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE
RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR
NON-FICTION Selected as a Book of the Year in the Herald In 1845, a
Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened
portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it
might be a long-lost Velazquez, he bought the picture and set out
to discover its strange history - a quest that led from fame to
ruin and exile. Fusing detection and biography, this book shows how
and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of
mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising
discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an
eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velazquez,
bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works
than ever before.
Over the past thirty years, Y.Z. Kami has built a resounding oeuvre that spans both portraiture and abstraction, using direct observation, poetic reference, and repeated geometries to create poignant evocations of the sublime. This comprehensive monograph explores the breadth of Kami s work with over 300 color illustrations, and texts by leading scholars and curators Robert Storr, Laura Cumming, and Elena Geuna. Y.Z. Kami s large-scale portraits recreate the visceral experience of a face-to-face encounter, suggesting a connection to the presence of each subject. Through a matte, uniform haze, he depicts his subjects with eyes open or closed, gazing forward or looking down. Kami s focus on each individual s face reveals an inner life beneath immediate appearancess a feat that is particularly resonant in the context of contemporary portraiture.
Rendered in oil paint on linen, the portraits also recall Byzantine frescoes or Fayum funerary portraits, continuing the art historical quest to locate the unknown and the infinite within material form. In his abstract work, Kami continues this interplay of surface and interior, using forms inspired by architecture, geometry, and poetry. In the Endless Prayers series, prayers and verses in Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit are cut into rectangular fragments and pasted into mandala formations, their spiraling patterns echoing the repetitive nature of prayer. Comprised of square or rectangular marks arranged in concentric circles, the Dome paintings create tessellated, pulsing voids as if passing from darkness into light.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Rio 2
Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, …
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R76
Discovery Miles 760
|