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Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a
painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects
in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the
eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations
and compositional devices using as little depth as possible. A
heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe-l'oeil flourished
from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in
fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics
in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render
objects and spaces with eye-fooling exactitude. Both witty and
serious, trompe-l'oeil is a game artists play with spectators to
raise questions about the nature of art and perception.
Post-Impressionism is a movement in France that represented both an
extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent
limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English
art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century
painters as Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van
Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Most of these painters
began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however,
to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in
its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms
of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The
Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more
ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure,
brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional
subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short
brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a
basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century
modernism.
A richly illustrated and extremely enjoyable reference book on the
historical evolution of the nude. From the Palaeolithic "Great
Mothers" to the Greek athletes, from the Venus of Urbino by Titian
to Leonardo's Virtuvian Man, from the Odalisque by Boucher to those
by Ingres, to the amazons of Helmut Newton and the desolate
lifeless bodies of Andres Serrano, the nude is the theme of
artistic representation par excellence. The nude body as the
incarnation of perfect beauty and the suspicions concerning its
sensuality imposed by Christian culture; the renewed triumph of
ancient beauty in the Renaissance and the study of anatomy; the
visual licentiousness of the 18th century and the photographic
nude; ideal beauty, eroticism, pornography; the nude also as
representation of the ugly and its flaunted truthfulness in the art
of the 20th century; the nude that itself becomes a work of art in
the avant-garde of the post-WWII period, with performance, body art
and experimental theatre. These are the threads of the narration
all conducted around a rich apparatus of images. After Art of the
Twentieth Century, published by Skira in four languages in 2009,
Flaminio Gualdoni has now created a richly illustrated new
reference book that is also extremely enjoyable to read.
This general catalogue, which represents years of work on the
systematic cataloguing of Pomodoro's entire sculptural output,
covers the full range of works produced by the artist between 1953
and 2003, supplemented with the first complete documentary research
into the entire existing bibliography.
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