|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
A beautiful celebration of six decades of work by Edgar Degas,
published in the centennial year of the artist's death Edgar
Degas's (1834-1917) relentless experimentation with technical
procedures is a hallmark of his lifelong desire to learn. The
numerous iterations of compositions and poses suggest an intense
self-discipline, as well as a refusal to accept any creative
solution as definitive or finite. Published in the centenary year
of the artist's death, this book presents an exceptional array of
Degas's work, including paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings,
monotypes, counter proofs, and sculpture, with approximately sixty
key works from private and public collections in Europe and the
United States, some of them published here for the first time.
Shown together, the impressive works represent well over half a
century of innovation and artistic production. Essays by leading
Degas scholars and conservation scientists explore his practice and
recurring themes of the human figure and landscape. The book opens
with a study of Degas's debt to the Old Masters, and it concludes
with a consideration of his artistic legacy and his influence on
leading artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Francis
Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Ryan Gander, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin,
R. B. Kitaj, Pablo Picasso, and Walter Sickert. Published in
association with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Exhibition
Schedule: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (10/3/17-1/14/18)
Denver Art Museum (02/18/18-05/20/18)
Throughout his long career, David Hockney has insistently explored
diverse ways of depicting the visible world. He has scrutinised the
methods of the old masters, and explored radical departures from
their cherished assumptions. The exhibitions accompanied by this
volume are the first to focus on this central theme in his art.
'Western art' from the Renaissance until at least the late 19th
century has been dominated by the depiction of nature. Was this to
be accomplished by direct looking (called “eyeballing” by
Hockney) or with the assistance of optical theory and devices, such
as cameras? Hockney has experimented with the full range of
existing strategies, overtly using perspective in some of his
classic pictures and rigorously investigating optical aids for the
imitation of nature, including the camera obscura and camera
lucida. Yet he has come to reject the photograph as the definitive
image of what we see. Along the way, he has identified a 'camera
culture' in European painting from 1400, arguing very
controversially that the supreme naturalism of painters like Jan
van Eyck are the product of optical devices. His book, Secret
Knowledge (2001), with its majestic panorama of paintings over the
course of five centuries, claims that art historians have missed
the central aspect of painters’ practice. The 'Hockney thesis'
has been received more favourably outside the professional world of
art history than in it. His own artistic practice has been in
vigorous dialogue with his radical thesis, and he has progressively
demonstrated new and dynamic ways of characterising the visual
world without perspective and other conventional techniques. This
quest results a series of joyous challenges to our ways of seeing
in the major exhibition in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum and
in the Heong Gallery (Downing College). It will look at the whole
span of Hockney’s varied career and at the nature of the optical
devices he has tested. His vision will be explored in the setting
of traditional masterpieces of naturalistic observation, and in the
context of modern sciences and technologies of seeing. The first
section of the book looks at his thrilling experiments in seeing
and representing in broad historical and contemporary contexts.
This is followed by discussions of pre-photographic devices for
capturing the appearances of things by optical means. The third
section includes essays on Hockney’s experiments from the
perspectives of neuroscience and computer vision. In short, it
reveals in a new way the working of Hockney’s unique eye.
This lavish catalogue presents sketches made en plein air between
the end of the eighteenth century and late nineteenth century. It
accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington (USA), the Fondation Custodia (France) and the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK). In the eighteenth century the
tradition of open-air painting was based in Italy, Rome in
particular. Artists came from all over Europe to study classical
sculpture and architecture, as well as masterpieces of Renaissance
and Baroque art. During their studies, groups of young painters
visited the Italian countryside, training their eyes and their
hands to transcribe the effects of light on a range of natural
features. The practice became an essential aspect of art education,
and spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. This
exhibition focuses on the artists' wish to convey the immediacy of
nature observed at first hand. Around a hundred works, most of them
unfamiliar to the general public, will be displayed. The artists
represented include Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner,
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille
Corot, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye,
Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann
Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Jakob Frey, among others. The sketches
demonstrate the skill and ingenuity with which each artist quickly
translated these first-hand observations of atmospheric and
topographical effects while the impression was still fresh. The
exhibition and the catalogue will be organized thematically,
reviewing, as contemporary artists did, motifs such as trees,
rocks, water, volcanoes, and sky effects, and favourite
topgraphical locations, such as Rome and Capri. The catalogue will
present numerous unpublished plein air sketches, and contains
original scholarship on this relatively young field of art history.
The articulated human figure made of wax or wood has been a common
tool in artistic practice since the 16th century. Its mobile limbs
enable the artist to study anatomical proportion, fix a pose at
will, and perfect the depiction of drapery and clothing. Over the
course of the 19th century, the mannequin gradually emerged from
the studio to become the artist's subject, at first humorously,
then in more complicated ways, playing on the unnerving
psychological presence of a figure that was realistic, yet
unreal-lifelike, yet lifeless. Silent Partners locates the artist's
mannequin within the context of an expanding universe of effigies,
avatars, dolls, and shop window dummies. Generously illustrated,
this book features works by such artists as Poussin, Gainsborough,
Degas, Courbet, Cezanne, Kokoschka, Dali, Man Ray, and others; the
astute, perceptive text examines their range of responses to the
uncanny and highly suggestive potential of the mannequin. Published
in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition Schedule:
Musee Bourdelle, Paris (03/15/15-05/15/15) Fitzwilliam Museum
(10/14/14-01/15/15)
Touch is our first sense. Through touch we make art, stake a claim
to what we own and those we love, express our faith, our belief,
our anger. Touch is how we leave our mark and find our place in the
world; touch is how we connect. Drawing on works of art spanning
four thousand years and from across the globe, this book explores
the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new
ways of looking. In a series of lavishly illustrated essays, the
authors explore anatomy and skin; the relationship between the
brain, hand, and creativity; touch, desire and possession;
ideological touch; reverence and iconoclasm. A final section
collects a range of reflections, historic and contemporary, on
touch. Objects range from anonymous ancient Egyptian limestone
sculpture, to medieval manuscripts and panel paintings, to
devotional and spiritual objects from across the world, to love
tokens and fede rings. Drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture by
Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Carracci, Hogarth, Turner, Rodin,
Degas, and Kollwitz are explored, along with work by contemporary
artists Judy Chicago, Frank Auerbach, Richard Long, the Chapman
Brothers, and Richard Rawlins. The events of 2020 have made us
newly alive to the preciousness and the dangers of touch, making
this exploration of our most fundamental sense particularly timely
and resonant.
|
You may like...
Rhapsodic
Laura Thalassa
Paperback
R514
Discovery Miles 5 140
The Familiar
Leigh Bardugo
Paperback
R360
R281
Discovery Miles 2 810
The Hidden Girl
Lucinda Riley, Harry Whittaker
Paperback
R370
R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
|