European Books

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

Edward Dolnick

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.

The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War

Lynn H. Nicholas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

See the movie if you can 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

After seeing the documentary movie with the same title, I was anxious to buy the book. The movie is based on the book and generally I find books preferable to movies. In this case, however, I would recommend the movie unless you are an art history major or World War II history buff. The book is a scholarly work with dense writing and extensive footnotes. While I can appreciate such texts, it was not what I was expecting since the movie is so engaging that I sat through it utterly entranced and with an intense desire to learn more.

Editorial Review:

Every few months you'll read a newspaper story of the discovery of some long-lost art treasure hidden away in a German basement or a Russian attic: a Cranach, a Holbein, even, not long ago, a da Vinci. Such treasures ended up far from the museums and churches in which they once hung, taken as war loot by Allied and Axis soldiers alike. Thousands of important pieces have never been recovered. Lynn Nicholas offers an astonishingly good account of the wholesale ravaging of European art during World War II, of how teams of international experts have worked to recover lost masterpieces in the war's aftermath and of how governments "are still negotiating the restitution of objects held by their respective nations."

Claude Monet, 1840-1926 (Basic Art)

Christoph Heinrich

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Editorial Review:

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the most typical and the most individual Impressionist painter. His long life he dedicated to a pictorial exploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape, offer the human eye. But while Monet the painter was faithful and persevering in the pursuit of his motifs, his personal life followed a more restless course. Parisian by birth, he discovered plein-air painting as a youth in the provinces, where one of his homes, Argenteuil, has come to represent the artistic flowering and official establishment of Impressionism as a movement, with Monet as its creative leader. In his endeavor to capture the ever-changing face of reality, Monet went beyond Impressionism and thereby beyond the confines of self-contained panel painting: in Giverny he painted the Poplars, Grain Stacks and Rouen Cathedral series in which he addressed one motif in constantly new variations. Here, too, Monet laid out the famous garden with its water-lily pond which he was to paint on huge canvases well into the 1920s. He thereby sought to render not reality as objectively experienced, but rather that which takes place "between the motif and the artist". In their open, merely tenuously representational structure and impressive scale, his water lily paintings - created long before the currents of the contemporary avant-garde - point the way to the developments of the future.

Leonardo's Notebooks

Leonardo da Vinci

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best Version of da Vinci's Notebooks in Print 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Though there are nice, complete versions of Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, this well designed, edited, and packaged book presents the most important and pertinent elements from his Notebooks in a single large format hardcover version that is the perfect presentation for the general audience.

This version of da Vinci's Notebooks presents the contents in sections that group like illustrations and text together: "Beauty, Reason and Art" contains such content as da Vinci on painting, the human figures, and art forms; "Observations and Order" covers anatomy, geography, landscape and the sciences; and "Practical Matters" delves into da Vinci's inventions and experiments, architectural studies and metalwork, as well as sculpture.

The illustrations from the original Notebooks are exceptionally well reproduced in this book and the size and presentation are generous and the main focus throughout the book.

Unless you need access to the entirety of the Notebooks for research purposes, Leonardo's Notebooks as edited by H. Anna Suh, would make the perfect addition to your art or scientific library. It would look darn nice displayed on your coffee table as well.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

Editorial Review:

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) possessed arguably the greatest mind the world has ever known. Artist, draftsman, inventor, and philosopher, his contributions to modern society are profound and wide-reaching. Throughout his life, Leonardo kept dozens of notebooks, elegant studies on topics ranging from architecture to botany to philosophy—indeed nearly anything of which the human imagination could conceive.

Leonardo’s Notebooks collects a variety of the most fascinating of these studies and compiles them into one monumental volume that demystifies his insights and clearly illustrates his ideas, experiments, and observations with hundreds of his original sketches, line drawings, and paintings. Topics include Anatomy and the Movement of the Human Figure; Botany and Landscape; Engineering and Military Engineering; Physical Sciences; Aerodynamics and Flight; Geography—and more.

The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947 - 1957

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1947, Christian Dior’s “New Look” was greeted with both shock and delight, making headlines around the world. Accompanying the exhibition opening at the Victoria and Albert Museum in September 2007, this lavish book focuses on Parisian and British couture between 1947 and 1957, the decade Dior hailed as fashion’s “golden age.”

The “New Look” symbolized a new femininity. The full skirts and hourglass silhouettes were considered highly decadent, synonymous with luxury and prosperity, in marked contrast to the austerity of the WWII years. Nevertheless, the “New Look” caught the public imagination and ushered in a period of remarkable creativity. The Golden Age of Couture features stunning gowns and exquisite tailoring from Dior as well as from such designers as Balenciaga, Balmain, and Givenchy, along with evocative photographs by the likes of Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton.

This beautifully designed book reveals the skill and craftsmanship of haute couture along with the inner workings of the exclusive design houses, and the inspiration behind some of the most famous styles of all time.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, September 27–January 6, 2008

Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937

Jim Coddington, Robert Lubar, Jordana Mendelson, Adele Nelson, Joan Miro

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Taking Joan Miro's notorious declaration of 1927--"I want to assassinate painting"--as its point of departure, this richly illustrated volume is the first to focus on Miro the "anti-painter," identifying the core practices and strategies the artist used to challenge painting between 1927 and 1937. Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 surveys the various material, iconographical and rhetorical forms of Miro's attacks on painting by presenting, in chronological sequence, 12 distinct series of works, beginning with a remarkable group of paintings on unprimed canvas and concluding with Miro's return to Realism in "Still Life with Old Shoe" (1937). Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, stylistic heterogeneity and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key tactics of aggression that are explored in this extraordinary presentation of the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects and drawings Miro produced during this crucial decade of his long career. This volume integrates close scrutiny of Miro's materials and processes with historical and iconographic analysis, leading to an expanded understanding of the underappreciated aggressiveness of an artist long regarded as Surrealism's most lyrical painter-poet.
Joan Miro was born in 1893 in Barcelona. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, and through 1931, Miro generally spent half of each year in the French capitol and half in his native Catalonia, returning to live in France after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One of the twentieth century's greatest Modern artists, Miro created a pictorial world of intense imaginative power, in which visionary and cosmic elements are inextricably intertwined with the earthly and mundane. He died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

The Lost Painting

Jonathan Harr

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.

The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.

Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.

Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.

Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The fascinating details of Caravaggio’s strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. Harr’s account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling.
". . . Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . .in truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, A Civil Action, was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up hi tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake. . .if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk. . .[you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable." --The New York Times Book Review


"Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste--and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read." --The Economist


From the Hardcover edition.

Antonio Lopez Garcia

Cheryl Brutvan

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Antonio Lopez Garcia is one of Spain's most revered contemporary artists. Bringing his profound visual sensitivity and mastery of light to bear on a range of deliberately quotidian subjects, Lopez Garcia imbues them with an extraordinary and haunting character. In 1993, his paintings and drawings were given a major retrospective at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, while Victor Erice's 1992 documentary about Lopez Garcia, The Quince Tree of the Sun, received the Critics' Prize at that year's Cannes and top prize at the Chicago Film Festival. Yet Lopez Garcia's work has rarely been exhibited outside his native country. This book, published to accompany the first major exhibition of his art in the United States (in tandem with the MFA's monumental El Greco to Velazquez exhibition), offers the first comprehensive overview in English of this extraordinary oeuvre. An essay by curator Cheryl Brutvan discusses Lopez Garcia as a descendant of the great Spanish naturalists, as well as his indebtedness to Surrealism and "magic realism," while individual appreciations of some 50 paintings offer English-speaking readers their first opportunity to appreciate in depth the remarkable poetry and atmospheric density of this major world artist.

Salvador Dali 2v

Robert Descharnes, Gilles Neret

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

TASCHEN's 25th anniversary ? Special edition! Two large-format hardcover volumes in a slipcase at a special bestseller price Picasso called Dal? "an outboard motor that's always running." Dal? thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dal? (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics?and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This lively monograph presents the infamous Surrealist in full color and in his own words. His provocative imagery is all here, from the soft watches to the notorious burning giraffe. A friend of the artist for over thirty years, privy to the reality behind Dal?'s public image, author Robert Descharnes is uniquely qualified to analyze Dal??both the man and the myth.

Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909

Annegret Hoberg

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Editorial Review:

Kubin is irrefutably one of the most original talents of his
generation. Whether painting directly from his hallucinatory
visions or illustrating the works of such literary giants as
Balzac, Poe, Dostoevsky, and Gogol, Kubin eschewed the
decorative artistry of earlier Austrian art. Instead, he was
drawn to life s dark undertones, represented in his work
through his morbid subject matter and frenetic style. Filled
with horrific yet fully realized imaginings that were eerily
prescient of the era to come, this volume is certain to
introduce Kubin to a wider audience perhaps to an entire
generation who see in art a way to contend with the upheaval
and tribulation of their own time.