( J-L ) Books

Annie Leibovitz at Work

Annie Leibovitz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."
—Annie Leibovitz


Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 104 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

of note 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

After reading some of the other reviews, i have to agree with the comments about content however i believe it's important to understand that this was a publication for an accompanying exhibition at the brooklyn museum of art. It is an exhibition that is still touring around today. I saw the exhibition and was struck by the quality of the photographs as well as their diversity. It is as the title suggests, "A Photographers Life" and should be seen as such. I really liked the exhibition for it's incite into the life behind all of the famous photograph's we have come to know annie leibovitz for.

Editorial Review:

“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990—2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures–Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet–appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes made even more indelible through Leibovitz’s discerning eye. The images form a narrative rich in contrasts and continuities: The photographer has a long relationship that ends with illness and death. She chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of her life.

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.

Leonardo's Machines: Da Vinci's Inventions Revealed

Domenico Laurenza, Mario Taddei

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Book - Only a how-to if you are VERY experienced! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book because I have tickets to see the traveling exhibit, "The Da Vinci Experience", in a couple months. It is a gorgeous book. Each machine covered has copies of the Da Vinci original plans, plus the editor's illustrations breaking the machine into it's components, with the placements of said componenets. Each machine has explanations of how components and the full machine work (or are supposed to work). Also, each machine has a history of Leonardo's drawings, purpose, client or personal notebooks, etc. It's a great book and looks gorgeous. I wouldn't think it would be a how-to for a school project unless the kid/parent had a lot of mechanical experience beforehand. All drawings show "real" components that you'd need a full shop to put together. There are no measurements, per se, just comparative sizes shown in the drawings. In the case of Leonardo's original drawings, it looks like this was deliberate. For example, the book's Introduction tells of Leonardo's problems with Giorgio Tedesco, an assistant of a prominant Medici. He wanted Leonardo to build him wooden models of several inventions. Leonardo successfully argued that he could only give Tedesco the scaled drawings. Historians surmise that Leonardo suspected that Tedesco would take the models back to his country, and take them apart to make full-sized machines out of iron without Leonardo's help. Job security was no laughing matter in the 1500's! Love the book. Can't wait to see the working full-sized (except for the half-size helicopter)models made from the drawings in the exhibition.

Editorial Review:

Combining the original coded notebooks and modern computer imaging, over 30 of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions are pieced together in this work, in never-before-seen, mechanically accurate, computer generated artworks. Annotated diagrams show each working part of the contraptions, demonstrating in incredible detail how the machines would have operated. It also includes fascinating recreations of the finished inventions that show how they would have been used in contemporary life - from manned flying machines and mechanical bridges to musical instruments and devastating circular tanks. In-depth analysis of da Vinci's inventions reveal the stories that led to the finished designs.

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

Frida Kahlo

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo's amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist. The 170-page journal contains the artist's thoughts, poems, and dreams-many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera-along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations.

The text entries, written in Frida's round, full script in brightly colored inks, make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist's political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than 35 operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of 18. This intimate portal into her life is sure to fascinate fans of the artist, art historians, and women's culturalists alike.

Kandinsky

Ulrike Becks-Malorny

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

jammed packed 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Ulrike Becks-Malorny has brought recent perspectives on Kandinsky's career to further light with this new biography.

The density of the layout is phenomenal: so much is crammed into this volume it is almost unbelievable. It includes many plates in colour and numerous documentary photographs.

The handsome large format paperback begins with his artistic life in Munich, in the process showing many of his earliest impressionist, fauvist and folk inspired paintings, photographs and sketches, lino- and woodcuts, etchings and drawings never seen before.

Most illustrations are captioned with insightful comments about the work and matters of relevant historic interest.

It also shows how his work developed in dialogue with other artists, architects and musicians of his era, especially the Jugendstil artists, Gabriele Munter and other Blaue Reiter painters, Paul Klee, Adolf Hoelzel, Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko.

My only problem with the book is in the non-justified text and choice of font in Times Roman, which in this particular leading, is not the easiest typeface to scan these days.

Editorial Review:

Illustrated throughout and bound in a flexi-cover, Ulrike Becks-Malorny's study of Kandinsky provides an essential companion to all levels of study.

Klimt (Big Art)

Gottfried Fliedl

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Revealing, Educational and Loads of Photos 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 27 people found this review helpful.

First of all, the book is not covered as shown in the amazon photo which shows the famous "kiss" painting. The book, apparently updated in 2006, shows a cover photo of Klimt's famous Danae (1907-8) oil on canvas painting. I think this cover is more provacative and more organic and softer than the famed Kiss painting which reveals a couple entwined in gold looking rather stiff. Danae was certainly a better choice for the cover. The book is definitely not written for the casual art reader. It is written with extreme depth as what I'd expect from a historian of the arts on a university research level. As verbose as it is, it has plenty, if not hundreds of photos of the famous works, including all of Klimt's paintings and lesser known sketches. The author discusses several of Klimt's famous paintings in depth and reviews various critics of Klimt's time period as well as Klimt's personal opinions and struggles. Culture, politics, and various movements in the arts is also discussed at length. This book is too deep for the casual browser or reader but makes a great coffee table book if only for the pictures alone. It is a high quality book and the pages are high quality (acid free) and glossy. The painting photos are rich and fully colored, better than other books I've bought on Klimt (where the precious gold paint is reduced to lousy brownish or greenish prints). The gold tones in this book, so famous in Klimt's work, are reproduced extremely well as well as the other vivid colors so characteristic of Klimt's work. It's a bargain to get this book at the price.

Editorial Review:

Gustav Klimt's art is thoroughly fin de siecle. It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper middle-class society - a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy, which Klimt (1862-1918) and his contemporaries found - or hoped to find - in beauty, was constantly overshadowed by death, and death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. Particularly his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world "in female form." Author Gottfried Fliedl also discusses the Secession movement and Klimt's role within this important group of artists.

Leonardo Da Vinci: 1452-1519: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (Taschen 25th Anniversary)

Frank Zollner, Johannes Nathan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

TASCHEN's 25th anniversary - Special edition! Special bestseller price Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) possessed one of the greatest minds of all time; his importance and influence are inestimable. This XXL-format comprehensive survey is the most complete book ever made on the subject of this Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and all-around genius. With huge, full-bleed details of Leonardo's masterworks, this highly original publication allows the reader to inspect the subtlest facets of his brushstrokes. * Part I explores Leonardo's life and work in ten chapters. All of his paintings are interpreted in depth, with The Annunciation and The Last Supper featured on large double-spreads. * Part II comprises a catalogue raisonn? of Leonardo's paintings, which covers all of his surviving and lost painted works and includes texts describing their states of preservation. * Part III contains an extensive catalogue of his drawings (numbering in the thousands, they cannot all be reproduced in one book); 663 are presented, arranged by category (architecture, technical, anatomical, figures, proportion, cartography, etc). This sumptuous TASCHEN offering is the most thorough and beautifully produced Leonardo book ever published, and this special edition offers it for a third of the usual price.

Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

da Vinci Leonardo

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Volume 1 is ok. Volume is NO (if you are an artist)! 3 out of 5 stars.
8 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I was hoping that after getting these books, I would learn some secret in art making from the great one, but I found them book very disappointing. Tons of texts and very few explanation.

However, the first volume is worth buying because it's about his drawing and painting theory. Beware they are very advance and i found them very confusing.

The second volume has nothing to do with art but rather pure science (Astronamy, sun, etc).

The first Renaissance man 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Nothing of Leonardo DAVinci's sketchbooks were published until the 20th century. These are some of the most important documents of the Renaissance, and they did not become known until the 20th century. There are still people who do not know how important this work was. His anatomical studies were a watershed moment, because they introduced visual diagrams as the standard for communicating knowledge of the body and self. This was no more and no less than the conviction that the true knowledge of the shape of any body could only be arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. The truth of the body, the truth of the human being can only be discovered by looking at the body from multiple aspects, like; level, motion, perspective, transformation and growth. He opened up the body, it had always been closed, now its open. Now, what goes on inside the body is going to give us the essence of what it means to be human. It is the internal struggle, the self with the self, within .you. When you look at his sketchbooks, you see just one place where the whole world opens up.

Leonardo DAVinci-- Leonardo DAVinci invented the modern self. He invented the modern self precisely in this way, through the perspective of disappearance. What he tells reality and us about the self is that it only exists by that which is perceived by the eye. Reality is a product of nature; reality is that which we perceive by the eye. Reality is only that by which we can see. Moreover, in his notebooks he gives us another foundational belief about the human subject and its form. That the sound rules are the issue of sound experience and observation. Experience and observation can only be our best teacher. Of course, this is also, what Voltaire is telling us to by the way. The challenge comes when we realize that we are both to the subject observing and the object that is observed. In our search for self, we experience a kind of division between our constitutions as objects and our constitution as subjects. However, when we look at the human form, when we look at the self we find that the body is in harmony with nature, and that it is in harmony within nature. How does DA Vinci make these kinds of claims? Alternatively, how does he ground these kinds of claims with the function of the eye or the power of the eye? Well, one of the ways he does it is thru the camera obscura. Earliest record of use of camera obscura is in DA Vinci's writings. The camera obscura gave birth to the science of optics, the science of seeing. It is with DA Vinci, that the science of seeing became the foundation of self-representation, a representation called the self, thus the representation of the human form. Now DA Vinci embodied his own concept of the painter, as philosophers. He saw painters principally as natural philosophers. To him, nature was all important, absolute, the image of the eternal. In one very significant passage of his notebooks, he defines the relationship of art to nature and its process of evolution. "The painter will produce pictures of small merit, if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. If he will study from natural objects, he will bear good fruit, as was seen in the painters after the Romans always imitating each other until their art constantly declined from age to age. Therefore, this was paramount for him in some ways what he was doing, and thinking was very radical and revolutionary and in other ways, it was very traditional. He appears to be quite a traditionalist, he studied ancient sources, Greeks, medieval sources, he studied anatomy, and these traditions get him to compare the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the world. These analogies extend to everything that he attempted to trace, to record and to know about the human form. Comparisons between the arteries in the body and the underground rivers of the earth. The flow of blood to the head in relation to the circulation of water to the summits of mountains. How does blood get to your head? If you want to understand that then understand how water flows up to mountains. Blood when it bursts in the veins of your nose and water rushing out of a vein in the earth. Almost everything that occurs in the human body can be found in the natural world. His interest in these analogies becomes very evident in the notebooks and sketchbooks. Scholars argue that these microcosm and macrocosm analogies are more than outright comparisons that belong to a pre scientific age, they lead him to compare the study of the body and Ptolemy's study of the earth. Consequently to use Ptolemy's method in the geography as the starting point for his own systematic study of anatomy. Therefore, anatomy and geography here become one in DA Vinci's mind. The forms of the earth and those of the human body have a parallel. "Thus in 15 entire figures you will have set before you the microcosm on the same plan as was before me adapted by Ptolemy in his cosmology, and so I shall afterwards divide them into limbs as he divided the whole world into processes. Then, I will speak of the function of each part in every direction putting before your eyes a description of the whole form and substance of man as regards his movements from place to place by means of these different parts. Thus if it please our great author I may demonstrate the nature of men and their customs in a way I describe this figure." Therefore, within the human form and within the kind of intricate details of human anatomy he discovered a way of describing and recording, not only the geographical construction of the natural world, but of Divinity itself. And when you look more closely at the system he devised to study the body, the more carefully you look at his drawings of the human form the more clearly you begin to recognize how strikingly stunningly original it is.

Earlier authors had relied exclusively on verbal descriptions of the human body. The human body had been a verbal entity but he emphasis visual description and some of the illustrations he has to bring visual dimensions to the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle the descriptions put forward by these men he presents in visual terms in these kind of body scapes. In the course of 20 years, roughly from 1489 to the end of his life, he dissected about 19 corpses and became very much obsessed with dissection. He drew these parts of bodies in minute detail every part of the human anatomy, he would draw each piece separately, together and at different angles. He laid out bodies in his drawings to mime classical poses in painting. He is referencing the history of art with the poses and the visual representation of the human subject. It is presented to us that deeply challenge these values of human nature, of life and death of living form and the cadaver it really raises some profound questions. The problem is in order to get to those questions, in order to explore some of the deeper philosophical implications of his work you have to get past the gross factor and the moral and ethical questions that his work raises. He is an artist that works very consciously with the sense of the ethical lines that he is crossing; he is not an artist that wants to make you comfortable. He sees that blood gets in the way of his observations, so he advises that you make a model of the body part and then you draw it. Model making and scientific art go hand in hand for him. You have to reconstruct reality before you can represent it. Therefore, before you can draw what is real you have to make it yourself. One of the most striking features of the notebooks is the manner in which he presents his work to us. There are no criticisms of the shortcomings that he has discovered in earlier authors, he does not boast about his own accomplishments, his writing style is pedagogical, and he is writing a teaching manual with descriptions and advice. Therefore, if you want to draw a lung, here is how you should do it. What he is trying to do is to convey to a larger audience this method of presentation and by representing human form, he relies on diagrams, and his reliance apparently causes some serious problems for the printing presses of the day. It also caused real issues for publishers because of the graphic nature of the work.

This was very important for medicine. He shows us we can separate human emotions and passions from the human body in understanding human form, and what it means to be human. There is a purely clinical dimension and this other dimension of feelings and emotions, and they do not have to come together at all, this is radical.

Thus again, this inside outside, you see it everywhere in his work. Why are we fascinated with the painting of the Mona Lisa? Because of the question we always ask, what is going on inside? The study of the Mona Lisa, it seems to me has always been organized around precisely the question that drove DA Vinci in his research. All his sketches in this obsessive and fanatical devotion to drawing every part of the body in relationship to every other part of the body at multiple levels and multiple perspectives and in motion, outside inside. There is the outside, what is going on inside, isn't that why we are obsessed with this? This painting just demands that we try to find out what is going on underneath. The truth is underneath, behind her smile, something she is keeping from us. Yet she is revealing just enough of it to make us have to find out what is going on inside of her. It is that relationship once again between the inside and the outside.

I read this book for a graduate class in the Humanities. Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, art, and science.

Editorial Review:

Volume 1 of 2-volume set. Total of 1,566 extracts reveal full range of Leonardo's versatile genius: his writings on painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, mining, inventions, music. Dual Italian-English texts, with 186 plates and faithful reproductions of more than 500 additional drawings.

Women

Annie Leibovitz, Susan Sontag

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Stunningly & Ironically Beautiful 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This books is incredible. The photos themselves are so rich with texture and color that it feels as if you are experiencing that very moment with the subjects. The photos are of National Geographic quality. They will move you. It's easy to forget the genuine value of individuality because we're so caught up in our looks and in trying to be the best. It is filled with women from every type of work, socioeconmic status, region, and experience. Every reader will be able to relate immediatly. This book takes an ordinary moment in time and makes it a glittering treasure. I bought this for my mom and we sat and absorbed each page together and it really brought us closer and created interesting discussions about women in our society. It is thought provoking, visually pristine, and will stir up a bit of magic in your soul. Postive, enlightening, and worth every penny. The absolute perfect gift for any women of any walk of life.

Editorial Review:

The photographs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites, reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers, painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists, performance artists, and businesswomen. "Each of these pictures must stand on its own," Susan Sontag writes in the essay that accompanies the portraits. "But the ensemble says, So this what women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this."