( S-U ) Books

The Family Of Man

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Perhaps the best photographic book ever published 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I first found this book at Foyle's in London, about 35 years ago, and it struck me. Since then, I bought five copies of the Family of Man, but no one remained in my home, because ever I felt the need to give this book to someone I loved or trusted.
What is making this book so precious to me?
First the idea itself of collecting pictures from the whole world (remember, when Steichen launched his project, the Cold War and the related hysteria was at its peak). This to demonstrate that all the human beings have to pass through the same events in their life: birth, growth, education, emotions, work, love, children, reflection, death. This apparently trivial concept leads to a conclusion by far less trivial: we all do belong to one family, our species, the humans (by the way, this thinking had not so great success in the past, nor the present seems to be more benevolent).
The Family of Man is exactly the visual demonstration of such a concept, by comparing the same events as viewed from different geographic and cultural perspectives, by means of photos from renowned or unknown photographers (of course, the pictures from the US are prevailing in numbers for logistics and statistical reasons: it was by far more simple for an US photographer to even simply receive the news of the Steichen project than for a photographer in Rwanda or in the USSR).
Steichen and his assistants made an impressive selection, shortlisting 503 pictures from the over 2 million they received. By the way, Steichen was a photographer, and his selection also considered the aesthetic side of the question: most of the pictures selected simply are wonderful.
The result is this book. I think no one on this planet can miss it, because The Family of Man is representative of a large part of our culture and on our very nature.
To give an example, in my opinion this book is at the same emotional and rational level as Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, Melville's Moby Dick, primo Levi's If this is a Man, or the ancient Greek lyrics, to quote some comparisons.
I hope it will continue to be published; we, the humans, desperately need it.

Editorial Review:

Hailed as the most successful exhibition of photography ever assembled, The Family of Man opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in January 1955. This book, the permanent embodiment of Edward Steichen's monumental exhibition, reproduces all of the 503 images that Steichen described as "a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world. Photographs made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death." A classic and inspiring work, The Family of Man has been in print for more than forty years. The New York Times once wrote that it "symbolizes the universality of human emotions." First produced by a magazine publisher and sold by the hundreds of thousands on newsstands and in airport shops, The Family of Man has been in more recent years published by the Museum. It has been continuously in print since 1955; the present Thirtieth Anniversary Edition was prepared from original photographs with all new duotone plates in 1986.

Sargent Portrait Drawings: 42 Works by John Singer Sargent (Dover Art Library)

John Singer Sargent

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Sargent Portrait Drawings 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The book is great. The ones who sent it didn't package it well. It is a paperback book and it came all bent up.

What would you expect from the master ? 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

A good book full of great drawings by one of the best artist I have ever studied. The price is right and you should not waist one more minute before you order it.
I always like to see how the great artist draw, since drawing is the back bone to good painting in my mind.
I really get a kick out of artist who say they can't draw and can only paint, sure.. Thats like saying you never learned to walk and that you can only run.
Sargent used to say you should draw every day and I think he was right.

Editorial Review:

Collection of portraits, selected from public and private holdings by art historian Trevor J. Fairbrother, reveal the technical skill and intuitive eye for which American portrait painter John Singer Sargent is renowned. Drawings in pencil, pastels and charcoal — a lesser-known aspect of Sargent's oeuvre — are shown. List of Plates. Introduction. Captions.

Sargent Notebook (Decorative Notebooks)

Sargent

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

Gorgeous and Practical! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I've been carrying this book around in my purse all year, and friends are constantly admiring it. As a result, I've begun keeping a small supply of these little notebooks on hand for small rewards or gifts. They are a big hit with both children and adults, and make a wonderful, non-fussy thank-you present or remembrance. A great value!

Editorial Review:

A striking beauty — one of the artist's best-known works — graces the cover of this 64-page ruled notebook that's perfect for notes, addresses, phone numbers, secret thoughts, and more.

The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent

Carl Little

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) stands among the greatest of watercolor painters, along with J.M.W. Turner, Winslow Homer, and other masters of this difficult medium. Watercolor was more than a distraction from the portrait and mural commissions Sargent labored over; after 1900, watercolor became central to his artistic vision. His aquarelles are, simply stated, masterworks. Portraits, interiors, landscapes, architectural studies--Sargent's work in watercolor offers a great variety of subject matter, ranging from Arab gypsies to World War I soldiers, to masterful depictions of Venetian churches, to Florida swamp alligators.
Sargent carried his watercolors on his travels; They were ideally suited to capturing the scene, the light, the air, wherever he found himself. This book serves as a record of his travels, featuring the paintings he produced in Palestine, Northern Africa, the Canadian Rockies, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Greece. Among specific locales were the islands of Majorca and Corfu; Florence, Venice, Carrara, Lake Garda, and Rome; the Alps; Lake O'Hara; the coast of Maine and the Miami River.
Sargent's bold and often experimental use of the medium, which sometimes led to semi-abstract images, compels admiration among contemporary painters as well as museum goers today. In addition to placing Sargent's accomplishments in the context of his life and time, Carl Little discusses the artist's extraordinary watercolor technique.

J.M.W. Turner

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Widely regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of art, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) had a profound influence on the development of Impressionism.

What is less known is that his influence spread far beyond Europe, and provided a foundational model for American artists challenged with tackling the vast panoramas of the New World.

J.M.W. Turner, accompanying the largest exhibition of his work ever presented in the US, shows how Turner’s revolutionary depictions of light, color and atmospherics in the landscape—combined with his understanding of the sublime in nature—made him among the most acclaimed and keenly studied European artists in the New World. Landscape painting was seen as the art form most closely allied to the identity of the newly independent nation, and Turner’s majestic works served as a model for a new generation of American painters.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 1, 2007–January 6, 2008
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, February 10, 2008–May 18, 2008
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 23, 2008–September 21, 2008

Georges Seurat: The Drawings

Jodi Hauptman, Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff, Richard Thomson, Georges Seurat

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Once described as "the most beautiful painter's drawings in existence," Georges Seurat's mysterious and luminous works on paper played a crucial role in his short, vibrant career. This comprehensive publication surveys the artist's entire oeuvre, from his academic training and the emergence of his unique methods to the studies made for his monumental canvases. Accompanying the first exhibition in almost 25 years to focus exclusively on Seurat's drawings, this volume presents approximately 130 works, primarily the artist's incomparable conte drawings along with a small selection of oil sketches and paintings. In an effort to bridge the seemingly opposite goals of description and evocation, Seurat masses dark and light tones to abstract figures, exploits medium and paper to amplify radiating light, and engages with the Parisian metropolis, revealing urban types, the industrial suburbs and nineteenth-century entertainment. Though Seurat is perhaps best known as the inventor of Pointillism, this volume demonstrates his tremendous achievement as a draftsman and his fundamental importance to the art of the twentieth century. It includes carefully selected details of the work, as well as reproductions from pages of Seurat's sketchbooks, which have never before been published. Texts by Jodi Hauptman, Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff and Richard Thomson address specific aspects of Seurat's techniques, materials, and subject matter. They are rounded out by a chronology, a selected bibliography and a detailed checklist.

Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors

Jane Kallir

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Shows Schiele's Progression as an Artist 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

There are three things that I liked about this book: (1) great art well reproduced. The colors are well saturated and vibrant. (2) Each section begins with a brief history of the artist's life and points out how his work changed (or didn't) during that period in his life. (3) There are enough illustrations so that you can truly observe his progression and maturation as an artist.

Schiele was clearly enamored by the human figure and he captured its allure and beauty as few have. This is an excellent art book that is also well priced. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele produced a prolific body of work before his early death in the flu epidemic of 1918 at the age of 28. His few hundred oils have often been reproduced and are well recognized, but he also created nearly 3000 drawings and watercolours. Limited access to these fragile works and dispersion among several collections have made a comprehensive survey of Schiele's work a rarity. This volume assembles the master draughtsman's works on paper, providing an opportunity to study his rapid artistic development over the course of a brief 12 years of activity. Each year of his output is introduced and the author discusses his step-by-step progression from child prodigy to master of the human form and expression.

Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros

Desmond Rochfort

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Mexico in the early 1920s, a growing, collective social consciousness gave rise to a revolutionary furor focused on liberating the country's workers from harsh conditions and poverty. In 1921, Mexican artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were all commissioned by the government to create educational paintings on the walls of public buildings. After that initial experience, they devoted themselves almost exclusively to painting these large-scale murals--forming the foundation of a movement that would last 50 years. The muralists' work took up the themes of society and revolution. Often the paintings depicted historical vignettes like the story of Cuernavaca and Morelos crossing the barranca, or Mexico's ancient Indians. They satirized contemporary society, created ideal visions of peaceful families, and built up dark, imposing industrial cityscapes then leveled them by depicting the debauchery and death of the capitalist industrialists.

The paintings themselves reflect diverse artistic influences--surrealism, cubism, and illustration, most notable among them. Their bold colors and strong imagery practically bound out of the 150 color plates in this book. Mexican muralist and scholar Desmond Rochfort lucidly traces the development of the movement to place the work in context and provides a solid history of each of the artists' social and artistic influences. This is an excellent overview of work that should appeal both to fans of the individual artists and Mexican art in general. --Jordana Moskowitz

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

Peter Galassi

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichas. Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp. In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes

John Esten

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The beauty and gentle eroticism of John Singer Sargent's paintings and drawings of nude males are the raison d'être of this otherwise somewhat slight book. Most are exquisitely languid, with such tender touches as a pink tinge on the buttocks of a boy lying prone on a beach in Capri, or two intimate "tommies"--privates in the World War I British Army--napping on a riverbank after a swim, heads together. Then there are a few nude wrestling matches, à la Eadweard Muybridge and D.H. Lawrence. And, as the author somewhat frantically insists, there are works that possess an "uplifting and spiritual aspect."

The wonder is that Sargent's sisters preserved these works--which the artist had kept private--after his death. They are thrilling, as much for Sargent's astonishing facility with a brushload of color as for the sensuous subjects. The essay may be skipped by readers who wince when informed that any subject of a society portrait by Sargent was "transformed into a fashionable denizen of the Edwardian age, whomever he was." Author John Esten sniffs prissily at the suggestion that Sargent may have harbored homoerotic feelings, while the works themselves often unabashedly focus on the genitalia of the models, and the ones that don't are filled with the kind of closeness and warmth of observation that makes the model's soft skin seem almost palpable. Linger over the book's 18 color plates, which are a lasting, luscious pleasure; the scores of black-and-white drawings are similarly inspired. --Peggy Moorman