Recommendations based on "Art Against War: Four Hundred Years of Protest in Art"

An instant classic—a lively new introduction to contemporary art that stretches from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to Marina Abramović's performance art to today's biennale circuit and million-dollar auctions.Encountering a work of contemporary art, a viewer might ask, "What does it mean?" "Is it really art?" and "Why does it cost so much?" These are not the questions that E. H. Gombrich set out to answer in his magisterial The Story of Art. Contemporary art seems totally unlike what came before it, departing from the road map supplied by Raphael, Dürer, Rembrandt, and other European masters.In The Story of Contemporary Art, Tony Godfrey picks up where Gombrich left off, offering a lively introduction to contemporary art that stretches from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to Marina Abramović's performance art to today's biennale circuit and million-dollar auctions. Godfrey, a curator and writer on contemporary art, chronicles important developments in pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, installation art, performance art, and beyond.

An introduction to the impressionist movement, highlighting the great artists, their masterpieces, and impressionism’s enduring influence.It is often forgotten just how provocative and unsettling impressionist canvases seemed when they were first exhibited in 1874. Critics, professional artists, and gallery visitors alike were shocked to encounter the unorthodox paintings on display, with their seemingly unfinished surfaces and lack of any elements of traditional composition. The advocates of this new approach rejected nearly all the established principles and practices of oil painting prevalent at that time in France.Tracing the origins and history of impressionism in a concise, introductory volume, Ralph Skea highlights the major differences between the new techniques and aesthetic principles of the impressionists and the academic art they abhorred, and goes a step further in exploring the original intellectual focus of the movement. Skea explores the impressionists’ desire to investigate their own sensory perceptions when painting, which resulted in their unique “impressions.”An ideal companion for museum-goers, as well as those who are entirely new to the subject, Impressionism weaves an engaging narrative around a selection of striking illustrations, discussing the movement’s greatest artists, their works and where to find them. 85 illustrations in color

Four essays on the psychological aspects of art. A study of Leonardo treats the work of art, and art itself, not as ends in themselves, but rather as instruments of the artist's inner situation. Two other essays discuss the relation of art to its epoch and specifically the relation of modern art to our own time. An essay on Chagall views this artist in the context of the problems explored in the other studies.

An only-from-Japan exploration of the photographer’s art and philosophy.Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter, who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s. This collection takes a Japanese perspective into the secrets of his appeal, from his life philosophy and lyricism to masterful colors and compositions reminiscent of ukiyo-e.Some two hundred works—including early street photographs, images for advertising, nudes, and paintings—cover Leiter’s career from the 1940s onward, accompanied by quotations from the artist himself that express his singular worldview.Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh. He pioneered a painterly approach to color photography in the 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. The publication of his first collection, Early Color, by Steidl in 2006 inspired an avid “rediscovery” that has since led to worldwide exhibitions and the release of a documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2014). He died in New York in 2013.size: 210 × 148 × 28 mmbinding: softcoverlanguage: english/japanese

Claude Monet is considered one of the most influential artists of all time. He is a founder of the French Impressionist art movement, and today his paintings sell for millions of dollars. While Monet was alive, however, his work was often criticized and he struggled financially. With over one hundred black-and-white illustrations, this book unveils a true portrait of the artist!

This anthology is remarkable not only for the selections themselves, among which the Schelling and the Heidegger essays were translated especially for this volume, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism.

As Lippard points out, Hesse's use of obsessive repetition in her works served to increase and exaggerate the absurdity she saw in her life. In many ways, her works were ”psychic models,” as Robert Smithson has said, of ”a very interior person.” In pioneering the use of ”soft” materials, her sculptures betrayed her awareness of the manner in which her experience as a woman altered her art and career. Although she died before feminism affected the art world to any great extent, her major works have since become talismans for succeeding generations of women artists. Eva Hesse was designed by Hesse's friends and colleagues Sol LeWitt and Pat Stier; her sculptures, drawings, and paintings are reproduced and discussed; and the text includes numerous quotations from her diaries. First published in 1976 but long out-of-print, this classic text is both an insightful critical analysis and a tribute to an artist whose genius has become increasingly apparent with the passage of time.

In his Aesthetics Hegel gives full expression to his seminal theory of art. He surveys the history of art from ancient India, Egypt, and Greece through to the Romantic movement of his own time, criticizes major works, and probes their meaning and significance; his rich array of examples gives broad scope for his judgement and makes vivid his exposition of his theory. The substantial Introduction is Hegel's best exposition of his general philosophy of art, and provides the ideal way into his Aesthetics. In Part I he considers the general nature of art: he distinguishes art, as a spiritual experience, from religion and philosophy; he discusses the beauty of art and differentiates it from the beauty of nature; and he examines artistic genius and originality. Part II provides a sort of history of art, divded into three periods called Symbolic (India, Persia, Egypt), Classical (Greece), and Romantic (medieval and post-medieval up to the end of the eighteenth century). Part III deals individually with architecture, scuplture, painting, music, and literature.

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms—and deceptions—through which we construct meaning in the world.

The twentieth century has seen great and rapid changes in society and in art. Artists have challenged all the traditional ways of seeing and depicting the world. They have grouped together in a bewildering series of movements, or followed individual and sometimes baffling preoccupations. In Rosemary Lambert's The Twentieth Century, the art lover is helped through the maze. Key works from Cubism and Fauvism to Pop Art and Photo Realism, from Picasso and Braque to the Bauhaus and beyond, are explored in non-technical language. The reader is conveyed by the author's own enthusiasm towards the discovery of many fascinating parallels in the painting, sculpture and architecture of this century.