Искусство

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) found his central theme in the loneliness of the twentieth century man, threatened by catastrophe and torn between materialism and freedom of mind and spirit. His early pictures showed the influence of Impressionism, with a preponderance of biblical, historical, and allegorical themes. World War I made a deep impression on him: somewhere between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the succinct forms and hard contours in his memorable paintings and graphic works showed man at the limit of physical and mental endurance. Later, the harshness and severity of his style softened and his colors became more radiant, but the monumentality remained. Theater, circus, and music hall became parables of human existence.

Beckmann’s work is concerned with the fundamental conditions of human existence and the tragic entanglement of the human being dependant on the whims of gods, sexuality, and society. His relentless search for knowledge, his uncompromising commitment to the picture, and his belief in the power of its form and color give his work its distinctive, fascinating character, and have earned him a high-ranking place among the artists of the twentieth century.

This monograph features more than 180 images of works from 1907 to 1950, including many of Beckmann’s famous self-portraits and triptychs (such as Temptation of 1936/1937). Biographical essays cover his war years, the twenties in Frankfurt, his exile years in Amsterdam, and his emigration to the United States where he died; additional material includes photographs on which many of his paintings are based, several exhibition shots, and images from other artists as Pablo Picasso, Eugène Delacroix, Max Ernst, and Edvard Munch that visualize Beckmann’s inspirations and context.

Victoire de Castellane, the designer of Dior Joaillerie, presents her collection of Fine Jewellery on the Belladone Island – an imaginary island conducive to the growth of Belladonna, a toxic plant whose essence was used as eye drops by Italian women during the Renaissance to dilate their pupils – dilated pupils being one of the signs of sexual arousal. The plant kingdom inspired the names of the jewels in their collection, plants which were part of the imaginary ancestral herbarium and reminiscent of the magic formulas of bewitching elixirs – Reina Magnifica Sangria, Poisono Misterius Spinella, Fleuro Poisonus Spinella, Paradisea Coeur Secretus, Carnivora Fluora Eternita, Dracula Spinella Devorus, Grani Opalia Devorus, Carnivo Papidevorus, Ancolia Veneinosa Pop. Each one of the 17 pieces describes the world in its own fashion, recounts a story, which secretly imbibes itself with that of the person wearing it.

In this collection, the imagination of Victoire de Castellane, freed from the shackles of convention, unleashes itself and proves its audacity. The first part of the book, designed to represent the extravagant nature of this collection as accurately as possible, is generously illustrated by Guido Mocafico’s photographs. The second part also shows the various phases involved in unveiling this collection, starting from the building of a lotus-like structure in the virtual sphere on Second Life, until the actual presentation in the hall Nymphéas de Monet at the musée de l’Orangerie.

A sumptuous feast of a book, Frida allows the reader to enter this revered artist's world, both literally and metaphorically.

Through a series of consecutive die-cut pages, one is drawn in - passing through aspects of her life, art and creative process while exploring the themes that inspired her most, such as love, death and maternity.

Excerpts from Frida Kahlo's personal diaries alternate with Sebastian Perez's poetic musings to give fresh insight and emotional depth, while Benjamin Lacombe's stunning artwork masterfully conveys the symbolism and surrealism of her art.

Zeitgeist. The roaring twenties in Berlin

It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, the Bauhaus total work of art, drag balls, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich. From cutting-edge kino to crowded jazz bars, come and roam the daring, freewheeling spirit of 1920s Berlin with this vivid cultural portrait of the age through painting, design, fashion, film, and more.

It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich’s rising star in theater and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought.

This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin’s Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money.

Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch's The Journalists; Lotte Jacobi’s Hands on Typewriter; Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens's project of the Alexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. Along the way, we explore both the utopian yearnings and the more ominous economic and political realities which fueled the era's escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labor, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism.

The editor

Rainer Metzger studied art history, history, and German literature in Munich and Augsburg. In 1994, he earned his Ph.D. on the subject of Dan Graham, and subsequently worked as a fine arts journalist for the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. He has written numerous books on art, including volumes on van Gogh and Chagall. Since 2004, he has worked as Professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.

Berlin is a concept album that represented a brave departure from the familiar sounds and themes of Lou Reed’s earlier solo work, a tragic tale about heartbreak and addiction meant to be played live as a rock opera, in the vein of The Who’s Tommy. But its poor reception meant that plans for a live performance were put on hold until 2007, when, with a renewed confidence in the material, Reed toured with a full orchestra and choir, giving some of the most personal and powerful performances of his career.

The tour was filmed by legendary artist Julian Schnabel, a longtime friend of Reed’s who also designed the spare and beautiful set, and whose daughter Lola contributed moving images projected behind the stage. This immeasurably powerful book draws on stills from Schnabel’s film, photographs of the set design, printed lyrics of Reed’s original verse, and images from Schnabel’s projections to tell the twin stories of Berlin as rock opera and as unique collaboration between two geniuses of contemporary art, music, words, and film.

The book also includes a rare conversation between Reed and Schnabel.

About the Author

Lou Reed is a founding member of the Velvet Underground and an accomplished solo artist, poet, writer, and photographer. He lives in New York. Julian Schnabel is a celebrated artist and filmmaker whose work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum and MoMA in New York, and whose film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was nominated for four Academy Awards. He lives in New York.

Bernini: Art as Theatre forges a new analysis of Baroque illusionism through a study of this artist’s sculptural ensembles.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was a sculptor, architect and painter, but also a court scenographer, playwright, actor and director. Bernini’s work in theatre served as a wellspring for his art’s visual effects. Theatre was the dominant cultural paradigm of the Baroque, manifest in the rise of opera and ballet, as well as increasingly magnificent scenographic technologies for the performed rituals of church and court. Bernini drew on a lexicon of theatrical effects, deploying light, movement and a fusion of fictive and physical space to render new forms of artistic illusion in both his sculptural mise-en-scènes and his stage sets. The force of his art’s illusionistic powers lay in a fiction of materials effected through medial exchanges between sculpture, painting and architecture.

This book opens up provocative new frameworks for the analysis of Baroque illusionism extending beyond Bernini to a reconsideration of seventeenth-century visual culture as a whole.

The 1970s: that magical era betwixt the swinging 60s and the decadent 80s, the epoch of leisure suits and Afros, the age of disco music and platform shoes. As war raged on in Vietnam and the cold war continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather. Thanks to directors like Spielberg and Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon: the blockbuster. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog had its heyday. The sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the US, more freely in Europe) most notably in Bertolucci's steamy, scandalous Last Tango in Paris. Amidst all this came a wave of nostalgic films (The Sting, American Graffiti) and Vietnam pictures (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter), the rise of the anti-hero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre, blaxploitation.

A-Z film entries include:
- Synopsis
- Film stills and production photos
- Cast/crew listings
- Box office figures
- Trivia
- Useful information on technical stuff
- Actor and director bios

Plus: a complete Academy Awards list for the decade

Based on recording industry sales figures, Best-Selling Albums is the definitive guide to more than 100 chart-topping records of the past six decades.

From Miles Davies and Nat ‘King’ Cole in the 1950s to Adele today, Best-Selling Albums features the most successful artists in the history of recorded popular music. Every album is illustrated with a sleeve artwork, front and back, providing a fascinating overview of the evolution of record cover design across the decades.

Each entry is packed full of information, including background on the recording of the album and its place in cultural history, as well as a full track listing and detailed musician and production credits.

In addition, there are listings of the biggest-selling movie soundtracks, the top 100 albums by sales, and much more.

Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916) transformed the natural world into dark visions and strange fantasies. He created a universe of mysterious hybrid creatures, offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical and mythological subjects, and presented flowers in a singular way. This book presents the full range of Redon’s achievements - mysterious charcoal "noirs," luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, dramatically shaded lithographs - through the Museum's unparalleled collection of the artist's work. The publication includes essays on the artist's aesthetic strategies, the meanings of his monsters, his accomplishments as a printmaker, and a comprehensive catalogue.

Includes 459 illustrations, 152 in color.

Approximately 400 exquisite paintings, drawings, furniture, decorative objects, and clothing, with commentaries by leading scholars in the field. Biedermeier describes a kind of factual art that very closely corresponds to sensory perception. Its basic characteristics became apparent even before 1800, and up until around 1830 it continued to develop through simplification, the natural beauty of materials, and clarity of form.

Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity is an elegant publication concentrating upon a core group of artistic works from this period of time, which were predominated by these formal elements and also gave shape to the new, central European aesthetic vision. More than three hundred examples from all genres of art from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Denmark are featured: paintings, prints, furniture, glass and porcelain objects, silver, interior decoration, and fashion from the trendsetting, stylish metropolises. This is an attractive presentation of this period’s innovative character, which permitted it to play a pioneering role in the modern era.

A fully illustrated book featuring unique jewellery masterpieces, paying attention to the creators, designers and manufacturers

This book starts from those periods in history (18th and 19th centuries) when the concept of costume jewellery, which is considered to be something that puts the finishing touches on fashion, did not as yet exist. The custom in the past was to make copies of real jewels with precious or semi-precious materials; moreover, great effort was made to invent material to replace precious stones and gold (strass, marcasite, pinchbeck, pomponne, etc.)

The volume ends with an attempt to define the styles of the decades close to the contemporary period - as yet never examined - with particular interest in the '60s,'70s,'80s and '90s and in the names of creators, designers and manufacturers who are still unknown to us.

Contents:
The Different Types of Costume Jewellery: Definitions
Imitation Jewellery, Bijoux de Couture, Costume Jewellery, Fashion Jewellery.

Major Technological Innovations
Paste/Rhinestone, Gold Alloys and Similar, Steel Jewellery, The Brilliant Cut, Marcasite Stones, The Mechanised Production of Costume Jewellery, Berlin Iron Ornaments, Electro-galvanic Gold, Plating, Hair Jewellery, Daniel Swarovski and the Mechanised Finishing of Rhinestones, Ivory, Tortoiseshell, Amber, Coral, Mother-of-pearl, Rock Crystal, Horn.

Styles
Victorian Jewellery, Edwardian Costume Jewellery, The Costume Jewellery of Avant-garde Artistic Movements, Art Deco Costume Jewellery, Costume Jewellery of the 1930s, Costume Jewellery of the 1940s (Cocktail style), Costume Jewellery of the 1950s, Costume Jewellery of the 1960s, Costume Jewellery of the 1970s, Costume Jewellery of the 1980s, Costume Jewellery of the 1990s.

About the Author:

Deanna Farneti Cera, an international expert on European and American costume jewellery, lives and works in Milan. She is an author, a leading researcher in the history of jewellery in fashion, and has curated exhibitions for several museums worldwide. In 2006, she opened the gallery Ornamento d'Autore in Milan, whose programmes include historical exhibitions on the history of costume jewellery and others on international trends in the field

Bill Viola is recognized internationally for his work in video and sound installations. For thirty years he has used innovative multimedia technologies to explore the phenomena of sense perception, drawing on mysticism, poetry, shamanism, Taoism, Sufism and Zen Buddhism

This book brings together a selection of essays, notebook entries, interviews, drawings and descriptions of projects that map Viola’s personal course through the readings, observations, experiments and associations that form the groundwork for his art. Each work illustrated is accompanied by a description by the artist himself or by comments on the work’s origins from Viola’s personal notebooks.