Книги по истории искусства

Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists—including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy—turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained.

Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings—both in drawings and in three dimensions—constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.

The global upheavals that took place over the course of the 20th century provoked an incredible metamorphosis of western art. The abundance of creative productivity during this century revolutionised the art world, breaking down barriers and resulting in an extraordinary proliferation of artistic currents. In this brilliant work, the author presents the essential disciplines and different artistic movements that accompanied the political, cultural, ideological, and social upheavals of the 20th century.

Art Deco is one of the most exciting chapters in the history of the decorative arts. Conceived in France before the First World War, it spread throughout Europe and had its greatest and most spectacular success in the United States. Myriad influences shaped the style – Cubism, Constructivism, Orientalism, the Ballets Russes, the Bauhaus – and its exponents included many of the century’s most celebrated artists, designers and craftsmen.

Sexy, modern, and unabashedly consumer-oriented, Art Deco was a new kind of style, flourishing at a time of rapid technological change and social upheaval

Lacking the philosophical basis of other European design movements, Deco borrowed motifs from numerous sources - Japan, Africa, ancient Egyptian and Mayan cultures, avant-garde European art--simply to create novel visual effects.

Art Deco 1910-1939 surveys the sources and development of the popular style with more than 400 colour illustrations and 40 chapters by numerous design specialists. The authors track Deco around the globe, from Paris to the United States - where it got its biggest boost from mass production - to Northern and Central Europe, Latin America, Japan, India, and New Zealand.

The book's broad focus encompasses industrial artefacts (the Hindenburg blimp, the Burlington Zephyr locomotive), as well as architecture, furniture, accessories, fashion, jewellery, typography and poster design. Despite the existence of other prominent artistic movements during the 1920s and '30s, the authors tend to hang the Deco label on virtually any object that portrays the effects of technology or employs colour, luxury materials or artificial light in striking ways. It does seem a stretch to include Man Ray's photographs, Sonia Delaunay's textiles and the movie King Kong in the Deco pantheon. But the great strength of Art Deco 1910-1939 is that it reveals the social context of Deco, not just its pretty face.
__________________

‘The best book on Art Deco to have appeared so far, and likely to remain so.’ Bevis Hillier, Literary Review

Art Deco – the style redolent of the flapper girl, the luxury ocean liner, Hollywood film and the skyscraper – came to epitomize the glamour, luxury and hedonism of the Jazz Age. It burst on to the world stage at the 1925 Exposition internationale des art decoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris, and quickly swept across the globe. Its influence was felt everywhere, from the skylines of New York and Shanghai to the design of fashionable eveningwear and plastic radios. Above all, it became the signature style of the pleasure palaces of the age – hotels, cocktail bars, nightclubs and cinemas.

This authoritative publication brings together leading experts to explore the sources, varied forms of expression, distinct visual language and global reach of Art Deco. With its breathtaking illustrations, this lavish volume is the definitive book on what is, arguably, the most popular style of the twentieth century.

About the Authors

Charlotte Benton is an independent architecture and design historian. Her publications include A Different World? E´migre´ Architects in Britain, 1928–1958 (1995).

Tim Benton is Professor of Art History at the Open University. He has also co-curated a number of exhibitions, including Thirties: British Art and Design before the War (1979) and Art and Power (1996).

Ghislaine Wood is a Senior Curator in the V&A’s Research Department. She was curator of touring exhibition Art Deco 1910– 1939 (2003) and deputy curator of the major exhibition Art Nouveau 1890–1914 (V&A 2000).

Part of a new series of beautiful gift art books, Art Deco Fashion: Masterpieces of Art highlights artworks from fashion illustrators of the era that was characterized by the allure of modernity, progression, women’s liberation, and luxury – leading to the short hemlines and androgyny of the Flapper, the outdoorsy Sporty girl and Silver Screen goddesses. 

Beginning with a fresh and thoughtful introduction to the Art Deco movements and its influence upon fashion, the book features all the best known Art Deco fashion masterpieces, including works by renowned artists such as Georges Barbier, Paul Iribe and Erté. 

Focusing on Art Deco graphic art and illustration, this gorgeous new book features fascinating text on the movement in general, fashion and advertising, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of work by talents such as Barbier, Erté, Cassandre and Colin. 

Sympathetic examples of other forms of Art Deco are also included.

While the main focus for this intriguing book is centred on graphic art and illustration, numerous examples of other forms of Art Deco are also featured. Nestled amongst the posters and paintings, sculpture, objects d'art and jewellery assert their similarity, whether through line, form or theme. These echoes serve to show the creativity fertility of the period as styles and ideas traversed artistic media.

This book has chapters on the Origins of Art Nouveau, Art Nouveau at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, Major Artists and a Bibliography

Art Nouveau, whose emergence at the same time as cinema was no mere coincidence, represents the most remarkable attempt to reconcile the demands of the technical age with the undying wish for beauty and glorification—or to pit them against the other.

Here the reform movement of the turn of the century is not only dealt with as an artistic event, but those economic and political interests which inspired, supported, and handicapped it are also taken into account. In the chapters "Movement," "Unrest", and "Equilibrium," the historical phenomenon as a whole is characterised and is also presented with its own distinct local features. The centres of Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Glasgow, Helsinki and Chicago are dealt with in subchapters as are Munich, Darmstadt and Weimar. Finally, Vienna, that city in which the synthesis achieved its culmination, is described separately. The outstanding artists are examined in detail in connection with the respective cities of their greatest activity. The result is a complex picture of the symbiosis of architecture, furniture design, and craftsmanship with their corresponding approaches to artistic revitalization.

About the author:
Klaus-Jürgen Sembach organised the exhibitions "Die Nützlichen Künste" (Useful Arts), 1981 in Berlin, "Zug der Zeit – Zeit der Züge" (The Railway Era), 1985 in Nuremberg, "So viel Anfang war nie – Deutsche Städte 1945–1949" (Never have there been so many beginnings – German cities 1945–1949), in Nuremberg and Berlin 1989, and has numerous publications on architecture, design, photography and film to his name.

The unity of art and life was the expressed goal of the Art Nouveau movement, the prelude to modernity. On the basis of shared ideas its adherents strove for a homogenous style, which nonetheless took on manifold variations in its expression. Dr. Gabriele Fahr-Becker pursues this will to style in architecture, interior decor, furniture design, silver and gold-smithery, ceramics and glasswork, graphic arts and painting. The author leads her readers through the diverse national variations of Art Nouveau in Europe and the United States. The significance of the literary and philosophical as well as cultural and political background is explained by means of many theories and writings by artists and their contemporaries. The countless permutations of Art Nouveau are woven into a complex and yet distinctive picture of this artistic movement at the turn of the twentieth century.

This sumptuous volume explores key aspects of Art Nouveau - decorative arts, architecture, fashion, dance, advertising, and more - with an in-depth approach and stunning illustrations.

The Art Nouveau movement became an international phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century that ushered in the era of modernity in almost every aspect of cultural life. For decades critics have argued that Art Nouveau was not an artistic period in its own right, but an amalgam of artists and styles that served as a bridge between neoclassicism and modernism. In this comprehensive, authoritative, and copiously illustrated book, art historian Norbert Wolf explores Art Nouveau as a logical outgrowth of the historic forces in which it arose.

This book focuses on the movement’s wide variety of applications and reclaims its prominence in the pantheon of modern art history. Chapters on aesthetics, spirituality, and the cult of beauty offer luminous examples of works by Mucha, Gaudi, Hoffman, Klimt, Horta, Munch, and Tiffany, among many others.

Wolf’s text is both informed and accessible, providing an exciting narrative that brings the Art Nouveau movement into clear focus. Beautifully produced to appeal to a wide range of readers, this new volume gives one of the world’s most popular styles the serious consideration it deserves.

For a fruitful period between the 1880s and the First World War, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes, Art Nouveau ( New Art ) inflected architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts, and illustration.

Art Nouveau was deliberately nouveau. With a spirit of willful reform, its practitioners sought to distance themselves from the imitative historicism that characterized much 19th-century art and replace it with undulating, decorative qualities. Turning to vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference, they pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation.

At the same time, Art Nouveau followed the example of the earlier English Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements to reject established hierarchies of artistic practice, to emphasize a return to handcraftsmanship, and to synthesize artistic media and practices into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. In this, as in its turn to nature, Art Nouveau is often seen as an aesthetic response to the Industrial Revolution, a recoil from the mass-produced and mechanic, and an elevation of the human hand and wonders of the great outdoors.

This fresh TASCHEN edition considers Art Nouveau as a broad historical phenomenon with distinct local features. We consider the style s wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavor in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudi, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity. The result is a vivid portrait of the age and a movement that is as much entrenched in our imagination of the fin de siecle as it is in the trajectory of modernism.

Klaus-Jürgen Sembach is a writer, curator, and former director of the Museum for Industrial Culture in Nuremberg. He has produced numerous publications on architecture, design, photography, and film.

Illustrations:  500 color and 275 b/w graphics