Книги о музеях мира

The exquisite objects created by goldsmith and jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé and his studio in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the aristocracy and nobility of imperial Russia are considered to be some of the most refined examples of the jeweler's art of any age. Of greatest fascination are the extraordinary Easter eggs created as special commissions for the Russian imperial family and other notable patrons - works that remain unparalleled in their ingenuity of construction and sheer beauty.

Accompanying a major exhibition Faberge Revealed represents a landmark for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and for Fabergé scholarship. The essays by Géza von Habsburg and other scholars present new findings on Fabergé, his workshops, and the creation of these extraordinary objects. For the first time all items by or attributed to Fabergé in VMFA's collection are documented along with the museum's significant holdings of other Russian decorative arts. Also included is a section on forgeries that bravely confronts this vexing question. Every object has been splendidly re-photographed for this book - and the detailed photography alone should provide inestimable value for future Fabergé scholarship.

Richly illustrated with some 600 photographs, the volume documents an important collection bequeathed in 1947 to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by Lillian Thomas Pratt, of Fredericksburg, Va., the wife of General Motors executive John Lee Pratt. Her collection, assembled between 1933 and 1946, comprised several hundred creations by the Faberge workshops and by other Russian imperial jewelers. These exquisite, marvelously crafted objects, range from the majestic jeweled imperial eggs to delicate jeweled flowers in vases to diamond-encrusted icons and tiaras, to animal figures nimbly carved from precious stone.

Contents:
Introduction by Géza von Habsburg
Chapter 1: The House of Fabergé/by Géza von Habsburg
Chapter 2: Behind the Scenes at Fabergé: The St. Petersburg Workshops/ by Ulla Tillander-Godenhieim
Chapter 3: Fabergé and His Russian Competitors/ by Géza von Habsburg
Chapter 4: Fabergé and His Foreign Competitors
Chapter 5: Mrs. Pratt's Imperial Easter Eggs / by Carol Aiken
Chapter 6: The Zarnitza Sailor and His Place in History / by Christel Ludewig McCaniess
Chapter 7: Fabergé and Grand Duchess Vladimir / by Alexander von Solodkoff
Chapter 8: Lillian Thomas Pratt and A La Vieille Russie: A Personal Relationship/ by Mark Schaffer
Chapter 9: Fauxbergé / by Géza von Habsburg
Catalogue: Fabergé/Other Makers/Forgeries

About the Author:

Géza von Habsburg is an internationally known author and authority on Faberge who has served as curator and organizer for a number of Fabergé exhibitions in the United States and abroad, among them Fabergé, Jeweler to the Tsars (1986-87) at Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich, Germany, and Fabergé in America, which was shown at VMFA and 4 other U.S. venues (1996-97), and Faberge, Imperial Court Jeweler, which was shown in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London (1993-94). He has written or co-written 9 books on Faberge and related topics. Von Habsburg is the grandson of King Frederick Augustus III of Saxony and great-great-grandson of Emperor Franz-Joseph of Austria. He is currently the curatorial director of the London-based Fabergé Company.

263 illustrations.

Anton Pössenbacher (1842–1920), cabinet-maker to the Bavarian court in Munich, was head of one of the largest late 19th-century German makers of luxury furnishings. His furniture, especially those for King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1871–1886), represent German Historicism at its zenith. Pössenbacher created almost all the furniture for the royal apartments at Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee and Neuschwanstein. Intricately carved and lavishly upholstered in gold brocade and dazzling embroidered pictures, these furnishings are highlights in the sumptuous interiors of Bavarian castles. Made to the specifications of an exacting monarch, these masterpieces of the cabinet-maker’s craft have lost nothing of their original fascination.

One of Pössenbacher's clients was King Charles I of Romania, for whom he designed an elegant palace library in Bucharest (1887). Pössenbacher’s clients also included industrialists, merchants and landed gentry, whose town houses and manors he provided with entire rooms.

The present book introduces the full range of furniture by Anton Pössenbacher viewed in their historical context. Numerous new photographs of the interior decoration of the Bavarian royal castles and hitherto unpublished designs for private commissions as well as a scholarly catalogue which also incorporates all relevant invoices from the ledgers kept by the cabinet of Ludwig II make this a standard work on the luxury furniture of Historicism.

A grand tour of the premier art collections of Italy would require an 1000-mile trip from Milan to Rome over to Venice and down to Naples-and then back to Florence-and long hours in line). Now Italy's foremost art publisher has brought these eight art institutions and their history together in a beautiful and elegantly-priced volume.

Here are Italy's premier art institutions presented by their directors, gallery by gallery, including docent selections of major works from each collection, like the Uffizi's Primavera by Botticelli, Leonardo's The Annunciation, and Michaelangelo's Tondo Doni:

* The Egyptian Museum, Turin One of the largest collection of Old Kingdom artifacts outside Egypt

* Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice The premier collection of northern Italian masters includes the Presentation of the Virgin by Titian, Miracle of the Holy Cross by Carpaccio, the Storm by Giorgione, Portrait of a Man by Lotto, and Titian's Peità

* The Uffizi, Florence The world's finest collection of Renaissance masterpieces, among them the Madonna by Giotto, The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, Pope Leone X by Raphael, and Bacco by Caravaggio

* National Archeological Museum, Naples Italy's best public collection of classical art including ceramics from the Magna Grecia period, statuettes and objects of art from Pompeii and Ercolano, Roman portraiture, and the famous mosaic depicting The Battle of Alexander.

* Palatina Gallery, Florence Beautiful rooms in the Pitti Palace hold masterpieces of Italian Renaissance painting and decorative arts

* Galleria Borghese, Rome Recently restored galleries present paintings by Raphael, Dosso Dossi, and Caravaggio, as well as magnificent sculptures by Bernini and Canova

* Capodimonte Museum and Gallery, Naples Includes both Renaissance and Seicento masterworks, Flemish 16th-century tapestries and interior decorations in rococò style

* Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan Holds masterpieces by Titan, Caravaggio, Canaletto and other North Italian masters including The Marriage of the Virgin by Raphael, The Dead Christ by Mantegna, and The Supper in Emmaus by Caravaggio

The creation of this important and lavishly illustrated book involved gathering material from all the major museums in Russia and abroad, as well as from public and private archives. It is a remembrance of things past and a testimonial to a great cultural and historic heritage. It is a book to fascinate anybody interested in art, collecting or Russian history.

Imperial Russia before the 1917 Revolution had a great tradition of private collecting. In this book, the authors reconstruct a tour of the great Russian collections as they would have been just prior to the fall of the Romanovs. The collections are brought back to life by watercolours and drawings of their palaces, as well as photographs of interiors, family portraits and, naturally, by the works of art that they collected, now all in Russian museums or museums abroad.

Later, among the tycoons created during the Industrial Revolution, were Pavel Tretyakov, whose gallery is now one of the most visited in Russia, and the Shchukin and Morozov families, who collected Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and all the Impressionists including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and Gauguin.

The Thyssen - Bornemisza Collection is one of the most important private collections of western art, comprising 780 works from the Middle Ages through to the 1970s. Opened in Madrid in 1992, this extraordinary museum provides an encyclopaedic overview of eight centuries of western painting.

This is a thought-provoking exploration of the masterpieces of sculpture, drawing and decoration of the last Ice Age. Produced between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, this is some of the oldest known figurative art in the world. Looking at these artworks provides a fascinating insight into the earliest modern minds and their capacity to express ideas symbolically through art.

Over 100 objects are featured, including small but exquisite sculptures made from mammoth ivory, engraved drawings, ceramic models, decorated objects and jewellery from the age of the great painted caves. Some are celebrated masterpieces such as the Swimming Reindeer (13,000 years old), the so-called Willendorf Venus (25,000 years old), the Vogelherd Horse (32,000 years old) and the Lion Man (32,000 years old); others are lesser- known treasures from the collections of European museums. The author examines them in a new light, as works of aesthetic – not solely archaeological – interest, and as such forming part of an unbroken continuum of human creativity.

The compelling narrative is also illustrated with a wealth of images, from classical sculpture to twentieth-century painting and even contemporary advertising campaigns, which demonstrate surprising aesthetic parallels between these ancient works and familiar modern pieces.

In this way, Ice Age art will bring home the point that the minds that created these objects in all their diversity and inventiveness were modern minds like our own, capable of highly sophisticated thought and expression.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is home to one of the world's most important collections of early Netherlandish painting. The origin of those rich holdings can be traced back to 1477, when the Burgundian Netherlands became a Habsburg possession on Mary of Burgundy's marriage to Archduke Maximilian of Austria.
Imperial Treasures. Masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is the fruit of the outstanding exhibition of the same name at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. The book is devoted to a unique selection of fifteenth and sixteenth-century masterpieces from the Low Countries in the museum's collection. In a series of essays by leading scholars, it explores the history of the collection and the emergence of the various pictorial genres. The exceptionally early development of history, portrait, landscape and genre painting in the Low Countries laid the foundations for the unprecedented flowering of both Flemish and Dutch painting in the seventeenth century.

A narrative chronology of the dealers, artists and spaces that have defined modern art – lavishly illustrated throughout with photographs of artists, dealers and art world personalities.

Art galleries are enormously influential in the aesthetic discourse of the modern age. They have launched the careers of the era’s most important artists, and breathed life into some of its most important artistic movements.

International Art Galleries is the first book to examine the modern gallery phenomenon, offering more than seventy-five portraits of art galleries from around the world, all of whom have represented the finest artists of the last sixty years, and all of whom have had a key role in defining the artistic zeitgeist.

Organized decade-by-decade, each chapter is introduced by a brief historical sketch that summarizes the social background of the decade in question. The galleries are introduced by a brief factual section that details their date of foundation, proprietor, addresses and artists represented, followed by a lively illustrated essay.

This book rewrites the history of jewellery in the age of Victoria. The ‘age of Victoria’ is taken in its widest sense to encompass jewellery made throughout Europe and America, displayed at the great international exhibitions and distributed through foreign trade, illustrated publications and a burgeoning tourist industry. Throughout, links with other disciplines will provide both the specialist and the non- specialist with the information to understand how jewellery permeated all walks and conditions of life in the 19th century.

The focus of the book is on the attitudes of owners to their jewellery and the symbolic weight that it was expected to carry. Rather than concentrating on the major figures at the top end of the jewellery trade, it is oriented towards the social aspects of owning, wearing and displaying jewellery. For example, novelists used jewellery to add a moral or metaphorical dimension to a character, while jewels depicted in portraits often carried multiple messages which could be immediately decoded by the viewer. The achievements of science, the fascination with nature and the Victorian sense of humour are all embodied in jewellery. Topics discussed in depth include the importance of jewellery in the life of the Queen herself, jewellery and dress, the language of jewellery, the cult of novelty, the importance of nationalism in the revival of historical styles, and the contribution of archaeological discoveries. The volume is sumptuously illustrated with contemporary reportage, photographs and portraits as well as examples of jewellery from the British Museum and other collections.

This opulent volume features large-format plates of an impressive selection of masterpieces from the Kunsthaus Zurich: fascinating paintings from the late Gothic period, the Golden Age of the Netherlands, the Italian Baroque, and the Venetian Settecento. Icons of Swiss art, including Fuseli, Böcklin, Hodler, Segantini, Vallotton, and Giacometti are among the highlights of the collections. First-class works by leading painters draw the viewer into the colorful world of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, at whose center stands a group of works by Monet. Besides pieces by Munch, there are important works by Kokoschka, Beckmann, and Corinth. Last but not least, this splendid book presents an excellent array of early 20th-century works by Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall, as well as American post-war art, Pop art, and other works up to the present time: Twombly, Beuys, Bacon, Baselitz, and Fischli/Weiss set the tone here.

This fascinating book presents the universal theme of love as seen in artworks from many different ages and cultures. The Louvre's diverse collection ranges from classical examples such as Nicostratos' c. 150-100 BCE sculpture Couple on their Wedding Night to more modern works such as Fragonard's eighteenth-century painting The Lock. An array of different scenes in the gathered works present the many faces of love, from the first seeds of romance to sensual, passionate intrigues. Each painting or sculpture is shown in its entirety and in detail, focusing on the elements pertaining to the theme of love. All are accompanied by a short, illuminating commentary and are introduced by a preface in which the specialist author Jean Claude Bologne draws upon his personal reflections on the works. Those discovering the works for the first time will find much to appreciate, art lovers will see great works in a different light, and the romantically-inclined will be enchanted.

For Madrid the Prado is without a doubt what the Louvre is for Paris and the Uffizi for Florence. A guidebook to this museum with a knowledgeable commentary is therefore essential for really getting to know Madrid. However this richly illustrated book not only portrays the dynamic relationship of the city and its art, it also relates a long and chequered history - from its beginnings and its charms as a residence, to the Civil War and modern times - expressed in countless churches, buildings, and squares. With this authoritative and visually striking book, simply browsing through its pages becomes a pleasant, culturally informed stroll through Madrid's streets.

The British Museum has one of the finest collection of antiquities from ancient Greece and Rome outside of those countries.

This beautiful book investigates 160 of the most important, including the most famous (such as the Parthenon sculptures) aswell as a selection of lesser-known but equally important pieces.

Each treasure is illustrated, often with details. The accompanying text tells the unique story of each piece and gives insights into its particular features. A brief background to each period of classical art is also included.

The range and scope of the collection provide the material for a stunning overview of the artistic production of this creative period and a perfect introduction to classical art.

With extraordinary exhibitions and the world’s finest collection of modern and contemporary art, MoMA is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental

With 126 years spanning the time between the earliest and most recent works, MoMA Masterpieces offers an unparalleled opportunity to immerse oneself in the multitude of artistic approaches encompassed under the banner of modern art.

This richly illustrated overview provides the perfect means to understand and enjoy the art of our time. The book opens with an introduction by Ann Temkin, who offers reflections on the development of the collection. The thoughtful selection of works that follows highlights the collection’s peerless range of styles and ideas.

Legendary favourites, such as van Gogh’s 'The Starry Night', Picasso’s 'Girl before a Mirror' and Andy Warhol’s 'Gold Marilyn Monroe', sit alongside lesser-known masterworks such as Horace Pippin’s 'Abe Lincoln, The Great Emancipator' and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 'Shooting Painting American Embassy'. Contemporary landmarks, such as Gerhard Richter’s 'October 18, 1977' and Kara Walker’s 'Gone: A Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart' demonstrate the outstanding contributions of more recent art.

About the Author:

Ann Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.

Альбом знакомит с МоМА (Museum of Modern Art) - одним из самых известных музеев Нью-Йорка, где хранится лучшее в мире собрание современного искусства. Здесь представлены работы художников, созданные в период с конца XIX века по сегодняшний день. Живопись, скульптура, архитектура, дизайн, графика, иллюстрированная книга, рэди-мейд - вот далеко не полный перечень форм, в которых проявляется сейчас искусство. Читатель познакомится со ставшими уже классическими полотнами Пикассо, Сезанна, Моне, Гогена, Ван Гога, с произведениями авангардистов XX века: Мондриана, Уорхола, Поллока, Колдера, с искусством наших дней. Сопоставление разных стилей, техник и форм позволяет составить пеструю картину современного искусства.