Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay. Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud's ... |
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While anchoring his practice in the traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917) paved the way for modern sculpture. From a very early stage, he was interested in movement, the expression of the body, chance effects, and the incomplete fragment. It was these elements that gave shape, and the impression of life, to such famous works as The Kiss and The Thinker. Produced in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, this "Taschen" Basic Art introduction examines the formative years of Rodin's training as well as the key stages of his subsequent career. It retraces the genesis of his ... |
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Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 - 1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design. While he did not receive much recognition in his hometown of Glasgow during his lifetime, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic detail inspired modernists across Europe. Mackintosh's avant-garde approach embraced a variety of media as well as fresh stylistic devices. His multi-faceted oeuvre incorporated architecture, furniture, graphic design, landscapes, and flower studies. He embraced strong lines, elegant proportions, and natural motifs, combining an ... |
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Multilingual Edition. ... Welcome to the most comprehensive catalogue of logos. Turning its searchlight on internationals' corporate identity, this encyclopedia gathers approximately 4.500 trademarks, with information about the designers, year of creation, country, and brand. In handy reference-book size, this is a sweeping survey of today's visual culture. Following up on the best-selling Bibliotheca Universalis logo manual, this second volume focuses on corporate identity. In a globalized world, more and more symbols convey values such as trust, quality, or reliability. This catalog ... |
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A good logo can glamorize just about anything. Now available in our popular Klotz format, this sweeping compendium gathers diverse brand markers from around the world to explore the irrepressible power of graphic representation. Organized into chapters by theme, the catalogue explores how text, image, and ideas distil into a logo across events, fashion, media, music, and retailers. Featuring work from both star names and lesser-known mavericks, this is an excellent reference for students and professionals in design and marketing, as well as for anyone interested in the visuals and philosophy behind brand identity. " ... |
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Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) in fact defied easy categorization and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and everyday urban life. The elder scion of a wealthy family, Degas cofounded a series of exhibitions of "Impressionist" art, but soon disassociated himself from the group in pursuit of a more realist approach. His subjects centered on the teeming, noisy streets of Paris, as well as its leisure entertainments, such as horse racing, cabarets, and, most particularly, ... |
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It was a dappled and daubed harbor scene that gave Impressionism its name. When Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet was exhibited in April 1874, critics seized upon the work's title and its loose stylistic rendering of light and motion upon water to deride this new, impressionistic, tendency in art. As with many seminal art movements, the critics got their comeuppance. Today, Impressionism is close contender for the world's favorite period of painting. With blockbuster exhibitions, record-breaking auction prices, and packed museums, the works once dismissed as unfinished or imprecise are now beloved for their ... |
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Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionary Dada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York launched a radical assault on the politics, social values, and cultural conformity which they regarded as complicit in the devastating conflict. Dada artists shared no distinct style but rather a common wish to upturn societal structures as much as artistic standards and to replace logic and reason with the absurd, chaotic, and unpredictable. Their practice encompassed experimental theater, games, ... |
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Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork. Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from Hollywood's most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop ... |
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 - 1938) is regarded as one of the key figures in 20th-century European art. A Modernist to his bones, he sent seismic waves through the art world with his hard-edged, intensely colored paintings and disseminated his ideas through Die Brücke art movement and the MUIM-Institut school of modernist painting, both of which he cofounded. Kirchner's work reconciled past and present through an Expressionist prism, reflecting the latest avant-garde ideas in art, while exploring traditional academic approaches and subjects. His works tackled social, moral, and emotional questions with a fierce ... |
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All about the Belle Époque. Delicate illustration that defined an era. ... With his instantly recognizable decorative style, Czech artist and Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha (1860 - 1939) defined the look of the fin-de-siecle. In evocative shades of peach, gold, ochre, and olive, his seductive compositions of patterns, flowers, and beautiful women became paradigms of the Belle Époque years. Mucha's work permeated illustration, posters, postcards, and the advertising designs of his day. His striking posters of star actress Sarah Bernhardt were particularly famous. Alongside this delicate decorative work, ... |
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The Case Study House program (1945-1966) was a unique event in the history of American architecture. Sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, the program sought to respond to the postwar building boom with prototype modern homes that could be both easily replicated and readily affordable to the average American. Concentrated on the Los Angeles area, the Case Study Houses included 36 model homes commissioned from such major architects of the day as Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, and Ralph Rapson. Their criteria included "using, ... |
