- Brashares, Ann
- 18th Century
- Eurocommunism
- Jones, John
- Auster, Paul
- Hardcover
- Lesynski, Loris
- Tulips
- Instructional
- PMP Exam
- General
- Wong, Shawn
- Peters, Ellis
- Information Systems
- Doctor Who
- Hardcover
- Mermaids
- Paxson, Diana
- Christie, Agatha
- McCaffrey, Anne
- Gage, Elizabeth
- Dass, Ram
- Business of Art
- Berenson, Laurien
- Danish
- Large Print
- Grandparenting
- Wilde, Oscar
- Stenciling
- Goonan, Kathleen Ann
- Some of our other sites:
- Books
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Cosmetics, Beauty Products and Fragrances
- Cellphones, Call Plans and Accessories
- Video Games
- DVDs
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- Health and Personal Care
- Home and Garden
- Home DIY
- Jewelry
- Magazines and Newspapers
- Music Downloads
- Musical Instruments
- Office Equipment and Supplies
- Software and Games
- Sporting Goods
- Toys and Games
- Watches
- UK Books
- UK Video Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- UK Software and Games
- UK Sporting Goods
- UK Toys and Games
Books : Arts & Photography : Schools, Periods & Styles : Modern
-
Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock’s drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.
This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.
-
As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.
It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.
ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.
-
This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media.Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible—even at a cursory reading.
From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.
-
Astonishing creations by masters of the art, such as Escher, Dali, and Archimbolo; amazing visual trickery; and an illuminating foreword by the Pulitzer Prize--winning author Douglas R. Hofstadter make this 320-page, breathtaking collection the definitive book of optical illusions.
Rings of seahorses that seem to rotate on the page. Butterflies that transform right before your eyes into two warriors with their horses. A mosaic portrait of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau made from seashells. These dazzling and often playful artistic creations manipulate perspective so cleverly that they simply outwit our brains: we can’t just take a quick glance and turn away. They compel us to look once, twice, and over and over again, as we try to figure out exactly how the delightful trickery manages to fool our perceptions so completely. Of course, first and foremost, every piece is beautiful on the surface, but each one offers us so much more. Some, including Sandro del Prete’s charming “Window Gazing,” construct illusionary worlds where normal conceptions of up, down, forward, and back simply have no meaning anymore. Others, such as Jos De Mey’s sly “Ceci n’est pas un Magritte,” create visual puns on earlier work. From Escher’s famous and elaborate “Waterfall” to Shigeo Fukuda’s “Mary Poppins,” where a heap of bottles, glasses, shakers, and openers somehow turn into the image of a Belle Epoque woman when the spotlight hits them, these works of genius will provide endless enjoyment and food for thought.
-
-
Vitamin P is an image-filled book that provides an international overview of the state of painting today. Documenting the most recent concerns, ideas and trends, Vitamin P explores the work of a vibrant new generation that is revitalizing this traditional, but continually updated, medium. Included are 114 of painting's leading practitioners, who were nominated by esteemed critics, curators and other experts from around the world. Each artist is represented by numerous examples of his or her work, accompanied by an explanatory text and short biography. Vitamin P illustrates the richness, eclecticism and dynamism of painting today. It is a critical sourcebook and reference work for seasoned art world veterans as well as newcomers to contemporary art.A stimulating introductory text is provided by Barry Schwabsky, who writes regularly for Artforum. He is currently Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.
-
-
Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of “postmodernism.” Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low,” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
-
The Cartoon History of the Modern World is a wickedly funny take on modern history. It is essentially a complete and up–to–date course in college level Modern World History, but presented as a graphic novel. In an engaging and humorous graphic style, Larry Gonick covers the history, personalities and big topics that have shaped our universe over the past five centuries, including the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the evolution of political, social, economic, and scientific thought, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, the Cold War, Globalization––and much more.
Volume I of the Cartoon History of the Modern World picks up from Gonick's award winning Cartoon History of the Universe Series. That series began with the Big Bang and ended with Christopher Columbus sailing for the New World. This book starts off with peoples that Columbus "discovered" and ends with the U.S. Revolution.
-
Paul Harvey is the most listened-to radio personality in America. Millions of loyal listeners tune in every week to hear his unique blend of news and views. Now, in Paul Harvey's The Rest Of The Story you'll find eighty-two astonishing true stories of the famous and infamous, the outrageous and the unknown. Each unforgettable tale has for its startling punch line the wild and wonderful solution to a real-life mystery. The 1950's presidential candidate who killed a teenage girl. The governor of New York who dressed up like a woman--at taxpayer's expense. The queen whose secret photo collection--if exposed--would shock the world. The American founding father who kept his wife locked in the cellar. The best-selling mystery writer who tried to get away . . . with murder! From present-day shockers to historical puzzlers, Paul Harvey's The Rest Of The Story reveals the untold story behind some of history's strangest little-known facts.
-
In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.
The Rescue Artist is a rollicking narrative that carries readers deep inside the art underworld -- and introduces them to a large and colorful cast of titled aristocrats, intrepid investigators, and thick-necked thugs. But most compelling of all is Charley Hill himself, a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm whose hunt for a purloined treasure would either cap an illustrious career or be the fiasco that would haunt him forever.
-
The fascinating new book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism.
If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon.
Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change: on the streets of Paris, at the new seaside resorts of Boulogne and Trouville, and at the race courses and picnic spots where the new bourgeoisie relaxed. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes (described by some as applied by a ‘floor mop’) but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for ‘Art’. Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world.
Full of fantastic tidbits of information (such as the use of carrier pigeons and hot-air balloons during the siege of Paris), and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet, and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.
-
Artist Tara Donovan uses commonplace consumer materials--toothpicks, tape, pencils, buttons, paper plates, and the like--to create her dazzling sculptural installations. Often biomorphic or topographical in character, her large-scale abstract works utilize systematic arrangements of thousands or even millions of units. Visually evocative and perceptually seductive, her pieces are at once organic and highly structured. Donovan has been recognized for her commitment to process and her ability to discover how the inherent physical characteristics of an object might allow it to be transformed into art.
Published in conjunction with a major solo exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, this book is the first to document Donovan's complete oeuvre, from her beginnings working in ink to her most recent pieces. Among the many works shown are Untitled (Plastic Cups), a 50-by-60-foot landscape of plastic cups; Haze, a 42-foot-long wall of over two million clear plastic drinking straws stacked like wood; and her three 40-inch cubes, one of steel pins, one of toothpicks, and one of shattered glass. An in-depth conversation between Donovan and Lawrence Weschler traces the artist's schooling, early career, and current work.
-
It’s the celebration of an era. At a mind-blowing price, this ultimate, beautiful, illuminating, and really groovy look at the 1960s counterculture is rich in illustrations and filled with the history, politics, sayings, and slogans that defined the age. For those who were there, this volume will flash them back. For those who weren’t, they’ll wish they had been.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll; peace rallies and riots in the ghettos; Flower Power, Black Power, and Gay Power; Mothers of Invention and Women’s Liberation; Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and Altamont. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it all depends on whom you ask. But without a doubt the hippies transformed society. Every significant moment of the era comes vibrantly alive once again in psychedelic images, rare portraits of writers and musicians, dynamite poster and album artwork, and photographic records of political events that shook the world. Hundreds of unforgettable quotations come from seminal figures such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Grace Slick and George Harrison. Proceeding year by year from 1965 to 1971, Hippie gives an unprecedented degree of shape and coherence to an age—that is kaleidoscopically astounding.
Barry Miles was a central figure in the counterculture milieu. He wrote Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, as well as The Beatles: A Diary; contributed to I Want to Take You Higher, the Rock Music Hall of Fame’s chronicle of psychedelic music. The Sixties is Miles’ own memoir of the decade.
-
-
This popular anthology of twentieth-century art theoretical texts has now been expanded to take account of new research, and to include significant contributions to art theory from the 1990s.- New edition of this popular anthology of twentieth-century art-theoretical texts.
- Now updated to include the results of new research, together with significant contributions from the 1990s.
- Includes writings by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures.
- The editors provide contextual introductions to 340 texts.
- Complements Art in Theory 1648-1815 and Art in Theory 1815-1900 to create a complete survey of the theories underpinning the development of art in the modern period.
- New edition of this popular anthology of twentieth-century art-theoretical texts.
-
"A new, imperishable beauty," was how the artist and architect Henry van de Velde described it. European Art Nouveau jewelry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced a new aesthetic characterized by sensuous forms, dramatic imagery and vivid symbolism. Many of the designers associated with the movement sought their inspiration not in traditional jewelry, but in the work of the pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists and in the arts of Japan. Rejecting the rigid naturalism typical of European decorative arts, designers such as Rene Lalique and Henry van de Velde, and the artists of the German Jugenstil and Austrian Wiener Sezession movements, created ornaments that expressed the spirit and freedom of the era. These artists and designers adopted a free-flowing line and asymmetrical format that invigorated their work and set it apart, while their use of natural motifs and of the female form imbued their creations with energy, sensuality and dreamy mysticism. But underlying the undeniable exuberance of these works was a fin-de-sicle edginess that endows this period with inexhaustible fascination. With nearly 120 ornaments from a single private collection--the finest of its type in America--Imperishable Beauty features all of the major designers and jewelers from this groundbreaking era. Paintings, prints, posters and textiles fill out the presentation, making this book as rich and intoxicating as the aesthetic it portrays.
-
People worldwide are adding another dimension to their lives: the third dimension! Thanks to the 3D wonder of Magic Eye, people of all ages find themselves spellbound by the hidden images that suddenly are leaping from book pages, greeting cards, calendars, even T-shirts and mugs.This colorful Magic Eye book guides gazers through 23 different 3D, computer-generated illustrations. Complete instructions, including two detailed viewing techniques, will have them searching for visual surprises through beautifully executed, full-page designs. Expand your Magic Eye vision and watch the wonderful happen!
-
With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman—many of which have never before been available in English—and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.
-
Contemporary art, continued Unless you regularly trawl the Chelsea galleries, hang out at the Tate Modern, peruse the Pompidou, attend every Biennale, and religiously read Artforum, you could probably use a primer on the art scene in the world today. Fortunately we’ve created our second Art Now volume to keep art fans abreast of the latest trends and hottest names. Featuring over 130 artists in A-Z entries with biographical information and exhibition history as well as images of important recent work—plus a bonus illustrated index of current auction prices—Art Now II is the guide to what’s happening and who’s who in contemporary art.