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Books : Arts & Photography : Schools, Periods & Styles : Surrealism
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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. 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.
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Starting with photography in 1958, Zdzislaw Beksinski established himself as a worldwide phenomenon and Poland's leading contemporary artist. Beksinski's fantastic works are among his best-known, and the paintings collected in The Fantastic Art Of Beksinski reveal unforgettable images of post apocalyptic landscapes obsessively packed with death and decay. Haunting, surreal, and disturbing, Beksinski's work remains both mysterious and beautiful. This black bonded leather collector's edition features some of Beksinski's most provocative work, is signed and numbered by the artist, and includes a cloth slipcase.
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Now available in paperback, this lavishly illustrated and astonishingly comprehensive volume stands as the definitive study of the influential but deliberately elusive international Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Organized according to the primary city centers where this shifting, quintessentially avant garde movement emerged, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris features the work of 40 key artists, both infamous and lesser-known, including Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, to name just a few, in media spanning painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Dynamically designed with an uncommon intelligence suited to the complexity of the movement itself, it contains hundreds of reproductions of works which, until the major traveling exhibition of 2005 and 2006 for which this book was originally produced, had for the most part never been seen in one place together. Documentary images, topical essays and an invaluable illustrated chronology of the movement make this volume uniquely essential, along with witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist accompanied by Dada-era photographs.
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A striking collection of extraordinary images from one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed and unique American artists.
This fantastical collection teems with ironic imagery which documents our culture’s vanity, aggression, dreams, and neuroses with biting wit and wisdom. Boris Artzybasheff’s striking graphic style, which includes everything from grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, to the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion, is displayed to full effect in this seminal collection of his work.
A stunning collection from an artist with a strong sense of design and humour!
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Superb reproductions of paintings by one of the 20th century's most famous artists: The Visage of War, The Enigma of Desire, the well-known Persistence of Memory, 13 others.
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TASCHEN's 25th anniversary ? Special edition! Two large-format hardcover volumes in a slipcase at a special bestseller price Picasso called Dal? "an outboard motor that's always running." Dal? thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dal? (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics?and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This lively monograph presents the infamous Surrealist in full color and in his own words. His provocative imagery is all here, from the soft watches to the notorious burning giraffe. A friend of the artist for over thirty years, privy to the reality behind Dal?'s public image, author Robert Descharnes is uniquely qualified to analyze Dal??both the man and the myth.
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Bridging the worlds of high art and true crime, Exquisite Corpse presents a unique perspective on the most notorious unsolved murder case of the twentieth century--the bizarre 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia murder.Unlike previous books on the Black Dahlia, Exquisite Corpse provides a detailed and compelling explanation for the unusual nature of this gruesome killing. Exquisite Corpse reveals, through visual comparisons and historical research, what seem to be profound connections between surrealist art and the Black Dahlia caseÑ-both before and after the murder. The evidence includes startling crime-scene and autopsy photographs of Elizabeth Short, rarely seen photographs by Man Ray, and surprising comparisons with a wide range of surrealist artworks. A Òweb of connectionsÓ indicates a direct link or one degree of separation between the alleged killer and a host of influential people in the arts and film industry in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s. A timeline provides a revealing chronology of events surrounding the murder.
Exquisite Corpse is a must-read for anyone interested in true crime, art history, Hollywood noir, and the infamous Black Dahlia case.
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Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism
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With an introduction by J G Ballard, this is a seminal Surrealist text that reveals the intimate details of Dali's life and work as figurehead of the 20th century art movement.
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The works of Rene Magritte (1898 - 1967) and the ideas that underlie them are a special case both in the history of modern art and in surrealist painting. In the search for the "mystery" in which things and organisms are enveloped, Magritte created pictures which, taking everyday reality as their starting point, were to follow a different logic from that to which we are accustomed. Magritte depicts the world of reality in such unsecretive superficiality that the beholder of his pictures is forced to reflect that the mystery of it is not evoked by some sentimental transfiguration, but rather by the logic of his thoughts and associations. Magritte thus invented an inimitable pictorial language which he uses to question our usual comprehension of pictures. In this book, Jacques Meuris traces Magritte's artistic development from its beginnings until the end of his life, and in doing so underlines the originality of this great Belgian Surrealist.
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Fellow painter Erban spent countless hours conversing with his colleague, Joan Mir (1893-1983), at his house in Mallorca for this book--a retrospective which explores through texts and images the work of one of the 20th century's most influential painters.
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Marc Chagall--one of the greatest of all twentieth-century painters--died in 1985, during a major exhibition of his work, mounted jointly by the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This exhibition had as one of its main features quotations taken from Chagall's autobiography, My Life.
Originally published in English in 1965, Chagall's My Life offers a lyrical and evocative account of the author's early life and tremendous insight into the shaping of his creative genius. His literary style--playful and witty arabesques of fantasy that remind us of his visual imagery--accentuates his descriptions of his childhood spent in the provincial Russian town of Witebsk, his early adventures, and his first meeting with Bella, the woman who later became his wife. He depicts his struggle as an artist in the face of poverty and opposition, followed by the fruitful years in Paris where he found fulfillment and recognition. Chagall ends his account by describing his return to Russia at the outbreak of World War I and the despair that finally induced him to return to France with Bella and their young daughter in 1922.
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Brilliantly exploring the life and work of American artist Joseph Cornell, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Simic utilizes a series of short prose pieces that scavenge the dark corners of New York City by way of the nooks and crannies of his own imagination, creating the literary equivalent of Cornell's art. Photos.
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"If I were not a Jew . . . I wouldn't have been an artist, or I would be a different artist altogether." -Marc Chagall, Leaves from My Notebook. Marc Chagall is one of the most popular artists of the 20th century, famous for his poetic, surreal images that represent a topsy-turvy world, combining fantasy and spirituality with a modernist style. This volume serves as a guide to the iconography of Chagall's best-loved work—in which he frequently included Jewish symbolism and folklore, sometimes overtly, sometimes in hidden, quite meaningful ways—offering insight into Chagall's Jewish roots and succinct interpretations of his major paintings, from his early masterpieces made in Russia and in Paris to his Yiddish art theater paintings. Harshav illuminates Chagall's most famous paintings of the Jewish shtetl, or provincial Russian town, and highlights the recognizable trademarks of his art, such as the "fiddler on the roof." It also interprets in detail Chagall's theater murals and his beautiful stained-glass windows at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Although Chagall is not known only as a Jewish artist, his background was the prism through which he saw the world and served as the language of his universally loved art.
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Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is widely regarded as epitomizing the "painter as poet". The worldwide admiration he commanded remains unparalleled by any artist of the 20th century. Chagall's paintings, steeped in mythology and mysticism, portray colourful dreams and tales that are deeply rooted in his Russian Jewish origins. The memories and yearning they evoke recall his native Vitebsk, and the great events that mark the life of ordinary people: birth, love, marriage and death. They tell of a world full of everyday miracles - in the room of lovers, on the streets of Vitebsk, beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Heaven and earth seem to meet in a topsy-turvy world in which whimsical figures of people and animals float through the air with gravity-defying serenity. This art album presents Chagall's work.
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Salvador Dali was one of the most famous--and one of the most notorious--artists of the twentieth century, recognized as much in the popular imagination for his flamboyant personal style and his penchant for showmanship as for his groundbreaking artworks in many media. Dali & Film investigates, for the first time in depth, the part played by film as a key influence on Dali's art, as well as his extensive involvement in film-based projects. This illuminating volume presents both the major paintings that reflect the artist's famous preoccupation with film and materials related to the key film projects on which he worked.
Throughout his long career, cinema contributed to Dali's understanding of both the power and the uses of illusion. In 1929 and 1930 he collaborated with the influential Spanish Surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel on the startling and highly controversial films Un Chien andalou and l'Age d'or. Many years later, Dali worked with the Disney studios in Hollywood and with Alfred Hitchcock, devising a dream sequence for the psychological thriller Spellbound that remains one of the most innovative in cinema. Over the intervening years, Dali came to reject what he saw as the elitism of Modernist film, and embrace instead the popularity of mainstream cinema, recognizing its potential to bring his work to a vast audience. Extensively illustrated with reproductions of paintings, film stills, storyboards and photographs of the artist with figures ranging from studio bosses to the Marx Brothers, Dali & Film reveals the depth and persistence of Dali's fascination with the medium, bringing a new dimension to our understanding of one of the great masters of twentieth-century art.
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The avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism continue to have a huge influence on cultural practice, especially in contemporary art, with its obsession with sexuality, fetishism, and shock tactics. In this new treatment of the subject, Hopkins focuses on the many debates surrounding these movements: the Marquis de Sade's Surrealist deification, issues of quality (How good is Dali?), the idea of the 'readymade', attitudes towards the city, the impact of Freud, attitudes to women, fetishism, and primitivism. The international nature of these movements is examined, covering the cities of Zurich, New York, Berlin, Cologne, Barcelona, Paris, London, and recently discovered examples in Eastern Europe.
Hopkins explores the huge range of media employed by both Dada and Surrealism (collage, painting, found objects, performance art, photography, film) , whilst at the same time establishing the aesthetic differences between the movements. He also examines the Dadaist obsession with the body-as-mechanism in relation to the Surrealists' return to the fetishized/eroticized body.