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Poligrafa
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«Like his Dutch contemporary Vermeer, Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) had little reputation outside of his native land until the nineteenth century, when the Spanish royal painting collections became state property and were installed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The year was in 1819, and several private and official collections in London and Paris also benefited. Unlike Vermeer, however, Velazquez had a fairly large oeuvre waiting to be rediscovered--and rediscovered it was, with great rapidity and enthusiasm. Goya and Manet are almost inconceivable without the precedent of Velazquez's portraiture, and in fact Manet even called the Spaniard «the painter of painters.» His impact on French Impressionism was colossal. And two of the twentieth century's most famous artists painted direct homages: Picasso made a version of «Las Meninas» in 1957; and Francis Bacon's «screaming popes» are based on Velazquez's 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X. From Goya until today, Velazquez's work has been recognized not only as the essential forerunner to Modern painting, but also as the greatest exponent of seventeenth-century Spanish art.» |
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Antoni Tapies was born in 1923 to a Barcelona family of publishers and booksellers. He began drawing and painting as a young man, during a convalescence, and in the end gave up studying law to concentrate on art. By the 1940s, in his 20s, Tapies was already exhibiting widely. As an early Matter painter, he added dirt and other solids to his canvases, transmuting them into art and reminding viewers of the earth to which they would return. Later, in the era of Arte Povera, he worked in foam rubber and spray, varnishes and, for creating objects or sculptures, refractory clay and bronze. Coming from a bookish family, he also produced a number of artist's books and editions, working with collaborators such as Joseph Brodsky and Jose Saramago. This collection of the artist's writings is available here for the first time in English. An interview with Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of the MACBA in Spain, completes the volume. |
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Widely considered one of the greatest, and certainly one of the most mysterious and erotically daring, painters of the twentieth century, Balthus, or Balthazar Klossowski, the French/Polish Count de Rola, died in his adopted Switzerland in 2001 at the age of 93. Descended from Polish aristocracy and raised among important European intellectuals like Rainer Maria Rilke, Andre Gide and Jean Cocteau, Balthus went on to consort and collaborate with many of the most influential members of the Modern avant garde-including Breton, Picasso, Artaud, Giacometti, Camus, Masson and Lacan, to name a fraction. His disturbing and often erotically charged paintings remain enduringly enigmatic. In this beautifully illustrated collection, Mieke Bal analyzes the way that the paintings emanate both reality and un-reality, creating the unique sense of eeriness at the heart of Balthus' work--which always invites viewers in and repels them at the same time. According to Bal, we are given access to a world that is in no way explained. Thus, the works must labor against assumptions of representation and appropriation, drawing us into a world we know not to exist. In Bal's interpretation, this canny fictionality renders the typical allegations of erotic appropriation naive and censorious. Rather than reduce Balthus' work to the adolescent girls, Bal focuses on additional issues such as color, space, genre and history. |
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Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is without doubt one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century. Dead at the age of 44, he nonetheless bequeathed a substantial body of pioneering work to countless subsequent artists for whom he stood as a model of fearlessness, courageous improvisation and balletic grace. Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others, but in the few completed writings that do remain, and in a few unpublished, undated notes — all of which are gathered in this volume — the concerns are remarkably consistent. Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, and in abstraction as enabling both the direct expression of an inner world, of individual feeling, and the urgencies and tensions of modern American life (famously characterized, in his words, by the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio). Pollock's most famous statement on his method exemplifies this concern with a creativity arising from an unconscious: When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. In this introduction to Pollock's art and thought, Nancy Jachec traces these and other themes across 120 color reproductions. |
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Perhaps no other figure exerted a greater influence on the urban transformation of Barcelona during the first third of the 20th century than Josep Puig i Cadafalch. If as an architect he constituted a perfect example of the tension posed between Modernism and Noucentisme, as a historian and archeologist he contributed to the recuperation of a significant part of Catalonia's historical and patrimonial memory. Nevertheless, it was his awareness of town planning issues which contributed to the great metropolitan transformation of Barcelona, from the opening of Via Laietana to the development of the Placa de Catalunya. This volume includes both a biography and a chronology of works and projects. |
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«Close Distance is both an exhibition and a collaborative artist's book by Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento and British writer Adrian Searle. Searle reviews Sarmento's output in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and film, which for Searle «speaks of sex, violence, the repressed, the unconscionable and the deliberately--provocatively--inexplicable.» |
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From Edvard Munch to Chris Ofili, French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) has exerted a profound influence on artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gauguin began as an Impressionist, contributing major works to the movement's groundbreaking exhibitions between 1879 and 1886. This concise, beautifully illustrated monograph collects Gauguin's most important works. In addition to his well-known paintings of Tahiti, in which the artist constructed his perfect vision of man's communion with the natural world, the book also includes powerful works that reflect the artist's contact with other seminal early modern masters such as Van Gogh and Cezanne. |
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Dan Graham's body of art and theory — which dates from shortly after he moved to New York in 1964 — has become a key part of the Conceptual art canon. He is a highly influential figure in the field of Contemporary art, both as a practitioner and as a well-respected critic and theorist. Best known for his large-scale installations incorporating mirrors — in which viewers become lost in a maze of reflections that they must navigate and interpret as they simultaneously see themselves and other viewers reflected — Graham has long examined the psychological relationship between people and architecture. This volume looks at Graham's key works and incorporates a collection of his seminal writings. A second edition, this important expanded monograph contains new material not found in the first. |
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One of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists and a founding figure of modern art, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) incorporated the influences of many cultures into his work. He pioneered an appreciation of the simple and primitive, traveling to Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands for inspiration. The artist's legacy is recalled in this excellent collection of 16 Gauguin masterpieces, painstakingly reproduced in sticker format. Included are Where are You Going?, Self-Portrait with Halo, Woman with a Fan, Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, Spirit of the Dead Watching, Reverie, and 10 others. |
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