This book is dedicated to my wonderful wife Claude-Aline, my beloved friend, who, in describing her complex family history, became my tutor, mentor and guiding intelligence as she informed me about the life and lives of people I could not have known without her.
CROWNS, with its formal, intimate, repetitive focus, is, as well, dedicated to all people - people of every continent, every skin color, every gender, every nationality and every religion - willing to explore their own causal history, their culture, ideologies, ancestry and social conventions in an effort to construct and complete their psychological portrait as both fact and imagination.
The first monograph in English on a major Polish painter.
Józef Halas (1927-2015) is one of the major Polish painters of his generation. Active in Wroclaw from 1949 until his death, first as a student and then as an artist and teacher, he left a unique body of work that, like many of those built largely during the Cold War, remained long unrecognized in Western Europe and North America. The Mountain series, which occupied most of his activity during the 1960s, marks both a strong connection with nature and a distance from the landscape painting tradition. The following series, Oppositions, Partitions, Verticals, Obliques, Levels and Interiors, constitute the pinnacle of his production and testify to a poetics of contradiction which is embodied in multiple and successful ways. The Pocket Gouaches, begun in the late 1970s, reveal an artist who has always remained open to experimentation. For a decade, the history of art has fortunately opened its field of investigation, modernity has become plural and its actors have become more numerous. There is no doubt that Józef Halas must now be counted as one of the important players in this global history. This monograph, with texts by Michel Gauthier, curator at the Centre Pompidou, Magdalena Howorus-Czajka, professor at the University of Gdansk, and Marjolaine Lévy, art critic, aims to contribute to the knowledge of Halas’s work beyond Poland and by placing it in an international context.
Photographer Richard Avedon, with a more than six-decade-long career, produced innovative and delightful work in fashion, as well as incisive and captivating portraits. Over the course of his lifetime he worked with a number of models and a wide range of portrait subjects, creating a powerful body of pictures that allow his viewers to study the likenesses of actors, ballet dancers, celebrities, civil rights activists, heads of state, inventors, musicians, visual artists and writers. Avedon offers viewers the opportunity to study faces without crossing any socially imposed boundaries about staring too long; he encourages viewers to think about the people before them, the lives they have lived, their private personalities and public personas, their struggles, accomplishments, disappointments, and joys. Richard Avedon. Relationships presents a selection of 100 iconic fashion photographs and portraits, from the extensive collection at the Center for Creative Photography, to delve into his approach to photographing people. Avedon’s combination of talent and skill, technical proficiency and attuning to his individual subjects, allowed him to make portraits that are riveting presentations of the people he photographed. Indeed, he achieved mastery of the portraiture form. Avedon had the opportunity to photograph a number of his portrait subjects on more than one occasion. Within the catalogue it is possible to see painter Jasper Johns in 1965 and 1976; novelist Carson McCullers in 1956 and 1958; the Beatles Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, and poet Allen Ginsberg in 1963 and 1970. Perhaps the most dramatic and powerful example of Avedon’s ongoing photographic relationship is that with his friend and collaborator, Truman Capote.
The long Pax Tokugawa was founded on the blood of 40,000 severed enemy heads. Indeed, 1600 marked the end of the period of wars that saw the defeat of the troops opposed to General Ieyasu Tokugawa.
The absence of wars, banishing the memories and horrors of past massacres, favoured the development of epic tales that gave rise to dark and terrifying atmospheres, such as the game of the hundred candles, a test of courage in which a handful of warriors meet on a summer night to tell each other scary stories populated by monsters from the national tradition. So we have the Joro¯ gumo, comely women who reveal their true nature as enormous spiders to their victims; the Tanuki, endearing badgers able to transform themselves; the Bakeneko, monstrous cats; the Kappa, aquatic beings that pester women; the Ningyo, mermaids whose fragrant flesh can give men renewed youth or an excruciating death.
The macabre ritual of the hundred candles is the great idea behind this original project that presents 200 works from the 18th and 19th centuries, including prints, rare antique books, clothes, weapons, swords, a samurai suit of armour, as well as seventy-seven precious netsuke, small ivory sculptures, from the Bertocchi private collection and a ten-metre long scroll that tells the story of Shutendoji, a mythological creature (Oni) at the head of an army of monsters that haunted Mount Oe near Kyoto. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Villa Reale in Monza, the book is a real journey of discovery of Japanese imagery, ranging from Hokusai’s famous manga notebooks (alongside his other masterpieces) to the works of Loputyn, the contemporary illustrator well known to hotaku manga enthusiasts.
“Seeing many of my works years after I completed them is a fascinating experience. I don’t really associate them with any particular time or place or state of mind, but view them as part of a long arc; a continuing of the way we go forth in the world and the way our perceptions are shaped and altered by life. One can be as profoundly influenced by events in Morretes, Brazil as the y can be by the man who sells them El País in Madrid.” –Bob Dylan, 2021
Spanning six decades, Retrospectrum showcases the development and range of Dylan’s visual practice, in tandem with that of his musical and literary canon. It features a wide selection of Bob Dylan’s artworks in an array of media, with important works loaned from private collections around the world. The artist’s diverse creations include oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings, as well as his ink, pastel and charcoal drawings and distinctive ironwork sculptures.
Among the artworks presented in Retrospectrum are some of the artist’s earliest ink sketches first published in 1973’s Writings and Drawings that illustrated and compiled Dylan's lyrics up until that time. These drawings are shown alongside works from last year's Mondo Scripto series, in which Dylan revisited some of his most renowned lyrics, hand-writing and illustrating them in his unique hand. The book also features the iconic Train Tracks paintings representing The Drawn Blank Series (2008) that first brought Bob Dylan’s visual artworks to critical and popular acclaim.
Retrospectrum also presents paintings from Dylan’s The New Orleans Series and The Asia Series (from 2012 and 2010 respectively), inspired by the artist’s own travels, as well as works from his hugely popular The Beaten Path Series (2015 – present). Among the artist’s most rarely seen pieces are his industrial ironworks, created from repurposed objects that speak to America’s industrial past.
The best of Japanese graphic poster design, from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics to the Issey Miyake logo
This book brings together the best of Japanese graphic poster design--from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics to the creation of the Issey Miyake logo, and from the Osaka Expo to the official poster for the Pan-Pacific Design Congress. Japanese contemporary posters are considered to have started in the mid-'50s, after World War II and following a period of depression, post-militarism and post-autarchy. This new expressive mode was fueled by stimuli from abroad, but it was also a chance to reinterpret traditional themes and colors, bringing them into modernity in refreshing and fruitful ways. In the maze of expressive forms that flourished in Japan during the postwar period, graphic design stands out as a precious tool for following the thread of national creativity and the intense permanence of traditional aesthetic sensibility through these new forms.
Over half a century after the inception of graphics and with the coming Olympic Games taking place in 2021, this volume takes a wide view of the trends and aesthetic shifts that can be traced in the development of graphic design in Japan. Contemporary Japanese Posters includes 85 graphic designers and 756 posters. It is the most complete volume on the subject in any language.
Over the last three decades, the Polish artist Xawery Wolski has deployed a diversity of non-representational vocabularies - ranging from geometric shapes inspired by early twentieth-century abstraction to Surrealist-inspired biomorphic forms - to investigate the idea of unification between the individual self and nature.
Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930) today is revered for her uncompromising, individualistic vision developed in her native Poland under the hostile eyes of the repressive Communist regime that was in power for most of her adult life. She has personally witnessed the worst of humanity’s instinct for destructive behavior and has made art that unflinchingly presents the human condition. She had, by the 1960s, gained the beginning of an international reputation as a sculptor in soft materials with the creation of monumental environments called Abakans. Always alert to build on her personal independent vision, she has created large groups of human figures out of old burlap sacks and resin. Her 80 backward-seated figures and 50 standing figures have attracted widespread attention and evoked provocative cultural and political associations wherever they have been shown. At the Venice Biennial of 1980, her ambitious exhibition in the Polish Pavilion caused a sensation among critics and the general public. Her retrospective moved to America from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to be shown in seven important museums. Since then the level and variety of her work has been nothing short of astonishing.
She changed sculpture from “object to look at” into “space to experience”. Monumental, powerful compositions in bronze or stone, iron or concrete have been created for specific locations—the Gori Collection in Italy, the Olympic Park in Seoul (Korea), the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Vilnius (Lithuania), and Chicago’s Grant Park—and are permanently installed as environments accessible to people.She has transformed the casting process into a way of building individual bodies with personal expression. Her largest group of figures (the environment in Chicago) consists of 106 headless shells in walking movement, made of material that resembles tree bark or rags from a mummy. She has also worked with tree trunks that she has armed with metal (War Games) and built multi-figurative compositions out of welded stainless steel (King Artur’s Court).
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