Graphic Style, Hockney, Signac & Rossetti

Graphic Style: From Victorian to Digital

When Graphic Style first appeared in 1988, it quickly won recognition as the book to consult for a visual overview of graphic design styles through the ages. Now this essential design compendium has been updated with a brand new section on the digital age, covering all the developments of the past 12 years from typocentric design to the impact of the Internet. Anyone who wants to know more about Dutch Art Deco or Italian Art Nouveau, or any of the other graphic styles of the 20th century, should turn to this book, with its more than 700 brilliantly selected illustrations and insightful text.
Steven Heller, art director of the New York Times Book Review and co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA/Design program, has written over 70 books on graphic design, illustration, and political art. The recipient of the 1999 AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, he lives in New York City.
Seymour Chwast is co-founder and now director of The Pushpin Group, an internationally acclaimed design firm. His award-winning illustrations and designs have been used in advertising and posters as well as in 30 books for children.
Graphic Style: From Victorian to Digital by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast
ISBN: 0810929848

Landscape of Belief

This book tells of the nineteenth-century American painters who, along with photographers, archaeologists, writers, evangelists, and tourists, flocked to the biblical Holy Land, a world of striking landscape vistas that reflected, in their eyes, a powerful image of the United States. Here they saw a metaphor for their country: a New World promised land, a divinely favored Protestant nation created by and for a modern chosen people.
Taking these biblical associations as a starting point, John Davis examines the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans looked to the actual landscape of the Holy Land as an extension of their national identity. Through close readings of panoramas, photographs, and conventional easel paintings, he shows how this "sacred topography" became a place to work out the competing ideological debates surrounding American exceptionalism, prophetic millennialism, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish sentiment, and post-Darwinian science.
The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture by John Davis
ISBN: 0691058458

David Hockney by Peter Clothier

For a contemporary artist of serious aesthetic purpose, David Hockney enjoys immense public visibility. His personality, ideas about art, and inventiveness both of imagery and of techniques ranging from oil painting to photography to faxes are captured by Peter Clothier in this concise but comprehensive overview. From his theatrical early canvases to his more recent photographic collages and operatic set designs, David Hockney has tackled the challenge of space on a grand scale. At the same time, much of his work has been devoted to the things most dear to him - friends, family, home, and studio. Invention, the driving force behind David Hockney's art, is in good part play. This color-rich volume conveys David Hockney's serious delight in making art that gives pleasure to both its creator and its audience.
David Hockney by Peter Clothier
ISBN: 0789200368

Paul Signac, 1863-1935

During his fifty-year career, the French Neoimpressionist artist Paul Signac produced powerful works in many media. This beautiful book, which examines various aspects of Signac's career and reproduces in color some two hundred of his paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, is an unprecedented overview of his art and influence.
The book traces Paul Signac's artistic development, which began with the luminous plein air paintings he made in the early 1880s, continued with his explorations of color harmony, contrasts, and neoimpressionist technique made in close association with Georges Seurat, and culminated with the scintillating works of his maturity, in which the rigors of pointillism gave way to richly patterned, decorative color surfaces.
Essays discuss Paul Signac's triumphs as a painter, draftsman, watercolorist, and printmaker, examine his role as a promoter of his own works and those of his colleagues, and shed new light on his appreciation of the works of his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. The volume also includes an annotated chronology and a map that pinpoints the sites depicted in Paul Signac's works.
Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon is a well-known Paul Signac scholar. Anne Distel is Chief Curator of the Musée d'Orsay. John Leighton is Director of the Van Gogh Museum. Susan Alyson Stein is Associate Curator of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Paul Signac, 1863-1935 by Marina Bocquillon-Ferretti
ISBN: 0300088604

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. He is now best known for his sumptuous oil paintings of solitary women from the 1860s and 1870s.
These were a major influence on European Symbolism at the end of the nineteenth century, and were admired by Salvador Dali as embodiments of the 'Eternal Feminine' in 1936. In this overview of Rossetti's career, however, Lisa Tickner suggests that the later oils have obscured an interest in his earlier work and his achievements as a draughtsman and illustrator.
Lisa Tickner discusses the jewel-like watercolours of the 1850s, inspired by themes from Dante and Arthurian legend, and aruges that it was, paradoxically, when Rossetti was most in thrall to the mythic past that he was at his most innovative and visionary. This timely reassessment presents a picture of a complex and highly original artist.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Lisa Tickner
ISBN: 1854374877