Seurat, Warhol, Chuck Close, Prado & Art Deco

Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte

"Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte" provides an in-depth exploration of one of the world's most renowned paintings, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884 by Georges Seurat.
The catalogue accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition of La Grande Jatte and its many related drawings and oil paintings. Seurat scholar Robert L. Herbert makes new revelations about the painting's relationship to its preparatory studies, stressing Seurat's empirical craftsmanship.
Robert L. Herbert compares La Grande Jatte to works by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Signac, also in the exhibition, and analyzes the ways that twentieth-century critics, including Meyer Schapiro, T.J. Clark, and Linda Nochlin, have viewed the picture. Herbert proposes that the enduring fascination of the famous canvas comes from Georges Seurat's mixture of fashion and irony.
Also giving new perspectives in this book, the noted cultural historian Neil Harris charts how and why La Grande Jatte attained its revered status at the Art Institute of Chicago and throughout the United States. Additionally, the exhibition's cocurators examine the painting's place in the museum's collection. Essays by Art Institute conservators show how Georges Seurat transferred and altered figures from studies to final canvas and elucidate the exact nature of his pigments and brushwork. Color scientist Roy S. Berns traces the efforts to digitally recapture the original hues of Georges Seurat's time-altered masterpiece.
Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte by Robert L. Herbert
ISBN: 0520242114

Andy Warhol 365 Takes

Andy Warhol was one of the most compelling figures of the 20th-century art world whose body of work transformed the landscape of contemporary art. He was also a notorious collector who saved practically everything that came his way. In 1994, seven years after the artist's death, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh became the repository not only for a substantial body of his artwork and films, but also for the Time Capsules into which he obsessively deposited a lifetime's worth of ephemera and personal memorabilia.
For this book-created in the same format as Abrams' best-selling Earth From Above: 365 Days-the museum has gathered highlights of its collection. Illustrated with almost 400 objects, from paintings to party invitations, the volume also features lively commentaries by the museum's staff as well as quotes from Andy Warhol's own irreverent writings. Timed to coincide with the celebration of the museum's 10-year anniversary, this book will serve as both an introduction to and a handbook for the most extensive collection anywhere of this iconic artist's work.
Andy Warhol 365 Takes: The Andy Warhol Museum Collection
ISBN: 0810943298

Chuck Close Prints

For three decades, Chuck Close has challenged the accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. This book, published to accompany a retrospective of his prints organized by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, and traveling to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and several additional museums around the country, is the first comprehensive survey of Close's revolutionary prints.
Featuring exquisite reproductions of the prints together with essays on Close's career and in-depth interviews with the artist and his master printmakers, Chuck Close Prints highlights the intensely collaborative nature of Chuck Close's projects. Close may labor on a single print for as long as two years, working out aesthetic problems by retrieving a centuries-old European method or creating an entirely new technique (such as applying sunscreen to block light). According to Close, "Prints have moved me in my unique work more than anything else has."
From the artist's ambitious first mezzotint to his recent pulp-paper multiples, this book chronicles the genius of Chuck Close in the medium in which he has done his most exciting work. Taken together, these prints constitute a remarkable self-portrait of the creative drive, vision, and intellect of one of America's most important living artists.
Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration by Terrie Sultan
ISBN: 0691115761

Prado in Madrid

The Prado contains the most important collection of Spanish masters to be found anywhere in the world, as well as impressive collections of works by other European masters. Nowhere else can one find so many works by El Greco, Velazquez, Zurbaran, Murillo and Goya. The great strength of the museum is that is has also amassed extensive collections of other European artists. The works of Hieronymus Bosch are unsurpassed in any other gallery, the Titian collection is vast and Rubens' development is particularly well-represented.
This is a completely revised and updated edition of the ever-popular title, first published over 10 years ago. It celebrates the opening of the Eighteenth-Century Galleries, following the museum's programme of restoration, renovation and conservation. It includes new colour illustrations and commentaries on paintings now hanging in these galleries. Many works can therefore be viewed for the first time. Reproduced here in colour are the recently restored and cleaned works, together with new attributions. Many of the 400 colour plates in this book have been specially photographed. There are also many extended captions, which the authors have written for those works of particular interest.
Prado, Madrid by Alfonso E. Sanchez
ISBN: 1857592085
Prado Collection

Art Deco 1910-1939

Spanning the boom of the roaring Twenties and the bust of the Depression-ridden 1930s, Art Deco came to epitomize all the glamour, luxury, and hedonism of the Jazz Age. It was the style of the flapper girl, the luxury ocean liner, the Hollywood film, and the skyscraper. It burst onto the world stage at the 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes, and quickly swept across the globe. Its influence was everywhere: it transformed the skylines of cities from New York to Shanghai and shaped the design of everything from fashionable evening wear to plastic radios. Above all it became the style of the pleasure palaces of the age - hotels, cocktail bars, night-clubs and cinemas. Though it originated before the First World War in the one-off masterwork or the limited edition piece, Deco became synonymous with mass consumption and modernity, and was enthusiastically embraced by taste-makers all over the globe, among them Josephine Baker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Maharajah of Indore.
Art Deco was an essentially eclectic style. Art Deco drew from European craft traditions as well as from the exotic cultures of Ancient Egypt, Meso-America, East Asia, and black Africa. Its use of rare and unashamedly precious materials was a reminder of the wealth of empires, whilst its streamlined and geometric imagery celebrated the machine age and the exuberance of the contemporary world. This lavish and authoritative book brings together leading experts in the field to discuss the phenomenon that was Art Deco. Its sources, varied forms of expression, distinct visual language and global spread are examined in a series of thought-provoking and scholarly essays. With its breathtaking illustrations this volume will stand as the definitive book on what was, arguably, the most popular style of the twentieth century.
Art Deco 1910-1939 by Charlotte Benton
ISBN: 082122834X

Cecil Beaton Portraits

Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was one of the most renowned photographers of his generation. A major contributor to Vogue and Vanity Fair in Britain, France, and America, Cecil Beaton captured for posterity such admired subjects as artists Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Richard Avedon; actresses Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo; statesmen and politicians Winston Churchill and Robert Kennedy; and, of course, Britain's Royal Family. This sumptuously illustrated book - published on the centenary of Cecil Beaton's birth - brings together many of his evocative portraits in celebration of his remarkable life and work.
Gifted in an extraordinary range of fields, Cecil Beaton was noted for his flamboyant sense of style. His portraits, fashion photographs, book jacket designs, war reportage, designs for theater and film, and diaries mark him as one of the first international multi-media artists. This book features an illustrated essay discussing the wide range of the photographer's career as well as a portfolio of 160 reproductions of his most famous portraits and an extended illustrated chronology. Beaton: Portraits is a comprehensive look at a tour-de-force photographer and is an essential book for anyone interested in photography, fashion, or twentieth-century style and design.
Pablo Picasso
Beaton Portraits by Terrace Pepper
ISBN: 0300102895

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