Reviews (2)

I agree with "A reader": This book is sublime.
This should be considered indispensable to anyone interested in this artist, Romanticism, or landscape painting in general. As well as offering a carefully considered account of the artist's life and work, the text is careful to separate the myths that have grown around some of these paintings, carefully placing the artist within the context of his own time andcovering the manner in which these images have been misappropriated up to the present day.
Sublime
Werner Hofmann's new monograph on Caspar David Friedrich benefits from superb colour reproductions as well as Hofmann's own discursive brilliance.Read more

Subjects:  1. 1774-1840    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Criticism and interpretation    5. European    6. Friedrich, Caspar David,    7. Germany    8. History - Romantic    9. Individual Artist    10. Individual Painters - 19th Century    11. Landscape in art    12. Romanticism in art    13. Art / General    14. Individual artists    15. Painting & paintings    16. Romanticism   

Reviews (4)

A Glimpse into the Creator's Mind
Here you can browse through the minutiae of a genius' observations about the world around him--from flight, the human body, the nature of water, proportion, optics, movement and weight. What will impress you on every fascinating page is the universality of Leonardo's thirst for knowledge, making him truly the epitome of the "Renaissance man," and perhaps the last human who can truly be called a polymath: "the natural desire of good men is knowledge."

Da Vinci was a genius before his time
Leonardo was born in the Tuscan town of Vinci on April 15, 1452. He was a scientist before there was science, an inventor whose ideas outstripped the technology of his time, and a famous artist who produced the most valuable and recognized painting in the world. His career was one in which he would create some of the most famous paintings in the world, including perhaps the most-widely recognized and most highly valuable painting of all time, the Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci was more than just an artist, however. He was also interested in science, anatomy and architecture. His sketchbooks, filled with his ideas for inventions, stunned the world when they were found centuries after his death.
DA CODE TO ALL THINGS DA VINCI
The Da Vinci Code? In one word: genius. And we don't mean Dan Brown's tome. We mean the man himself, the Renaissance master who very nameconjures up the definition of "brilliance." This collection--- the first to be published in more than 35 years --- is culled from Leonardo's myriad of notebooks that he filled with ruminations on painting, botany, aerodynamics, geography, physical science, anatomy and architecture. This massive collection illuminates the mind of one of history's greatest minds and talents through the most extraordinary sketches, drawings, jottings and paintings. Most fascinating: da Vinci's own handwritten notes, here carefully translated and insightfully edited by art historian H. Anna Suh. Somewhere in that Great Palette, even good ol' Miss Mona is sweetly smiling. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. 1452-1519    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Artists, Architects, Photographers    5. Criticism    6. European    7. History - Renaissance    8. Leonardo,    9. Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc    10. da Vinci,    11. Art / History / Renaissance    12. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers    13. Individual artists    14. Renaissance art   

Reviews (1)

A Prolific, Impressive Figurative Painter Steps Back to Think
There are many books about the works of British artist Lucian Freud, one of the better of which is the one by William Feaver that accompanied an exhibition of his works, but this new release is important in more ways than one.Now in his 80s Freud has not changed his subject matter (face portraits, large scale nudes alone and with company, dogs, the occasional landscape) nor has he altered his technique which leans toward thick impasto and palette knife and scrubble manipulations.
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Subjects:  1. Art    2. Art & Art Instruction    3. Catalogs    4. Freud, Lucian    5. History - General    6. Human figure in art    7. Individual Artist    8. Individual Painters - Contemporary    9. Techniques - Painting    10. Art / Painting   

Subjects:  1. 20th Century Art    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Criticism and interpretation    5. Frankenthaler, Helen    6. Individual Artist    7. Women And Art    8. Art / Individual Artist    9. Individual artists    10. Painting & paintings    11. Prints & printmaking    12. Sculpture & other three-dimensional art forms   

Subjects:  1. 1932-    2. Architecture    3. Art    4. Criticism and interpretation    5. Estes, Richard,    6. General    7. History - General    8. Individual Painters - 20th Century    9. Painting, American    10. Photo-realism    11. United States    12. Estes, Richard    13. History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -    14. Individual artists    15. Painting & paintings   

Subjects:  1. American - General    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. History - Contemporary (1945- )    5. History - Realism    6. Individual Artist    7. Individual Painters - Contemporary    8. Art / Individual Artist    9. Art styles: c 1960 -    10. Individual artists    11. Painting & paintings   

Subjects:  1. Individual Photographer    2. Individual Photographers And Their Work    3. Photo Techniques    4. Photography    5. France    6. Individual photographers    7. Photographs: collections    8. Photography / Individual Photographer    9. Places & peoples: general interest   

Reviews (2)

And research turns to wonder...
I'm a rower in high school on the west coast, and you don't really hear much about rowing over here, since it's mostly an east coast sport. So when my history teacher started going over Thomas Eakins and showed a clip about him from a documentary with some examples of his rowing paintings, my attention was immediately captures. I decided to do my term paper on him, but I expected it to be a long and tedious process, judging from the book I got from the library (which looked plain, boring, and old), so I put it off 'till the last minute. I just picked up the book an hour ago for the first time and just got online to see if they had any copies of it ..., since it proved to be well-written and interesting (so you don't space out so much in the middle of paragraphs like I tend to), and because it led me to think about things that are important parts of learning and art and life, but nobody ever talks about. This book proved to be insightful and fascinating, and after only one chapter, I'm hooked on the subject! And to think I was dreading reading it!

A BEAUTIFUL TRIBUTE TO EAKINS THE ARTIST
Anecdotes abound in reference to Thomas Eakins American painter, watercolorist, draftsman, photographer, and sculptor.He is remembered for relaxing after painting by working calculus problems, and shocking friends with stories of his nude models.Read more

Subjects:  1. 1844-1916    2. Art & Art Instruction    3. Artists    4. Biography    5. Eakins, Thomas,    6. General    7. Individual Painters And Their Work    8. United States    9. Art / Commercial / General    10. Eakins, Thomas    11. Individual artists   

Reviews (4)

Freud the painter
Excellent book on Lucien Freud, with good illustrations & nicely presented. Freud is one of the leading painters of our times - his often harsh depictions of family & friends are not always easy to digest, but this book helps explain the artist & his times. Perhaps the element I missed was information on his teaching at the Slade (why do books on artists so seldom cover this aspect of their work, surely the influence & development of artists through teaching is an important part of their lives?).

Great pictures, confusing text
While I spent hours enjoying the color plates in this book, I spent an equal amount of time frustrated with the text.The author is clearly familiar with Freud, knows him, and understands his world and his sources.One problem is that he assumes the reader has a similar kind of knowledge.He refers, for example, to Freud's early fascination with certain comic strips (some apparently dating from the mid-19th century)and how they affected Freud's development.These are illustrated with a very few marginal reproductions that do nothing to enlighten the reader about the nature of these influences.At another point, the author refers to one of Freud's early paintings (not reproduced in the book that I could find) which he argues was based on color plate III from a book on Egyptian art (which Freud owns), but the color plate is not reproduced either... so the reader is left to consider the influence of an unillustrated source on an unillustrated painting.Some of the paintings referred to in the text are reproduced in thumbnails in the margins of the book, which is extremely helpful when one is trying to follow the flow of the argument, but others are not. Plate references are given;unfortunately, the plates are not in numerical order (for example, illustration 63 may or may not be before 64, which might in turn be followed by 69 and then 65) which leaves you hunting around trying to match image with text.The author refers to many of the people who knew and interacted with Freud.Some of them are well known in their own right and require no identification.Many, though, were people I, at least, had never heard of --- a female English aristocrat who was evidently peeved that her daugher had not been invited to a coronation or wedding or some other royal function, a bewildering variety of people who(in a sentence or two) are described as marrying and divorcing before Freud married and/ or divorced (or maybe just bedded, it's never really made clear) the women in turn. People are identified as the sister or the in-law of another person previously unmentioned in the text, and so on.If you've ever been to a party with a group of people who have all known each other for a long time, with you a newcomer, you'll have some idea of the effect of this ... they're all talking about things that happened and people they knew years ago, and you have absolutely no idea what's going on.And, when all is said and done, the author actually writes relatively little about the paintings as paintings.He does provide some fascinating quotes from Freud which give you some grist for your intellectaul mill, but that's about it. Frankly, I gave up on the text and simply enjoyed the pictures, a good number of which I had not seen reproduced before.

An In-Depth Survey of This Important Painter
LUCIEN FREUD is certainly one of the most talked about contemporary figurative artists around the world.Most people are familiar with his greater than life-sized portraits of corpulent male and female nudes and of his much talked about protraits of friends such as Francis Bacon and David Hockney. But few of us have been exposed to the gamut of this artist's output to the extent that this very fine book by William Feaver investigates the entire career of the grandson of Sigmund Freud.Read more

Subjects:  1. Art    2. Art & Art Instruction    3. Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions - Museum    4. History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)    5. Individual Artist    6. Art / Individual Artist   

Subjects:  1. 1935-    2. American - General    3. Art    4. Art & Art Instruction    5. Artists' illustrated books    6. Catalogs    7. Catalogues raisonnes    8. Catalogues raisonnâes    9. Dine, Jim,    10. Individual Artist    11. Techniques - Printmaking    12. Individual artists    13. Prints & printmaking   

Editorial Review

Gossipier than any tabloid, as scholarly as Vasari,luminously illustrated and illuminating as a lightning bolt, Stevens' and Swan's landmark biography is one of the most stunning art books I've seen in seven years of Amazon.com reviewing--a masterpiece that explains how the Dutchman de Kooning became the master painter of the American century. It's a page-turning tale: raised by a mom who beat him with wooden shoes, de Kooning escaped Rotterdam as a stowaway on a freighter and found a second family in New York's rampageous art bohemia. He subsisted on ketchup and booze, and broke through around 1950 with dazzling abstract expressionist canvases inspired by what was in the air: cubism, surrealism, jazz, and film noir. The careerist thing to do would've been to ride the Ab Ex tsunami, but de Kooning stubbornly defied purist abstraction with the startlingly quasi-figurative Woman paintings. Stevens and Swan artfully show how much went into these notorious works. De Kooning's Woman is "part vamp, part tramp," a Hollywood pinup girl with push-up bazooms, a dirty joke and a scary goddess based on a Mexican deity to whom hearts were sacrificed. She is also part Mom and part Elaine de Kooning, his artist/muse wife, and the numberless women he juggled. Read more

Reviews (1)

Excavating de Kooning
Writing the first customer book review on Amazon is a bit like confronting a `blank canvas'. - where to begin? The masterpiece `Excavation' (1950) was trumpeted as de Kooning's first major work to be recognized by a wide audience and win critical acceptance. The authors Stevens and Swan mine this metaphor effectively throughout the biography providing the foundation for understanding the artist. After all, aren't all biographies an excavation of a past life lived?
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Subjects:  1. Artists, Architects, Photographers    2. Biography & Autobiography    3. Biography / Autobiography    4. Biography/Autobiography    5. Individual Painters - 20th Century    6. Biography & Autobiography / Artists, Architects, Photographers   

Reviews (3)

BEAUTIFUL CALENDER
This is a calendar I will enjoy everyday, and I knew I would when I ordered it.Fra Angelio is a featured artist of The Met this year, but they were out of the calendars when I ordered, so I was very happy to find that Amazon had it.The pictures selected for this calendar are beautiful, and provide daily inspiration, though painted by this Italian artist about 800 years ago.

Fra Angelico: A Breathtaking Glimpse
This is much more than a coffee table book because of the extensive coverage of the artist: his life, his contemporaties, influences on his style and his influence on the styles of others.The lavish illustrations in glorious color emphasize the other-worldliness of the subject matter.

Fra Angelico: A Reevaluation and Appreciation
FRA ANGELICO may be a museum catalogue for the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but it is also one of the more impressive historical documents on this important painter and his influence on the world of art in the library today.The book is a masterwork of scholarship and visual examples of this 15th Century artist.
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Subjects:  1. Angelico,    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Exhibitions    5. General    6. History - General    7. Individual Artist    8. ca. 1400-1455    9. fra,    10. Art / General    11. Biography: general    12. Early Renaissance (c 1400-1500)    13. Individual artists   

Reviews (1)

Very Practical book. useful for school projects
excellent illustrations. this book is a must for anybody contemplating building any of Leonardo's machines. Particularly for school projects. Disappointed that the crossbow wasn't included. Otherwise probably one of the best books available on his machines. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Art    2. Art & Art Instruction    3. Early works to 1800    4. Individual Artist    5. Individual Painters - Renaissance    6. Inventions    7. Mechanical engineering    8. Inventions & inventors    9. Popular science   

Subjects:  1. Art    2. Art & Art Instruction    3. European    4. History - Renaissance    5. Individual Artist    6. Art / History / Renaissance    7. Art and Architecture    8. Early Renaissance (c 1400-1500)   

Features

• Box set

Subjects:  1. 20th Century Art    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Individual Artist    5. Sculpture    6. Art / Individual Artist    7. Individual artists   

Reviews (1)

de Kooning paintings 1960-1980
Book is in English and German.Good photographs with some works I had not seen before.Also a couple pictures of de Koonings studio inside and out.Includes an interview by Harold Rosenberg.Loved it, of course I am De Koonings biggest fan! ... Read more

Subjects:  1. American - General    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions - General    5. Exhibition Catalogs    6. History - Abstract    7. Individual Artist    8. Individual Painters - 20th Century    9. History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -    10. Individual artists    11. Painting & paintings   

Editorial Review

Just what kind of book is Read more

Reviews (21)

If nothing else, certainly brilliant and thought-provoking
Let us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its poetry and prose, reminds me of an epic, like the Hindu Mahabharata or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The lyrical narrative reveals just as much, if not more about Agee, than his subjects. His writing style excludes his subjects as readers.
Topic great, writers not so great.
The eloquence of composition surely necessitated infinite use of superlatives and verbs, resulting in a requisite painstaking remostrance to the reader, thus fettering the effusion and disembogulation of the document.In other words, wouldn't it have been better to just leave all of the fluff out of the book and just write as if the reader is someone other than the Queen of England?If you can weed through all of excessive use poems and verbs, it's a halfway decent book

I thought I hated it at points, but I've never been able to get it out of my head.
This book is an amazing work of art.At times it's baffling, and at times almost impertinent--like when the author decides to describe every object in an entire home, and yet in all these things and in all the conflicting emotions it evokes, it creates a mood and a feeling and a setting that will seep into your skin and fog your brain for months.
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Subjects:  1. 1909-1955    2. Agee, James,    3. Alabama    4. Description and travel    5. General    6. History    7. History - U.S.    8. History: American    9. Journeys    10. Poverty    11. Rural conditions    12. United States - 20th Century    13. United States - State & Local - General    14. 20th century    15. American history: from c 1900 -    16. History / United States / 20th Century    17. Social history    18. USA   

Reviews (11)

Volume 1 is ok.Volume is NO (if you are an artist)!
I was hoping that after getting these books, I would learn some secret in art making from the great one, but I found them book very disappointing. Tons of texts and very few explanation.
Not Great
Inexpensive, but the image quality is terrible, in some cases completely illegible and dark.

The Renaissance man of Renaissance men at work
Leonardo's curiosity and inventiveness are on display throughout this work. I cannot judge the quality of the translation , or how good the Richter edition of the Notebooks is. I can say that this is a tremendous amount of interesting observation and thought regarding the subjects from anatomy to perspective in painting, questions of architecture and aeronautics, that concern the Renaissance Man of Renaissance Men. All of this is in a way too much for another mind certainly one like my own who simply does not know anything about many of the areas Leonardo was interested in to real take in. But I think every person who takes an interest in the human mind and the way it works, in creativity and genius would do well to have and read these works. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. 1452-1519    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Fine Arts    5. General    6. History - General    7. Individual Artist    8. Leonardo,    9. Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc    10. da Vinci,    11. Individual artists    12. Leonardo    13. Renaissance art    14. Science / General   

Subjects:  1. 1386?-1466    2. Art    3. Art & Art Instruction    4. Criticism and interpretation    5. Donatello,    6. Individual Sculptors And Their Work    7. Italian sculpture    8. Italy    9. Sculpture    10. Sculpture, Italian    11. Sculpture, Renaissance    12. Donatello    13. Renaissance art    14. Sculpture & other three-dimensional art forms   

Subjects:  1. Art    2. Individual Photographer    3. Photoessays & Documentaries    4. Photography    5. Subjects & Themes - Portraits    6. Techniques - Painting    7. Art / Painting