ENH245 - J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Battling Modernism: Visual Artists

This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.

This program provides an historical overview of Bauhaus, the most controversial and forward-looking school of art and design of its time. The conflicting artistic philosophies of the school's key figures are considered, from Walter Gropius' espousal of expressionism to László Moholy-Nagy's overriding belief that fewer aesthetic ambitions would yield more functional products--that less is more. With a stellar faculty that also included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, and Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus inspired the artistic and constructivist principles that gave rise to many icons of 20th-century design and architecture.

Briefly discusses the life and art of the French painter and provides commentary on his major works.

Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the paper cut-outs Henri Matisse made from the early 1940s until his death in 1954, this paperback edition presents approximately 150 works in a groundbreaking reassessment of the artist's colorful and innovative final chapter. The result of new research by conservators and curators, the catalogue explores a host of technical and conceptual issues: the artist's methods and materials and the role and function of the works in his practice; their economy of means and exploitation of decorative strategies; their environmental aspects; and their double lives, first as contingent and mutable in the studio and ultimately made permanent, a transformation accomplished by mounting and framing. Richly illustrated to present the cut-outs in all of their vibrancy and luminosity, the book includes an introduction and a conservation essay that consider the cut-outs from new theoretical and technical perspectives, and five thematic essays, each focusing on a different moment in the development of the cut-out practice, that provide a chronicle of this radical medium's unfolding. Period photographs show the works in progress in Matisse's studio. One of modern art's towering figures, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker before turning to paper cut-outs in the 1940s. From the clashing hues of his Fauvist works, made in the South of France in 1904-5, to the harmonies of his Nice interiors from the 1920s to this brilliant final chapter, Matisse's career followed a path that he described as "construction by means of color."

De Stijl (Art movement) -- Netherlands.
Mondrian, Piet, 1872-1944 -- Criticism and interpretation.

In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists--Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia and Robert Delaunay--presented the first abstract pictures to the public. Inventing Abstraction, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork. It traces the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. This richly illustrated publication covers a wide range of artistic production--including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, film, photography, sound poetry, atonal music and non-narrative dance--to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years. An introductory essay by Leah Dickerman, Curator in the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture, is followed by focused studies of key groups of works, events and critical issues in abstraction's early history by renowned scholars from a variety of fields.

Pablo Picasso changed the face of art forever. Follow Picasso as he started the famous "cubist" movement, how he experimented with a variety of materials, including collage, ceramics, printing, sculpture, and linocuts.

Picasso, Pablo, 1881-1973.

Explores the mind and motivations of Pablo Picasso as he creates over fifteen works before the camera. Using a specially designed transparent 'canvas' to provide an unobstructed view, Picasso creates as the camera records. He begins with simple works that take shape after only a single brush stroke. He then progresses to more complex paintings, in which he repeatedly adds and removes elements, transforming the entire scene, until at last the work is complete.

How did Jackson Pollock become a cult figure for the Beat Generation? And what caused his reputation to continue to soar? This compelling and original Abrams classic, now back in print, locates the artist in the continuum of his times, recreating the social and cultural milieu of New York in the 1940s and 1950s. With extensive knowledge of Pollock's habits (much of it gained through interviews), his reading, his conversation, and the exhibitions he visited, the author retraces many of the far-flung sources of Pollock's work. A wealth of comparative photographs that illustrate paintings by artists Pollock admired further explains the work of this complex, tragic, and immeasurably influential figure. Pollock's big, bold canvases are reproduced in five colors to convey the brilliance of his network of tones, his aluminum paint, and his sparkling collage materials. Six gatefolds show his vast horizontal works without distortion and a chronology provides a summary of the major events of Pollock's life.

Originally released as a motion picture in 2000.
Based on Jackson Pollock : an American saga / by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.

Combines archival footage of Jackson Pollock's life and work with reminiscences from his contemporaries, and explores the truth and legends surrounding this controversial painter.

Pollock, Jackson, 1912-1956 -- Criticism and interpretation.