Confidential Concepts, Inc.
Все книги издательства Confidential Concepts, Inc.Diego Rivera
They met in 1928, Frida Kahlo was then 21 years old and Diego Rivera was twice her age. He was already an international reference, she only aspired to become one. An intense artistic creation, along with pain and suffering, was generated by this tormented union, in particular for Frida. Constantly in the shadow of her husband, bearing his unfaithfulness and her jealousy, Frida exorcised the pain on canvas, and won progressively the public’s interest. On both continents, America and Europe, these commited artists proclaimed their freedom and left behind them the traces of their exceptional talent. In this book, Gerry Souter brings together both biographies and underlines with passion the link which existed between the two greatest Mexican artists of the twentieth century.
Remington
It is impossible to reflect upon Frederic Remington’s art without thinking of the merely human elements. Remington became interested in the American Indian, probably because he became interested in the active, exciting life of the American Great Plains. The Indian appealed to him not in any histrionic way, not as a figure stepped out from the pages of Hiawatha, but just as a human subject. Remington hit upon this truth when he travelled west. What he found there was majesty that he did not make, solely, an affair of Indians in war paint and feathers. Remington knew how the light of the moon or of the stars is diffused, how softly and magically it envelops the landscape. There is a sort of artistic honesty in his nocturnal studies. He never set out to be romantic or melodramatic, just to develop his affinity and closeness to nature. The beauty of the painter’s motive, too, has communicated itself in his technique. His grey-green tones fading into velvety depths take on transparency, and in his handling of form he uses a touch as firm as need be. The determining influence in his career was that of the creative impulse, urging him to deal in the translation of visible things into pictorial terms.
American Realism
Urban realism, snow-covered streets of New York, boxing matches, children on the banks of a river, the painters of the Ash Can School preferred realistic images. Their paintings are a true hymn to noise and sensations. This unconventional movement enabled the birth of a true national artistic identity which broke free from the establishment. The Ash Can School resolutely promoted the affirmation of the modernist current of American art. Edward Hopper, who was a student of Robert Henri, embraced the principles of this movement and brought them to another level.
Pollock
Born in 1912, in a small town in Wyoming, Jackson Pollock embodied the American dream as the country found itself confronted with the realities of a modern era replacing the fading nineteenth century. Pollock left home in search of fame and fortune in New York City. Thanks to the Federal Art Project he quickly won acclaim, and after the Second World War became the biggest art celebrity in America. For De Kooning, Pollock was the “icebreaker”. For Max Ernst and Masson, Pollock was a fellow member of the European Surrealist movement. And for Motherwell, Pollock was a legitimate candidate for the status of the Master of the American School. During the many upheavals in his life in Nez York in the 1950s and 60s, Pollock lost his bearings – success had simply come too fast and too easily. It was during this period that he turned to alcohol and disintegrated his marriage to Lee Krasner. His life ended like that of 50s film icon James Dean behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile, after a night of drinking.
Music & Eros
Music is not only a pleasure for the ear, it is the echo of the heartbeat, breath and desire. Professor Döpp revisits music as the catalyst for dance, love and sex. From the music sheet to dance and through instruments, music is the expression of our profound desires and most violent passions. The text revisits the history of music and art from the dances of the first men to pop and electronic music and through belly dance. Music and Eros take us on a time-travelling journey to discover the interaction of music and sex.
William Morris
Through his eclecticism, William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the most emblematic personalities of the nineteenth century. Painter, architect, poet and engineer, wielding the quill as well as the brush, he jolted Victorian society by discarding standards established by triumphant industry. His commitment to the writing of the Socialist Manifesto was the logical result of the revolution he personified in his habitat, the form of his design and the colours he used. Forerunner of twentieth-century designers, he co-founded with John Ruskin the Arts and Crafts movement. As an independent man, William Morris led the way to Art Nouveau and later Bauhaus. Through the essential body of his written and visual work, Arthur Clutton-Brock’s masterwork deciphers the narrow relationship between ideals and creation, as well as between evolution and revolution.
Michelangelo
Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He moulded his draughtsmanship, bent it, twisted it, and stretched it to the extreme limits of possibility. There are not any landscapes in Michelangelo's painting. All the emotions, all the passions, all the thoughts of humanity were personified in his eyes in the naked bodies of men and women. He rarely conceived his human forms in attitudes of immobility or repose. Michelangelo became a painter so that he could express in a more malleable material what his titanesque soul felt, what his sculptor's imagination saw, but what sculpture refused him. Thus this admirable sculptor became the creator, at the Vatican, of the most lyrical and epic decoration ever seen: the Sistine Chapel. The profusion of his invention is spread over this vast area of over 900 square metres. There are 343 principal figures of prodigious variety of expression, many of colossal size, and in addition a great number of subsidiary ones introduced for decorative effect. The creator of this vast scheme was only thirty-four when he began his work. Michelangelo compels us to enlarge our conception of what is beautiful. To the Greeks it was physical perfection; but Michelangelo cared little for physical beauty, except in a few instances, such as his painting of Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and his sculptures of the Pietà. Though a master of anatomy and of the laws of composition, he dared to disregard both if it were necessary to express his concept: to exaggerate the muscles of his figures, and even put them in positions the human body could not naturally assume. In his later painting, The Last Judgment on the end wall of the Sistine, he poured out his soul like a torrent. Michelangelo was the first to make the human form express a variety of emotions. In his hands emotion became an instrument upon which he played, extracting themes and harmonies of infinite variety. His figures carry our imagination far beyond the personal meaning of the names attached to them.
Hans Memling
Little is known of Memling’s life. It is surmised that he was a German by descent but the definite fact of his life is that he painted at Bruges, sharing with the van Eycks, who had also worked in that city, the honour of being the leading artists of the so-called ‘School of Bruges’. He carried on their method of painting, and added to it a quality of gentle sentiment. In his case, as in theirs, Flemish art, founded upon local conditions and embodying purely local ideals, reached its fullest expression.
Andrea Mantegna and the Italian Renaissance
Mantegna; humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great scholastic and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. Aiming at optical illusion, he mastered perspective. He trained in painting at the Padua School where Donatello and Paolo Uccello had previously attended. Even at a young age commissions for Andrea’s work flooded in, for example the frescos of the Ovetari Chapel of Padua. In a short space of time Mantegna found his niche as a modernist due to his highly original ideas and the use of perspective in his works. His marriage with Nicolosia Bellini, the sister of Giovanni, paved the way for his entree into Venice. Mantegna reached an artistic maturity with his Pala San Zeno. He remained in Mantova and became the artist for one of the most prestigious courts in Italy – the Court of Gonzaga. Classical art was born. Despite his links with Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna refused to adopt their innovative use of colour or leave behind his own technique of engraving.
Malevich
Pioneer of geometric abstract art and one of the most important members of the Russian Avant-garde, Malevitch experimented with various modernist styles. In reaction to the influence of Cubism and Futurism on artists in Russia, Malevitch in his art reduced the world of nature to basic elements and colours, such as in his Red Square (1915). He introduced his abstract, non-objective geometric patterns in a style and artistic movement he called Suprematism. One of the important names of the twentieth century, he however turned back to Primitivism once Russia’s communist leaders forced him to do so.