Essays on Art and Literature

Essays on Art and Literature PDF Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691036571
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Part of an exhaustive series which provides English translations of a representative proportion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's vast body of work, this volume contains such essays as "On Gothic Architecture", "On the Laocoon" and "Shakespeare: a Tribute."

Always Looking

Always Looking PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961834
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A dazzling collection of “remarkably elegant essays” (Newsday) on art—and the companion volume to the celebrated Just Looking and Still Looking—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. In this book, readers are treated to a collection in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” (The New York Times Book Review). Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra. John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.

Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays

Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays PDF Author: D. H. Lawrence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521007016
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Seven essays D. H. Lawrence wrote after visiting Etruscan cities in central Italy.

The Complete Works of Artemus Ward; Essays, Sketches, and Letters

The Complete Works of Artemus Ward; Essays, Sketches, and Letters PDF Author: Artemus Ward
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3368324896
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Reproduction of the original.

Nothing If Not Critical

Nothing If Not Critical PDF Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307809595
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject. For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists. He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.” He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic). Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded. His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture. There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate. And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s. A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.

Sketches and Essays

Sketches and Essays PDF Author: William Hazlitt
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9781330310731
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Excerpt from Sketches and Essays I cannot understand the rage manifested by the greater part of the world for reading New Books. If the public had read all those that have gone before, I can conceive how they should not wish to read the same work twice over; but when I consider the countless volumes that lie unopened, unregarded, unread, and unthought-of, I cannot enter into the pathetic complaints that I hear made that Sir Walter writes no more - that the press is idle - that Lord Byron is dead. If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. If it be urged that it has no modern, passing incidents, and is out of date and old-fashioned, then it is so much the newer; it is farther removed from other works that I have lately read, from the familiar routine of ordinary life, and makes so much more addition to my knowledge. But many people would as soon think of putting on old armour as of taking up a book not published within the last month, or year at the utmost. There is a fashion in reading as well as in dress, which lasts only for the season. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Self-Taught and Outsider Art

Self-Taught and Outsider Art PDF Author: Anthony Petullo
Publisher:
ISBN: 0252072774
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A collection of self-taught and outsider art with a European representation of artists.

Forty-one False Starts

Forty-one False Starts PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374709726
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

A Story Teller's World

A Story Teller's World PDF Author: R K Narayan
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 8184750757
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
REQUIRED, THE STORY-TELLER COULD HAVE AN AUDIENCE BUT IN THIS CASE HE WOULDN'T BE READING FROM HIS MS, BUT WOULD BE LOOKING AT THE VILLAGERS. I MUCH PREFER THE STORY-TELLER ALONE.

The Lure and the Truth of Painting

The Lure and the Truth of Painting PDF Author: Yves Bonnefoy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226064444
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Always fascinated in his poetry by the nature of color and light and the power of the image, Bonnefoy continues to pursue these themes in his discussion of the lure and truth of representation. He sees the painter as a poet whose language is visual, and he seeks to find out what visual artists can teach those who work with words.