Теги книги: история живописи

From the 18th century to the 20th, this book gives a panorama of Russian painting not equalled anywhere else. Russian culture developed in contact with the wider European influence, but retained strong native intonations. It is a culture between East and West, and both influences in together. The book begins with Icons, and it is precisely Icon-painting which gave Russian artist their peculiar preoccupation with ethical questions and a certain kind of palette. It goes on the expound the duality of their art, and point out the originality of their contribution to world art. The illustrations…

After staying in Milan for his apprenticeship, Michelangelo da Caravaggio arrived in Rome in 1592. There he started to paint with both realism and psychological analysis of the sitters. Caravaggio was as temperamental in his painting as in his wild life. As he also responded to prestigious Church commissions, his dramatic style and his realism were seen as unacceptable. Chiaroscuro had existed well before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique definitive, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light. His influence was immense,…

Painter, designer, creator of bizarre objects, author and film maker, Dalí became the most famous of the Surrealists. Buñuel, Lorca, Picasso and Breton all had a great influence on his career. Dalí’s film, An Andalusian Dog, produced with Buñuel, marked his official entry into the tightly-knit group of Parisian Surrealists, where he met Gala, the woman who became his lifelong companion and his source of inspiration. But his relationship soon deteriorated until his final rift with André Breton in 1939. Nevertheless Dalí’s art remained surrealist in its philosophy and…

Pieter Brueghel was the first important member of a family of artists who were active for four generations. Firstly a drawer before becoming a painter later, he painted religious themes, such as Babel Tower, with very bright colours. Influenced by Hieronymus Bosch, he painted large, complex scenes of peasant life and scripture or spiritual allegories, often with crowds of subjects performing a variety of acts, yet his scenes are unified with an informal integrity and often with wit. In his work, he brought a new humanising spirit. Befriending the Humanists, Brueghel composed true…

He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari’s words, “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair – he has left a portrait of himself on the…

Ornans, Courbet’s birthplace, is near the beautiful valley of the Doubs River, and it was here as a boy, and later as a man, that he absorbed the love of landscape. He was by nature a revolutionary, a man born to oppose existing order and to assert his independence; he had that quality of bluster and brutality which makes the revolutionary count in art as well as in politics. In both directions his spirit of revolt manifested itself. He went to Paris to study art, yet he did not attach himself to the studio of any of the prominent masters. Already in his country home he had had a little…

“The Devil holds the strings which move us!” (Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 1857.) Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer… the Devil has many names and faces, all of which have always served artists as a source of inspiration. Often commissioned by religious leaders as images of fear or veneration, depending on the society, representations of the underworld served to instruct believers and lead them along the path of righteousness. For other artists, such as Hieronymus Bosch, they provided a means of denouncing the moral decrepitude of one’s contemporaries. In the same way, literature…

Surrealists appeared in the aftermath of World War I with a bang: revolution of thought, creativity, and the wish to break away from the past and all that was left in ruins.This refusal to integrate into the bourgeois society was also a leitmotiv of Dada artists, and André Breton asserted that Dada does not produce perspective. Surrealism emerged amidst such feeling. Surrealists and Dada artists often changed from one movement to another.They were united by their superior intellectualism and the common goal to break free from the norm. Describing the Surrealists with their aversive…

Since the dawn of Christianity, artists have been fascinated and stirred by the figure of Christ. His likeness appears in frescoes on the walls of catacombs that date from Roman times; he is featured in the stained glass windows of Gothic churches; and he can be found in various forms in today’s pop culture. The Biblical Saviour is not a static, immaterial deity: Christ’s mortal birth, unusual life and dramatic death make him an accessible subject for religious and secular artists alike.Whether they show the spirituality of God Incarnate or the earthly characteristics of a flesh-and-blood…

Although considered a minor genre for a long time, the art of landscape has risen above its forebears – religious and historic painting – to become a genre of its own. Giorgione in Italy, the Brueghels of the Flemish School, Claude Lorrain and Poussain of the French School, the Dutch landscape painters and Turner and Constable of England are just a few of the great landscapists who have left their indelible mark on the history of landscape and the art of painting as a whole. After serving for a long time as a backdrop for paintings and as a skill-practising exercise for artists, nature…

From the thousand-year-old statues celebrating fertility, to the odalisques of the modern painters, erotic art has always held a prominent place in societies, whatever their morals or cultural references. This work assembles one thousand images of erotic art, from all times and all continents, to illustrate how the representation of these pleasures of the flesh testifies to the evolution of different civilisations and their histories. While eroticism abounds today in advertising and in the media, this book offers an exceptional view into the archives of erotic imagery and emphasises the…

Poet, draughtsman, engraver and painter, William Blake’s work is made up of several elements – Gothic art, Germanic reverie, the Bible, Milton and Shakespeare – to which were added Dante and a certain taste for linear designs, resembling geometric diagrams, and relates him to the great classical movement inspired by Winckelmann and propagated by David. This is the sole point of contact discernible between the classicism of David and English art, though furtive and indirect. Blake is the most mystic of the English painters, perhaps the only true mystic. He was ingenious in his inner…

Писатель Анри Перрюшо, известный своими монографиями о жизни и творчестве французских художников-импрессионистов удачно сочетает в своих романах беллетристическую живость повествования с достоверностью фактов, пытаясь понять особенности творчества живописцев и эпохи. В своей монографии о знаменитом художнике Винсенте…

Писатель Анри Перрюшо, известный своими монографиями о жизни и творчестве французских художников-импрессионистов удачно сочетает в своих романах беллетристическую живость повествования с достоверностью фактов, пытаясь понять особенности творчества живописцев и эпохи. В своей монграфии о знаменитом художнике Огюсте…

Карл Павлович Брюллов (1799–1852) родился 12 декабря по старому стилю в Санкт-Петербурге, в семье академика, резчика по дереву и гравёра французского происхождения Павла Ивановича Брюлло. С десяти лет Карл занимался живописью в Академии художеств в Петербурге, был учеником известного мастера исторического полотна Андрея…

Марсель Дюшан (1887–1968) – одна из ключевых фигур в искусстве XX века. Но до сих пор актуален вопрос, кто же он – гениальный художник или ловкий провокатор? Широкой публике Дюшан известен прежде всего как создатель реди-мейдов, буквально взорвавших традиционные представления о природе и ценности произведений искусства.…

Эта книга известного английского историка искусства посвящена искусству итальянского Возрождения. В не рассматриваются особенности творчества выдающихся художников этой эпохи: Боттичелли, Рафаэля, Мантенья, Джулио Романо, Пьомбо и др. Автор показывает тесную связь художников Ренессанса и неоплатонической философии,…

В книге собраны статьи Бориса Гройса о творчестве Ильи Кабакова, написанные в период с 1980 по 2008 год. За это время Кабаков перешел от альбомов и других ранних концептуалистских работ к созданию тотальных инсталляций и далее – к новой интерпретации мировой истории живописи. В своих статьях Гройс описывает и анализирует…

Книга «Генеалогия эксцентриков: от Матабэя до Куниёси», впервые опубликованная в 1970 году, открыла японским читателям ранее неизвестных японских живописцев эпохи Эдо. В центре повествования шесть имен: Иваса Матабэй, Кано Сансэцу, Ито Дзякутю, Сога Сёхаку, Нагасава Росэцу и Утагава Куниёси. Эти художники, ведущие…

Знаменитый художник и архитектор Джорджо Вазари (1511–1574) прославился не только своими картинами и постройками, но и как писатель, автор легендарных «Жизнеописаний». В эту книгу вошли шесть жизнеописаний великих мастерах эпохи Возрождения: Джотто, Боттичелли, да Винчи, Микеланджело, Рафаэля и…