Reality Through the Arts (6th Edition)
by Dennis J. Sporre
from Prentice Hall
This introductory exploration of basic artistic concepts and terms applies them to a skeletal multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural history of artistic styles. It treats all the arts–painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, music, theatre, dance, film, architecture, literature–uniformly, and uses a common outline to reinforce the relationship of terms and concepts to the perceptual process. The book also ties both artistic media and history to the theme of art as a reflection of human reality This examination focuses on the media of the arts, pictures, sculpture, music, theatre, cinema, dance, architecture, literature, the styles of the arts, ancient approaches, artistic reflections in the pre-modern world, as well as artistic styles in the emerging modern world and, the beginnings of modernism, pluralism in a post-modern age. For art enthusiasts and others interested exploring how artists express themselves.
Drawing from Observation
by Brian Curtis
from McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
Perceptual drawing, in which one renders the physical world as it appears to an observer, is the focus of this new text for the introductory drawing course. Drawing from Observation offers a balanced mix of hands-on technique and perceptual theory while making a compelling argument for the long-term value of studying perception-based drawing.
Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (Modern Art Practices and Debates)
by David Batchelor
from Yale University Press
Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
by Ulrich W. Hiesinger
from Yale University Press
One of Italy’s greatest modern painters, Antonio Mancini (1852–1930) is best known for his daring and innovative painting methods. This overview of his career—the first comprehensive study in English—follows upon the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of fifteen major oil paintings and pastels by Mancini, including the famous Il Saltimbanco (1877–78), all of which are included in this beautiful volume.
Mancini’s paintings are at once realistic and visionary, and they span a career that brought him from the legendary slums of Naples to Paris, Rome, and English country houses. Of particular interest is Mancini’s relevance to the American art world, where he was once a much-discussed controversial figure, supported by a small group of American patrons and artists before becoming famous in Italy. John Singer Sargent is said to have called Mancini the greatest living painter.
Realism (Style and Civilization)
by Linda Nochlin
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Realism in 20th Century Painting (World of Art)
by Brendan Prendeville
from Thames & Hudson
This first ever survey of the subject demonstrates that realism has had a continuous yet restlessly changing place in American and European painting throughout the twentieth century--from Eakins, Bellows, and Homer, through Vuillard, Bonnard, Schiele, Morandi, Hopper, and Giacometti, to Balthus, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney. Most accounts of twentieth-century art have tended to overlook the persistent, diverse, vibrant, and powerful presence of realist painting. Brendan Prendeville discusses the historical, artistic, and critical contexts in which painting has taken a realist turn, from the Ashcan School to Soviet Socialist Realism, from painting of the Existentialist era to the time of Photorealism. In this period, he argues, the western tradition of pictorial realism has in fact been renewed and modified through the diverse influences of modernism, political conflict, and new visual technologies. 180 illustrations, 80 in color.
American Realism
by Edward Lucie-Smith
from Thames & Hudson
American Realism is Edward Lucie-Smith's eloquent and interesting discourse tracing the progress of American realist art from the colonial period through postmodernism. It features a generous 250 illustrations and 115 gorgeous, full-color plates. Lucie-Smith's underlying argument seems to be that realism more accurately reveals the American character than does abstract expressionism or minimalism. This premise is developed by examining specific paintings and placing them in a cultural and historical context. Of particular interest are the sections on Thomas Eakins, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Philip Pearlstein, Andy Warhol, and Eric Fischl. --Madeline Crowley
Despite the acclaim given since 1945 to American abstract painting and sculpture, realism has continued to play a uniquely important role in American art. This lavishly illustrated book explores the tremendous scope, richness, toughness, sensibility, and liveliness of the American realist tradition. Sixteen sections discuss and display the finest and most important work of different artists, groups, schools, and periods—including American Impressionism, the Ashcan School, Precisionism, American Scene Painting, Edward Hopper, Urban realism, Photorealism, and Postmodern realism today—and provide convincing proof that the American realist legacy occupies an unparalleled position in the world art of the past one hundred years. Edward Lucie-Smith discusses the work of pioneering masters of American realism such as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Charles Sheeler, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Andrew Wyeth. He then examines the work of contemporary realist painters, from Wayne Thiebaud, Leon Golub, Isabel Bishop, Alice Neel, and Fairfield Porter to younger artists, such as Eric Fischl and Jeff Koons, who have achieved star status as practitioners of this innovative tradition. The book thus carries the story of American realism up to the present, showing how it continues to flourish in the United States today as strongly as it has in the past. A magnificent volume, with over one hundred color plates, American Realism both celebrates and reveals the strengths of a great American legacy. 250 illustrations, 115 in color.
Courbet A&I (Art and Ideas)
by James Henry Rubin
from Phaidon Press
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art: N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth
by et al., James H. Duff
from Bulfinch
Rackstraw Downes
by Sanford Schwartz
from Princeton University Press
It might seem odd that a brilliant realist painter would choose to spend months working on a seven-foot-long canvas of a boring stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. But in Rackstraw Downes' hands, ordinary or unappealing elements of the American landscape suddenly seem worthy of close attention. Rackstraw Downes, an overdue tribute to the English-born artist, combines 100 striking color reproductions of the artist's panoramic paintings (including vivid details) with illuminating commentary. After studying at Yale University in the early 1960s, when abstraction was beginning to yield to Pop and Minimalism, Downes found his footing by taking a long, careful look at landscape. In recent years, he has painted sites in Manhattan, including luminous city views and an eerie 1998 portrait of untenanted office space in the World Trade Center. But his major subjects have always been marginal spaces in nature—landfills and scrubland, culverts and dumps. Putting up with the vagaries of weather and interruptions by suspicious officials, he paints these scenes onsite. Lively details picked out in jewel-like colors are united by the precise evocation of light and atmosphere, the geometry of lines and curves, and Downes' complex system of perspective. (He writes about recreating the experience of turning your head to take in an entire panorama.) Seeking neither to romanticize these scenes nor to critique them—although he is an environmentalist at heart—Downs prefers the naturalist's dispassionate approach. An essay by Sanford Schwartz engagingly discusses the artist's background and interests. Robert Storr, the former Museum of Modern Art curator, analyzes Downes' relationship to key issues of realist painting in the twentieth century. Downes, a longtime essayist, contributes detailed observations about his use of perspective, which lead him on conversational excursions into the history of art. A detailed chronology and bibliography round out this superb study of an "artist's artist" who deserves a much wider audience. --Cathy Curtis
Rackstraw Downes paints down-to-earth, often gritty features of today's American environment in an unflinching and highly realistic style. This book is the first to provide a multifaceted picture of his work, its intellectual foundations, and its place in the history of art--from both outside commentators and Downes himself.
Beautifully illustrated, with copious examples from thirty years of the artist's work, the book makes eminently clear why Downes is widely regarded as a "painter's painter." It showcases many of the artist's panoramic pictures--painted with a strong sense of place and a miniaturist's sense of scale. The images, which depict industrial parks, construction sites, housing projects, refineries, razor wire, and landfills, stimulate fresh thoughts about these supposedly unattractive sights. Bathed in the light of a precise time, the paintings resonate with a strikingly evocative quality.
The three essays that accompany Downes's art provide rare insights into the way a painter thinks and works. Sanford Schwartz explores the relationships between the artist's personal and intellectual background and his oeuvre. Robert Storr situates Downes in the context of a number of highly prominent contemporary artists such as Chuck Close, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Smithson in a way that offers a new interpretation of Downes's work, while making clear its importance within twentieth-century art. Downes's own essay, "Turning the Head in Empirical Space," presents a direct, firsthand account of his working methods within a larger discussion on spatial paradigms of Renaissance and post-Renaissance modes of painting.
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