The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World 1880-1920
by Wendy Kaplan
from Thames & Hudson
The first assessment of the truly international influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, published to accompany a groundbreaking exhibition.
At the turn of the last century, the Arts and Crafts movement transformed not only how objects looked but also how people looked at objects. It provided a framework for essential issues that are still debated today: the conflict between standardization and individuality, the question of whether a one-of-a-kind handcrafted object is superior to a mass-produced one, and the problem of defining what kind of design most benefits society.
As the most industrialized country, Britain was also the first to generate a movement to counter what was seen as the malevolent effects of mass production. Protagonists such as John Ruskin and William Morris championed "joy in labor"—the moral and spiritual uplift that would come with the revival of making objects by hand. The improvement of working conditions, integration of art into everyday life, and an "honest" aesthetic resulting from the use of indigenous materials and native traditions were also central to the movement's philosophy. At the end of the nineteenth century, these Arts and Crafts ideals were appropriated and adapted by the young avant-garde throughout Europe and the United States.
With 260 objects—furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, and works on paper—from Britain, Ireland, the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Scandinavia, and Finland, this is a visually stunning, definitive survey. The book features masterworks by the best-known designers of the period, such as William Morris, M. H. Baillie Scott, Henry Van de Velde, Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, Eliel Saarinen, Gustav Stickley, Greene and Greene, and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as lesser-known examples that have never been displayed together. 360 illustrations, 300 in color.
With contributions by: Alan Crawford, Rüdiger Joppien, Juliet Kinchin Amy F. Ogata. Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark, Christian Witt-Dörring.
Exiles and Emigres
by Stephanie Barron
from Harry N. Abrams
Fabric of Enchantment: Batik from the North Coast of Java
by Rens Heringa
from Weatherhill
The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt: Essays (American Discovery of Ancient Egypt)
Mark Tansey
The monumental monochrome paintings of Mark Tansey seem at first to celebrate a landscape's elemental grandeur with photographic accuracy. Icy blues of snow- and oceanscapes show a frozen moment of nature's ungraspability. Then, out of the blue, literally, you make out a face in a large snowball--and not just any face, but Karl Marx's. A vague surfer rides roiling swells around the Statue of Liberty, and the cliff face that climbers are scaling is as impossibly angled as an Escher staircase. Now we realize we're in the same intellectual and often very funny terra infirma of Tansey's earlier quasi-conceptual works, as when he reimagined Picasso and Braque as the Wright brothers trying to get their Cubist plane off the ground. That old and new Tansey territory, a land of slippery perceptions, makes up this survey of an important contemporary American painter.
Rodin in His Time: The Cantor Gifts to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
by Mary L. Levkoff
from Rizzoli International Publications
With his impressionistic technique, supported by a complete mastery of anatomical structure, Rodin overthrew the reigning academic precepts of finish and symmetry. By developing subjects beyond traditional allegories, he pointed the way to sheer abstraction in the twentieth century.
This handsomely illustrated catalogue publishes for the first time in its entirety a major American collection of sculpture, the Cantor gifts to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and provides a rich context for Rodin's own work. It presents sculpture by Rodin's most important nineteenth-century forerunners--Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, François Rude, and others--as well as work by the contemporaries he admired, those with whom he competed, those he influenced, and those who moved from his orbit to develop their own styles at the dawn of the twentieth century.
But the centerpiece of the book remains Rodin: forty-two works by the most influential sculptor of the modern period, all specially photographed and many shown in multiple views.
Picasso & The Weeping Women
Scythian Gold
by Ellen Reeder
from Harry N. Abrams
The Painted Enamels of Limoges: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity
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