Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dal (1904-1989) was one of the most colorful and controversial figures in 20th-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
This early autobiography, which takes him through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. It is superbly illustrated with over 80 photographs of Dal and his works, and scores of Dal drawings and sketches. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer. As a whole, he . . . communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray.
Dal 's flamboyant self-portrait begins with his earliest recollections and ends at the pinnacle of his earliest successes. His tantalizing chapter titles and headnotes -- among them Intra-Uterine Memories, Apprenticeship to Glory, Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts, Dandyism and Prison, I am Disowned by my Family, My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution, and Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought -- only hint at the compelling revelations to come.
Here are fascinating glimpses of the brilliant, ambitious, and relentlessly self-promoting artist who designed theater sets, shop interiors, and jewelry as readily as he made surrealistic paintings and films. Here is the mind that could envision and create with great technical virtuosity images of serene Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmarish landscapes of soft watches, burning giraffes, and fly-covered carcasses the next. For anyone interested in 20th-century art and one of its most gifted and charismatic figures, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal is must reading.
Don't miss The Pharos Gate, the final volume in the Griffin & Sabine story. Published simultaneously with the 25th-anniversary edition of Griffin & Sabine, the book finally shares what happened to the lovers.
Griffin--Foolish man. You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened. You do not dismiss a muse at a whim. If you will not join me, then I will come to you. --Sabine Sabine was supposed to be imaginary, a friend and lover that Griffin had created to soothe his loneliness. But she threatens to become embodied, to appear on his doorstep, in fact. So he runs. Griffin & Sabine, the most creative and talked-about bestseller of 1991, left readers on the edge of a precipice. With Sabine's Notebook, they begin--along with Griffin--the fall. Once again, the story is told through strangely beautiful postcards and richly decorated letters that must actually be pulled from their envelopes to be read. But this volume is also a sketchbook and diary kept by the possibly unreal Sabine, who is living in Griffin's house in London while he wanders through Europe, North Africa, and Asia, backwards through layers of ancient civilizations--and of himself. Filled with her delicately macabre drawings and notations, the notebook adds a darker element of visual intrigue to their complex and mysterious world. For the thousands who finished Griffin & Sabine and asked, "What happened next?," this second volume in the quartet provides the answers--but raises new and even more haunting questions of its own.
In his 1956-57 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, the Russian-born American painter Ben Shahn sets down his personal views of the relationship of the artist--painter, writer, composer--to his material, his craft, and his society. He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.
A loosely formed autobiography by Andy Warhol, told with his trademark blend of irony and detachment
In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol--which, with the subtitle (From A to B and Back Again), is less a memoir than a collection of riffs and reflections--he talks about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, and success; about New York, America, and his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania; about his good times and bad in New York, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and his life among celebrities.
Presenting the first in-depth study of Thomas Moran's early western landscapes, Joni Louise Kinsey describes how the artist created three monumental paintings--The Grand Ca on of the Yellowstone (1872), The Chasm of the Colorado (1873-74), and The Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875)--that, in the aftermath of the Civil War, evoked the nation's spiritual journey and suggestsed its cultural upheaval. The author describes how the paintings reflected a new national identity of both failure and promise, and helped open the West for tourism and travel.
The definitive chronicle of the origins of French avant-garde literature and art, Roger Shattuck's classic portrays the cultural bohemia of turn-of-the-century Paris who carried the arts into a period of renewal and accomplishment and laid the groundwork for Dadaism and Surrealism. Shattuck focuses on the careers of Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire, using the quartet as window into the era as he exploring a culture whose influence is at the very foundation of modern art.
0-8133-1027-X the Soviet Nationality Reader: the Disintegration in Context
The lecturer traces the historical development of attitudes toward the arts over the past 150 years, suggesting that the present is a period of cultural liquidation, nothing less than the ending of the modern age that began with the Renaissance.
