Customer Reviews (1)

review of Cubism and Abstract Art
A landmark publication in the history of modern art surveys, this book was written by Alfred Barr, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1936. (A paperback re-issue appeared in 1974.)Intended as a primer for the lay reader, the book is nevertheless an insightful survey of virtually all the important modern artists and movements to have appeared on the world stage up until that time, and Barr speaks from the vantage point of someone who personally knew and had exhibited many of the artists discussed.Barr covers, however succintly, a broad terrain with the inclusion of architecture, film, and photography, in addition to painting and sculpture, and traces the development of modern art from its roots in Impressionism to the then-current Surrealism.The book is noteworthy for its inclusion of the famous chart detailing the influences and divergences of the various styles, much like a rendition of one's ancestors on a family tree, and for the categorization of artists and styles into two broadly opposing groups:the expressionist vein, begun by Gauguin and continued by the Fauves, German Expressionists, Dadaists and Surrealists; and the conceptual vein, initiated by Cezanne and continued by Cubism, Constructivism, and De Stijl. The chosen artists, names of styles or movements in which they participated, and the canonical works they produced have remained remarkably stable, despite the ever-shifting, multi-faceted defintions of modern art, as important examples of modern works across the distance of nearly seventy years after the book's first release.Additionally, Barr offers definitions of terms such as "abstract," as well as discussions of techniques like collage.

A multitude of reproductions completes this highly readable and comprehensive account of the often bewildering and competing strands of modern art. ... Read more

Product Description
Containing illustrations of paintings by Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Leger, and designs by Chanel, Vionnet and Callot Soeurs, this is a study of the interrelationship between fashion and Cubism in the early-20th century. Published to accompany a 1998/9 exhibition at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, it sets out to demonstrate how fashion's newly planar forms and cylindrical, waistless silhouette exemplified Cubism's interpretation of the body. Fashion illustration and photography of the period also followed the precepts of Cubist imagery, with its indeterminate space, cylinders, cones and rotation. The author, a fashion historian, traces Cubism's continuing synergy with fashion up to the present day. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Book
I was pleasantly surprised to pick up this book and be greeted with such clear, detailed, and beautiful photographs.The combination of clothing and art is carefully chosen and illustrates the written points perfectly.I show this book to everyne who comes over, and it has yet to be looked at for less than 30 minutes at a time! ... Read more

Product Description
Providing full-color reproductions of works by artists such as Braque, Glis, Klee and Picasso, this volume examines the formation of the Kahnweiler collection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

69 years old yet still unsurpassed
Though written as an exhibition catalog for a show that took place almost 70 years ago, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s Cubism and Abstract Art is still the most concise, yet at the same time penetrating analysis and explication of the various movements and history that contributed to the abstract art of the period before the Second World War.It is both a fine introduction to the topic and, at least in my opinion, among the best resources available to the serious student of modern art. ... Read more

Product Description
Previous studies of William Carlos Williams have tended to look only for the literary echoes in his verse. According to Bram Dijkstra, the new movements in the visual arts during the 1920s affected Williams's work as much as, if not more than, the new writing of the period. Dijkstra catches the excitement of this period of revolutionary art, reveals the interactions between writers and painters, and shows in particular the specific and general impact this world had on Williams's early writings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Groundbreaking
This book was the catalogue for a magnificent exhibition held at the Moma in NYC in 1989 and it has not been equalled ever since. Top-quality illustrations and a groundbreaking text that studies the ins and outs of the relationship between the two founders of Cubism, written by a legendary museum director, himself a friend of Picasso's: in short, one of the best exhibition catalogues ever written which, to this date, remains a reference on the subject of Cubism.

One of the best art books money can buy
Your art-book dollar can hardly go further than here, with zillions of beautiful color reproductions of Cubist paintings, running the gamut from the early solid days to the dissolved Analytic days to the flat Synthetic years, and even on to some works where the name Cubism cannot really apply.There is also a fascinating timeline with excerpts from correspondence between Picasso, Braque, and their friends, which gives a very personal glimpse into their lives as they carried out this strange artistic journey together.Very often Cubism books feel that because of the generally dull color of Cubist painting, they can get away with black and white reproductions, but you cannot get a real sense of a painting without seeing it in color.Short of a round-the-world trip to every museum in which these paintings are kept, there is no better education you can get on Cubism today. ... Read more

Product Description
Cubism originated in Paris between 1906 and 1908 with the revolutionary experiments of Picasso and Braque. It was a movement which spread very rapidly throughout Europe and the world and which extended from painting into other fields of artistic expression such as sculpture and design. In questioning the imperative to be representational and in emphasising an autonomous vision of the world, Cubism was a radical innovation which continued to affect artistic movements well into the century. Philip Cooper examines the wider contemporary cultural background of the artists (and writers) who contributed to Cubism. He gives an account of the emergence and development of this movement and explores its various aspects and phases such as analytical Cubism and synthetic Cubism. There is a full discussion of the Cubists' pioneering approach and use of materials, including the invention of papier colle and collage. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Useful History and Summary of Cubism
Cubism was a phase in the development of perhaps every major artist contemporary to the periods immediately preceding and immediately following World War I. Picasso and Braque, working closely together in Paris between 1906 and 1908, are credited as the creators of this style. Cubism was the major step toward Abstractionist painting that came to dominate twentieth-century art, preceded only by Cezanne, whom Picasso credited as its inspiration. Cooper credits the Cubists with the invention of collage, examples of which are included in this beautifully illustrated volume. With 48 full-page color reproductions of important Cubist paintings with accompanying discussion, and an additional 36 illustrations in black and white, this book offers a useful history and summary of Cubism and the artists who practiced it. A better-than-average addition to the library of new low-cost paperback art books that too frequently are plagued with an indifferent text. ... Read more

Product Description
In this book, a professor of literature and a physicist offer a broad, new, interdisciplinary account of Modernism. Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook encompass physics, the visual arts and literature in a thought-provoking analysis of the period from the 1880s to World War II. Uncovering common structures and values underlying each of these disparate fields, the authors define Modernism and its historical location between nineteenth-century intellectual conventions that preceded it and the Postmodernism that followed. Bridging boundaries that traditionally divide disciplines, Vargish and Mook create a uniquely coherent and comprehensive view of the aesthetics and intellectual values that characterize the culture of Modernism. ... Read more

Product Description
Cubism was the most influential artistic movement that emerged in the twentieth century. Yet just what cubism was, or stood for, at the time of its emergence is still in dispute, while the explanations offered for its importance for twentieth century art, and its legacy for the present, are bewildering in their variety.This fascinating book offers a way beyond this confusion: a narrative of its beginnings, consolidation and dissemination that takes into account not only what the style and the movement signified at the time of its emergence but also the principal writings through which cubism's significance for modernism has been established. Visually stunning with over 100 illustrations, this is an essential work for all students and teachers of modern art history.
... Read more

Product Description
This work provides an examination of Apollinaire as a personality central to the production and dissemination of identifiable emblematic and allegorical themes. ... Read more

Product Description
The invention of collage by Picasso and Braque in 1912 was a turning point in the development of Cubism and Futurism and a significant innovation of 20th-century art. Collage has traditionally been viewed as a new expression of modernism, one allied with modernism's search for purity of means, anti-illusionism, unity and autonomy of form. This book - in its study of collage and its relation to modernism - challenges this view. Christine Poggi argues that collage did not become a new language of modernism but a new language with which to critique modernism. She focuses on the ways Cubist collage - and the Futurist multimedia work that was inspired by it - undermined prevailing notions of material and stylistic unity, subverted the role of the frame and pictorial ground and brought the languages of high and low culture into a new relationship of exchange. Poggi discusses the theory and history behind the invention and early practice of collage, focusing first on the Cubists and then on the Futurists.Moving between the verbal and visual arts and between French and Italian traditions, she explores a number of related pictorial and poetic innovations: collage, "papier colle", constructed sculpture, Futurist "parole in liberta" and Apollinaire's "calligrammes". Poggi provides insights into the differences between the ways Cubists and Futurists questioned and subverted traditional genres and forms of expression. At the same time she shows how both groups made important contributions to the spirit of invention that prevailed before World War I. ... Read more

Product Description
Art mirrors life; life returns the favor. How could nineteenth and twentieth century technologies foster both the change in the world view generally called postmodernism and the development of new art forms? Scholar and curator Faye Ran shows how interactions of art and technology led to cultural changes and the evolution of Installation art as a genre unto itselfa fascinating hybrid of expanded sculpture in terms of context, site, and environment, and expanded theatre in terms of performer, performance, and public. ... Read more