Product Description
From DJ flap - Author brings Dufy to life, sketching his youth and apprenticeship in the arts; his years as a textile designer and art directory, first for the French couturier Paul Poiret, and then for a silk firm in Lyons; and his years of triumph as an artist second only to Matisse in his power to evoke a perfect world of balance, purity, and serenity. Forty color plates with commentaries. (Description by http-mart) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Love it!
The cover caught my attention. While I am familiar with Degas' work, I had not singled out his pastels. But I have been loving every page I have seen so far. The cover art is breathtaking with its stage light glowing from below. Interior art is reproduced well and flows nicely with commentary. Degas used very dynamic angles in many of his compositions which adds interest and drama visually. Easy to understand why impressionists had a hard time being acknowledged in their day and why they continue to look fresh to us today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

mannered elegance
This book brings together 40 prints of the artist's paintings in beautiful colour, as well as a lengthy text which precedes them, with photographs of Modigliani, and examples of his sculptures and caryatids. Werner presents M as a tragic figure since his health was poor - he suffered from tuberculosis all his life, and he died relatively young at 35, without receiving any substantial recognition of his work. Much is made of his excessive social life in Paris, though M was Italian, where he is said to have indulged in alcohol and hashish. He focused on painting after he was unable to continue with sculpture because of his lack of money, the difficulty in obtaining materials, and the affect of the stone dust on his weak lungs. Werner also tells us that M suffered from a psychoneurosis, and calls him a "solipsist who produced exclusively self-portraits, symbolic representations of his own tortured soul". However these arguments do not appear to relate to the nature of his painting. His work is calm, not tortured, and the idea that his infamous style of Expressionist distortion is meant to reveal a "paranoiac autism" seems silly. The photos we see of M show that he does not resemble his skittle-shaped, swan-necked, almond-eyed portraits. Even the notion that some of the subjects having closed eyes meaning an inner directed concentration based on a fear of the world, does not appreciate the stylistic choice he made to express his form of conception upon reality. He had trained as a draftsman and considered his work "illuminations", accentuating attributes to the point of caricature. The faces of his sculptures bear the same kind of visage. His work is both striking in his use of colour, where he favoured strong lines and prefered primary blacks and reds; and tender in the delicate way he treats the subjects, whether they be Parisian socialities, other artists, his two mistresses - Beatrice Hastings and Jeanne Hebuterne, or working class models like maids and peasants. What ultimately makes the work of Modigliani great is how one can return to the prints again and again, to revel in their mannered elegance, their sadness and beauty, and his unique balance between naturalism and abstraction. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more