Border visions

Sample

Karen Wilkin

This illustrated monograph explores the career of one of the most original and influential sculptors now working in the modernist tradition. His early work, as part of London's "New Generation," used unexpected materials in sculptures that married form and color in unprecedented ways. They are distinguished by their inventive polychromy and sleek industrial materials (fiberglass, plexiglass, glass, and aluminum tubing along with wood) as well as by their repetitive, curvilinear profiles and bold thrusts into space. Once in the U.S., Witkin continued to explore abstract volume and color in steel. His generously scaled constructions, equally notable for their structural audacity and emotional range, established him as a legitimate heir to the tradition of David Smith. In the early 1980s Witkin shifted to working in bronze, inventing a method of constructing with directly poured elements. This most recent work allows him to combine the sensuality of once-molten metal, the expressiveness of organic forms, the richness of bronze patina, and the immediacy of constructed sculpture. Author Karen Wilkin relates the story of the artist's career to date, discussing the evolution of his work in the context of the modernist tradition as well as the work of Witkin's contemporaries.

Sample

[coordinamento redazionale, Emanuela Belloni

The catalogue raisonné on Marcello Morandini (Mantova, 1940) represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date publication ever to be produced on his works of art. Edited by Marco Meneguzzo and subdivided into separate yet complementary sections, the catalogue gives a clear and in-depth description of Morandini's art from 1964 to the present day and is the result of the meticulous job carried out by the Marcello Morandini Foundation to catalogue, archive and authenticate his works. Comprising over 500 pages, the volume begins with a review by the editor and an essay by Serge Lemoine, a French historian who has followed Morandini's artistic career from the start. The second section contains a critical anthology of texts written for the artist's numerous exhibitions and which document his artistic research. Over the years, Morandini has explored different kinds of themes and studies on the movement of space (torsion, tension, expansion, superimposition), translating them into the world of geometry by using a bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional language and applying mathematical certainty to developing the work, in accordance with the inescapable conceptual premise whereby everything that surrounds us can be considered 'liveable'.

Sample

Giulio Magli

This book provides the first complete, easy to read, up-to-date account of the fascinating discipline of archaeoastronomy, in which the relationship between ancient constructions and the sky is studied in order to gain a better understanding of the ideas of the architects of the past and of their religious and symbolic worlds. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which explores the past relations between astronomy and people, power, the afterworld, architecture, and landscape. The fundamentals of archaeoastronomy are then addressed in detail, with coverage of the celestial coordinates; the apparent motion of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets; observation of celestial bodies at the horizon; the use of astronomical software in archaeoastronomy; and current methods for making and analyzing measurements. The final section reviews what archaeoastronomy can now tell us about the nature and purpose of such sites and structures as Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, Chichen Itza, the Campus Martius, and the Valley of the Temples of Agrigento. In addition, a set of exercises is provided that can be performed using non-commercial free software, e.g., Google Earth or Stellarium, and will equip readers to conduct their own research. Readers will find the book an ideal introduction to what has become a wide-ranging multidisciplinary science. -- Back cover.

Sample

Hollis Clayson

"The siege of Paris by Prussians in the fall and winter of 1870 and 1871 turned the city upside down, radically altering its appearance, social structure, and mood. As Hollis Clayson demonstrates in Paris in Despair, the siege took a heavy toll on the city's artists, forcing them out of the spaces and routines of their insular prewar lives, and literally thrusting onto the ramparts the many among them who became soldiers.". "But the crisis did not halt artistic production, as some have suggested. In fact, Clayson argues that the siege actually encouraged innovation, fostering changed attitudes and new approaches to representation among a wide variety of artists as they made art out of their individual experiences of adversity and change - art that has not previously been considered within the context of the siege. Clayson focuses especially on Rosa Bonheur, Edgar Degas, Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguiere, Edouard Manet, and Henri Regnault, but she also covers a host of other artists, including Louis-Ernest Barrias, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Detaille, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Albert Robida, and James Tissot. Paris in Despair includes more than two hundred color and black-and-white images of works by these artists and others, many never before published.". "Using the visual arts as an interpretive lens, Clayson illuminates the wide range of issues at play during the siege and thereafter, including questions of political and cultural identity, artistic masculinity and femininity, public versus private space, everyday life and modernity, and gender and class roles in military and civilian society. For anyone concerned with these issues, or with nineteenth-century French art in general, Paris in Despair will be a landmark work."--BOOK JACKET.