Botticelli, Allegory of spring

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Ernest Raboff

Briefly discusses the influences upon Dürer, the fifteenth-century German artist, and the outstanding features of some of his paintings.

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Jennifer Komar Olivarez

"Largely regarded as one of the most important movements of American architecture and design, the Prairie School helped move America into the modern age. Signaling a departure from nineteenth-century formality, its practitioners sought to create buildings that were organic and would facilitate a new, progressive way of life. This guide to the treasures of the Prairie School at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts focuses not only on the museum's collection of early twentieth-century American design but also on the Institute's historic Purcell-Cutts house, one of the most significant examples of Prairie School architecture in the country. With its historic photographs, many never before published, Progressive Design in the Midwest is a combination of history, house tour, and museum guide." "The many objects in the Institute's Prairie school collection including works by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gray Purcell, and George Grant Elmslie, among others, are described in detail. Along with each piece is a list of relevant texts, exhibitions, and the historical background of the piece, as well as information about the designer."--Jacket.

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Lillian Schacherl

Edgar Degas was one of the most obsessive painters of the female body in the entire history of art. He produced some six hundred images of ballet dancers alone, and the nudes that dominate his late work are scarcely less numerous. The wealth of carefully chosen illustrations in this volume provides a multi-faceted survey of these two aspects of Degas' oeuvre. The iconographical variety of the imagery is complemented by the wide range of media employed by the artist. Oils and pastels, prints and drawings, sculptures - all are included here. Lillian Schacherl brings to life the world inhabited by these women. She rejects the interpretation of the images as voyeuristic by the moralists among Degas' contemporaries and by some present-day writers. The artist's intention, she argues, was neither to glorify the glamorous world of the ballet nor to revel in the beauty of the female form. Rather, he sought to capture fleeting moments of classically perfect movement and spontaneous, unselfconscious gesture. The author shows that, in their synthesis of classical values and more modern artistic concerns, Degas' ballet dancers and late nudes constitute one of the peaks of nineteenth-century art.

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with an introductory essay by Victoria Salley

"Durer's drawings and watercolours show the artist at his most accessible, revealing his techniques and the masterly use of his media. No woodcut engravers, printers or apprentices come between Durer and the viewer. This contributes to the particular fascination of such sheets as The Large Piece of Turf or Hare. The introductory essay, portraying Durer as a passionate observer of his surroundings and an exceptionally gifted artist, is followed by thirty-five, high-quality reproductions of his most popular drawings and watercolours. Book jacket."--Jacket.