Celebrating the marvellous surrealism in architecture

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sous la direction de Jean Clair

In 1946, when Picasso received the offer to use one of the great rooms in the castle at Antibes as a studio, he exclaimed enthusiastically: “I'm not only going to paint, I'll decorate the museum too.” The result was a series of paintings and drawings that reflected the jubilant spirit, the joie de vivre, of a country that was free once more. Picasso later added sculptures, graphic works, and ceramics to this collection, forming the basis for what would be France's first museum dedicated to him, inaugurated in 1966 as Musée Picasso, Antibes.This catalog, published in conjunction with the exhibition of Palazzo Grassi, comprises a great selection of the most outstanding works from the Musée Picasso of Antibes, a large number of which have never been shown beyond the museum's walls. These include the murals La Joie de Vivre, 1946, The Sea Urchin Eater, 1946, and the impressive sculpture Head of Woman with Chignon, 1932. Featuring paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics, the works illustrate a splendid period in Picasso's artistic career. The volume also includes a selection of photographs of Picasso by Polish artist Michel Sima, which portray the context in which Picasso created the works.

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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.

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Steven Roger Fischer

When Lost's Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashed, the survivors found themselves on a seemingly deserted island. In Defoe's novel, Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, while in the movie Castaway Tom Hanks survives over four years on a South Pacific island. And Jurassic Park kept its dinosaur population confined to an island off the coast of Central America. Islands often find themselves at the center of imagined worlds, secluded and sometimes mystical locales filled with strange creatures and savage populations. The cannibals, raptors, and smoke monsters that exist on the islands of popular culture aside, the more than one million islands and islets on the planet are indeed small , geological, biological, and cultural laboratories. From Britain to Japan, from the Galapagos to Manhattan, this book roams the planet to provide the first global introduction to these waterlocked landforms. Longtime island dweller Steven Roger Fischer shows that, since time began, islands have been one of the primary birthplaces for plants, animals, and proto-humans. These eyots of stone and sand--whether in ocean, lake, or river--fostered the human race, and Fischer recounts how humanity then exploited these remarkable habitats as stepping stones to global dominion. He explores island economics, warfare, and politics, and he examines the role they have played in literature, art and psychology. At the same time, he sparks our imagination with visions of islands--from Atlantis to Tahiti, Treasure Island to Hawaii. Ultimately, he reveals, these isolated mini-worlds are a measure of humankind itself. An engaging account of the islets that have enriched, lured, terrified, and inspired us, Islands shines new light on these cradles of earth--and human--history.

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Jacob Bean

This volume describes and reproduces 379 drawings by Italian artists of the seventeenth century in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The most brilliant draughtsmen of this period--Annibale Carracci, G. B. Castiglione, Pietro da Cortona, Guercino, Carlo Maratti, and Salvator Rosa--are well represented in the Museum's collection, and the book offers a survey of Italian baroque draughtsmanship. It includes innovative work by Carracci, as well as drawings by such late baroque masters as Sebastiano Ricci and Francesco Solimena. Four hundred five illustrations are contained in this inventory. Entries for the drawings provide essential bibliographical references, provenance, and a discussion of the purpose of the drawing when known. -- Inside jacket flap.