Искусство - скачать книги или читать онлайн. Страница 375

If sensuality had a name, it would be without doubt Utamaro. Delicately underlining the Garden of Pleasures that once constituted Edo, Utamaro, by the richness of his fabrics, the swan-like necks of the women, the mysterious looks, evokes in a few lines the sensual pleasure of the Orient. If some scenes discreetly betray lovers’ games, a great number of his shungas recall that love in Japan is first and foremost erotic.

Pioneer of geometric abstract art and one of the most important members of the Russian Avant-garde, Malevitch experimented with various modernist styles. In reaction to the influence of Cubism and Futurism on artists in Russia, Malevitch in his art reduced the world of nature to basic elements and colours, such as in his Red Square (1915). He introduced his abstract, non-objective geometric patterns in a style and artistic movement he called Suprematism. One of the important names of the twentieth century, he however turned back to Primitivism once Russia’s communist leaders forced him to do so.

Icon painting has reached its zenith in Ukraine between the 11th and 18th centuries. This art is appealing because of its great openness to other influences – the obedience to the rules of Orthodox Christianity in its early stages, the borrowing from Roman heritage or later to the Western breakthroughs – combined with a never compromised assertion of a distinctly Slavic soul and identity.

Dealing not only with architecture, sculpture, and painting, but also with bronze and ceramics, this text offers a complete panorama of Chinese arts and civilisation. In his text, the author Bushell stresses the importance of knowing the society to understand the arts.

Canaletto began his career as a theatrical scene painter, like his father, in the Baroque tradition. Influenced by Giovanni Panini, he is specialised in vedute (views) of Venice, his birth place. Strong contrast between light and shadow is typical of this artist. Furthermore, if some of those views are purely topographical, others include festivals or ceremonial subjects. He also published, thanks to John Smith, his agent, a series of etchings of Cappricci. His main purchasers were British aristocracy because his views reminded them of their Grand Tour. In his paintings geometrical perspective and colours are structuring. Canaletto spent ten years in England. John Smith sold Canaletto’s works to George III, creating the major part of the Royal Canaletto Collection. His greatest works influenced landscape painting in the nineteenth century.

An icon in the Art Nouveau movement, Émile Gallé (1846-1904) sought to portray the beauty and simplicity of nature in his glass art. His designs, referred to as “poetry in glass”, range from fine pottery to jewellery and furniture. Everything Gallé produced contains traces of his masterful technique which reflects his innovativeness as an artist and his skill as a designer. In this rich text, Gallé unravels the beauty and ingenuity found within his own work.

Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910s, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known to insiders as the “Mucha style” for the legions of imitators who adapted the master’s celebrated tableaux. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young women in classical dress have become a pop cultural touchstone, inspiring album covers, comic books, and everything in between. Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles offer readers an inspiring survey of Mucha’s career, illustrated with over one hundred lustrous images, from early Parisian advertisements and posters for Sandra Bernhardt, to the famous historical murals painted just before his death, at the age of 78, in 1939.

A timeless theme that cannot be ignored, love has always fascinated artists. Painters, sculptors and even architects have drawn inspiration from and illustrated it. Ever new, love has led artists to create the masterworks of their life.

An emblematic figure of the early 20th century, Paul Klee participated in the expansive Avant-Garde movements in Germany and Switzerland. From the vibrant Blaue Reiter movement to Surrealism at the end of the 1930s and throughout his teaching years at the Bauhaus, he attempted to capture the organic and harmonic nature of painting by alluding to other artistic mediums such as poetry, literature, and, above all, music. While he collaborated with artists like August Macke and Alexej von Jawlensky, his most famous partnership was with the abstract expressionist, Wassily Kandinsky.

Поэзия от библейских времен до нынешних, классическая и современная литература, русские и зарубежные авторы – вот объекты творческого внимания поэта и писателя Ю. Лифшица, выступающего в книге «Поэты об интимном» как литературный критик. Причем интимное для него – это не только эротическое, но и творческое, предполагающее проникновение в святая святых того или иного автора. В оформлении обложки использована скульптура русского скульптора М.М.Антокольского (1843 – 1902) «Нестор-летописец».

«Возвышающий обман» – продолжение книги мемуаров Андрея Кончаловского «Низкие истины». Режиссер возвращается к началу своей биографии, на этот раз биографии творческой, рассказывает о своих фильмах и театральных постановках, о замыслах, о сценарных проектах. А еще – о единомышленниках, которые помогали в работе, о друзьях, с которыми шел по жизни, о женщинах, которых любил, о жизни, которая вся – стремление к идеалу, к возвышающему обману, без которого не было бы сил жить…

Книга голландского историка Шенга Схейена – самая полная на сегодняшний день биография Сергея Дягилева (1872–1929).