5 comments about Minimum.

1. John Pawson is one of my favorite architects, and this book perfectly highlights and demonstrates his minimalist approach. Light on text, heavy on beautiful photos. It's also gorgeously bound with a simple but rich cloth cover with beautiful type. It even came shrink-wrapped to ensure that it wasn't damaged during shipping. Everything about it is perfect.
   
   For such an inexpensive book, I couldn't have been more surprised. I can't recommend this highly enough.



2. Picture book on Pawson's theory of minimum, with snapshots across the history of architecture. Nice intro to Pawson before moving on to his works book. Pleasant read/look but you may wish to go straight to works.



3. I'm surprised by all of the good reviews. I don't recommend this book, unless its main purpose is to sit on a coffee table and look pretty.
   
   The pictures are decent, though many of them look grainy as if they've been blown up to fit the page. But perhaps the most disappointing part of the book was the text. Each picture has merely a paragraph devoted to description, and to compound that frustration, the font is so small (probably 6 point), I had to keep my eyes inches from the page. It would be understandable if the publisher were trying to save room, but clearly that's not the case, as an entire white page is devoted to a small paragraph, which is consequently crammed so near the binding that I had to pry the book apart to read the text. I realize that this style is probably meant to reflect the book's title, but I don't think moving the text to the middle of an already blank page would disrupt this.
   
   There are better books elsewhere.



4. This book is interesting. The book reveals what constitutes Pawson's thinking. Thru the graphic representations of photographic art, sculpture, ancient buildings, paintings, places, details, gardens, and ruins; Pawson powerfully visualizes his stance. At each image Pawson carefully crafts little notes to explain why he likes that particular image. A reader will easily grasp that Pawson's journey towards the absolute essentials was not created thru either erasing lines in drawings or reading some philosophical statements. But thru the years of his own site visits and foot work. Sometimes I felt flattered that some of my favorites were chosen as his favorites; othertimes, I found places and artists that I've never heard. I was able to rely on his notes because of his comments on my favorites. Only a person who has visited multiple times to his likings can write such succinct and insightful comments. Due to the intensity of the content and the nature of words, this book could also function like a daily meditation book. By that I mean, you can read it in two hours or you can read an image per day and extend the duration to two years. In a digitally mediated age, clapping hands to the loud voices/ moving fast/ diversity of thoughts, Pawson's book deliberately shuts mouth/ stand still/ seek simple equilibrium.



5. The book is not just about architecture. The author wants to convey a philosophy about minimalism to the readers. The book shows that the value of minimum is pervasive in every aspect of our life. At first, I was a littel bit disappointed about the content and the pictures (since I would like to see more modern architectural design). But later on, I found this book very intriguing. I think readers need to think when reading the book, try to get the communality of all the pictures from this book and come up with your own interpretation of what minimalism means. Of course, it takes time to derive your intellectual definition. But it is okay. Just take your time and you will enjoy the process of thinking in abstractive manner. Both the thinking process and results will guide your future design, aesthetics, and life style.

1 comments about Riviera Cocktail.

1. This is a very unique, well produced coffee table book / gift. Definitely for someone who enjoys fine arts and nostalgia.

3 comments about Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction.

1. This book shows you all you want to know about colours. It's not truly scientific but it showed me the best and most of colour-theory. I had some trouble with the science-language but hey, I'm Dutch, not a native "American" speaker! The only thing that I would change in this book is more pictures, and all in colour!



2. While I won't go to the trouble of selling this book, I do regret having purchased it. There are many other texts that do a much more nuanced and cogent exposition of the relationship between color and culture. My future use of this book will be as a visual reference, i.e. to refer to the various paintings and other works gorgeously reproduced in color.
   
   Otherwise, Gage's Color and Culture as well as Color and Meaning are best used as "intelligent" coffee table tomes.



3. This book is an excellant source of palette development, pigment uses and development as well as color theories throughout history. My students have worn out my copy -- needs to be reprinted and made known in college art departments. Good, solid informational writing and illustrations. A must-have book for artists and students. D. Swaim, Prof., M.C.C., Arizona

No comments about Art History: A View of the West, Volume 1 (3rd Edition) (Art History).

5 comments about Fashioning Kimono: Dress and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.

1. As a Kimono enthusiast it's nice to find a book that has pages and pages worth of JUST Kimono. The focus on a particular time period makes it interesting. Worth the bucks.



2. This book is beautifully produced with an excellent history of kimono plus many pages of designs, including children's and men's as well as obi, from the past 100 years. Many of the kimono designs are very "art-deco" which might turn off some who like plainer styles. But to my mind the colors and patterns are fabulous! Just look at the front cover image to get a sense of how rich these designs are.



3. The first fourth of the book contains a lot of valuable information about styles and techniques, then the rest is page after page of photos. Beautiful photos, but I wish there was more discussion about cultural significance of the designs depicted.



4. 
   "Fashioning Kimono" is a virtual panoply of color, art, and history focusing on kimono from the vast collection of Jeffrey Montgomery. Among the 1200 rare objects in Montgomery's enviable collection are these 150 kimono dating from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. It is an array comprehensive in scope with kimono and haori jackets worn by men, women and children.
   
   The almost 200 photographs of the textiles by Stefano Ember are stunning - bold, aresting in hue, delicate as a butterfly's wing in design. Publication of this volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which runs from mid October of this year through May 1, 2006.
   
   Annie Van Assche, the editor and primary author, presents a history of the kimono, while additional essays include such topics as new styles based on Art Nouveau and Art Deco designs, the kimono's influence on Parisian fashion, and the fascinating memoir of a Japanese girl growing up in the 1930s and 1940s.
   
   As Van Assche notes silk is at the very heart of the Japanese kimono culture. It's strength, sheen and adaptability to dyes make it the ideal material. The inspired use of color, we learn, may be due in part to the fact that in ancient times the Japanese believed "color imbued a garment with special powers."
   
   All with an interest in fashion, design and the Japanese culture will find "Fashioning Kimono" an indispensable addition to a personal library.
   
   - Gail Cooke



5. The early decades of the 1900s were the final flowering for the Japanese kimono, the standard clothing for men and women going back for centuries. This was literally so for many kimonos; for they have bright, sometimes lavish, flower patterns and images from the influences of the Western art styles of art nouveau and even art deco. The growing modernization and Westernization of Japan at this time was seen in the changing patterns in the kimono. The stylistic innovations came to an end with the turn to Western clothing after Japan's defeat in WWII and the destruction of the country's industry. One hundred and fifty modern kimono from about the 1890s to the 1930s from the collection of Jeffrey Montgomery are shown in color photographs with close-ups of the details of a few. The photos are full-page on the right with notes on the facing page. The book is done in conjunction with an exhibition of the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum through May 2006. The beginning essay by editor and contributor Annie Van Assche--textile artisan, Japanese art historian, and one-time curator of education for the Japan Society Gallery in New York--is an outstanding brief course on the artistic aspects, manufacture, and types and eras of kimono while serving as a lead-in to the following four essays taking up different topics regarding its final, modern, period.

No comments about Painting Watercolor Landscapes with Confidence.

2 comments about The Optical Unconscious (October Books).

1. Kraus's "The Optical Unconcious" is a good companion, as it were, to Martin Jay's "Downcast Eyes." Both discuss the dilema of visuality in Modernist thought and then -whoa - bring out post-modernism just by speaking about the eye and seeing. While Jay gets technical with his notion of "occular centrism," Kraus lets us feel what it means to watch or be watched. Her approach to the male gaze, the fashionable term for good old fashioned voyerism, is that it is natural. Sure, it one can analyse it as a by product of the failure of the industrial revolution to liberate people from work and to bring about more leisure time for the masses (by implication create greater equality - fewer people watching each other in the negative sense). Krauss is right when she insists that looking is a normal, natural occurance in contemporary society. She is also on target about the obsession Americans have with time, and that sight is the quickest method of human understanding. A great book!



2. Through a carefully structured narrative agenda, Rosalind Krauss is able to foreshadow, a compromised and descriptive text, about the contemporary use of the word "understand", specially if applied to the modernist arts and its criticism. Greatly to the advantage of us, lesser audiences, every thesis is exhibited with both academic rigor and narrative richness, permiting thus, the emergence of rich and useful images, powerful to illustrate, vinculate, even sometimes explain, many of the contemporary works of other theorists, that come to the text sometimes to expose, sometimes to poison, the general arguments around modernist production and the understanding of arts. Great for abbandoning oneself into insomnia, it is common to find provocative images, greatly to the advantage of self-involment in the arguments, and to the further underdstanding of the actual state of simbolical exchange, in the present tense. The involment in contemporary thought and debate, and the well constructed historical narrative, provides the text with an surprisingly effective mirror to look at our culture at an compromisingly close viewpoint, in wich many constitutive arguments of contemporary culture today are reflected just as the many of the historical lies that are still at use now at the "explaining" of the artistic pulsions, and its assimilation by the artistic institutions.

1 comments about Macbeth (Graphic Shakespeare) (Shakespeare Graphic Library).

1. Shakespeare has always been a bit of a puzzle to me so this book came as a pleasant surprise. The complete play is complimented by drawings which are exquisite and quite dramatic, nicely enhancing one of the greatest dramas in the world. The best way to describe it is to say that it reads like a comic although there are not many comics on the market of this quality. There is certainly no question of the play being dumbed down and I intend at some point in the future to expose my children to this work as an introduction to the greatest writer that ever lived.

2 comments about A New World: England's First View of America.

1. John White (c. 1540 - c. 1606), was an English artists who sailed with Richard Grenville in 1585 to the modern day coast of North Carolina. He made a number of watercolors of the landscape and the native peoples they encountered. These are the first and most informative illustrations of Native American society of the Eastern seaboard. They were later engraved by Theodore de Bry; all the surviving original paintings are now in the print room of the British Museum.
   
   This First View of America is beautifully illustrated and reproduces in full the British Museum collection of drawings and watercolors. White's duties included making visual records of everything he encountered, including plants, animals, birds, and human inhabitants, especially their dress, weapons, tools, and ceremonies. The collection also includes White's watercolors of Florida and Brazilian Indians.
   
   Each work is reproduced in color and supplemented by engravings by Theodor de Bry and others. In 1590 Theodorus de Bry and his sons had published a new, illustrated edition of Thomas Harriot's "Brief and True Report of the new found Land of Virginia" about the first English settlements in North America (in modern-day North Carolina). His illustrations were based on White's watercolor paintings. One interesting aspect of this fine book is seeing how significantly de Bry changed White's works; the engravings are very detailed, but lack the life of the paintings.
   
   Kim Sloan places John White and his work in their historical, cultural, and artistic contexts. Joyce Chaplin explores how White's contemporaries viewed his work and Christian Feest assesses its accuracy as historical documentation. Ute Kuhlemann examines the role of de Bry.
   
   I found this book a wonderful introduction to America as the English of the time must have seen it.
   
   
   Robert C. Ross 2008



2. Very well done, very informative, good attention to detail.

No comments about Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860.