No comments about Reading Rhetorically: A Reader for Writers (2nd Edition).

1 comments about Drawing: Dogs (HT10).

1. Does what it says! My daughter draws and she really liked this teaching book.

2 comments about The History of Greek Vases.

1. Its a very good book, well documented. The only issue that is was important to improve, is to change at least some photos from Black and White to Color. Art documentation demands many times to see directly the pieces colors



2. Though this adds to a field which has been dealt with before, the book presnts a fresh and insightful viewpoint. It will be valuable to all students of Greek history and chronolgy, and modern "pot throwers" everywhere.

No comments about Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science.

1 comments about Arts of Africa: 7000 Years of African Art.

1. The book is essentially an exhibition catalogue, but beautifully bound and presented. The book is broken up into a number of sections. Roughly 200 pages are devoted to ancient African art - things you may find only in museums or at high-end auctions, 50 pages are devoted to African ivories, and 100 pages are devoted to traditional African art - the types of art such as statues & masks most commonly associated with African art and collected in the last 150 years or so. There are also about 20 pages that describe the re-discovery of African art in Europe at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.
   
   The quality of the pictures in this book is excellent. They are mostly full-page photographic quality pictures that give a fine appreciation of the works discussed.
   
   I'd recommend this book to serious African art enthusiasts looking to extend their reference book collection. This is a great catalogue of really high-grade African art with an expert commentary to accompany it. It could also be a nice coffee table book. Although it does serve as a survey of African art over 7000 years the book isn't set up as a narrative of African art. I think it would be less appropriate for those just starting out in African art - or looking for an overview.

1 comments about Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century.

1. The relationship of art to politics has always been an uneasy one, and never more so than in the twentieth century. Governments seek to bend art to their own purposes; artists resist and subvert such efforts. But what happens when artists work on behalf of a political program or idea? Is their art corrupted? Exactly when is art propaganda?
   
   As Toby Clark argues, propaganda appears in many guises, not all of them suspect. Nor is the desire to persuade always at odds with the desire to create works of beauty. What is the relatonship of propaganda to the avant-garde? How do artists use scale and style to create political effects? How do art styles become identified with political systems? Is art tainted or elevated by its political content?
   
   In this wide ranging book, Clark examines work from all points of the globe, from the state propaganda of communism to the public art of democracies, from protest art of the 1960s to the efforts of artists in the nations of modern Africa. Beginning with the classic propaganda art of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin's Soviet Union - each with its own style, motives, and purposes - he then examines how democratic governments have also sponsored propaganda art, especially in wartime, exploring such problamatic issues as the representation of enemies and the commemoration of the dead.
   
   Art created in opposition to ruling ideas and values may also fall under the rubric of propaganda. Since the beginning of the century radical artists have embraced revolutionary, pacifist, feminist, and anticolonial causes. Clark describes the spectrum of competing theories and goals of protest art from Africa to Latin America, from Europe to the United States to China, and uncovers the complex rhetoric, the high beauty, and the ambiguous role of art that dwells in the political realm.
   --- from book's back cover

4 comments about The Power of the Center : A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts : The New Version.

1. I've been looking for a book like this for years! As a photographer, I know what I like but I can't always say why I (or others) like it--in other words, what makes a "good" image. Arnheim helps by examining with extraordinary sensitivity the psychology and even physiology of visual perception.
   
   Yes, it's complicated, and if you are not on the same wavelength as the author it may seem obtuse (perhaps even willfully so). But if your thinking is congruent with his, if you have been puzzling over how people examine images, how their eyes move about an image and absorb and appreciate it, then Arnheim's analysis is nothing short of brilliant and revelatory. I find myself saying "Yes! Yes! Yes!" as I read.
   
   There is more here than I need--much more. I don't feel that I need to master everything he writes in order to fulfill my need to understand visual perception so as to improve my photography. But I celebrate the day I discovered this book, and I congratulate the author on such a perceptive, clearly--even engagingly--written work.



2. Arnheim's great books inspired me to make my own analysis of one artist's paintings, van Gogh, so I just wanted to make a few comments about that. (I even once received a letter from Arnheim, saying he liked my ideas).
   
   As Ernst Gombrich has shown, analyzing space in a picture is an extremely complex business. The fact that even sophisticated observers sometimes form mistaken impressions of a pictorial space is itself an interesting phenomenon and illustrates an important principle of the human visual system, which is that it is not very good at evaluating precise metrical relationships. If the space is so constructed that it is at least internally consistent, it may look realistic when it is not, and the space may even seem distorted when it is not.
   
   Considering the problem of the different recession rates for the objects in van Gogh's paintings, how do we account for these distortions? We could simply dismiss them as errors resulting from van Gogh's inability to paint perspectivally, but would be a mistake, for the following reasons:
   
   1) The magnitude and direction of the errors in the sizes of objects are consistent with known psychophysical mechanisms of size constancy.
   
   2) There is a strong shape constancy effect, and also (as John Ward has pointed out), such as in the two chairs and the pictures on the wall (in his Bedroom at Arles).
   
   3) Van Gogh's failure to map out an initial, precise, major metric eliminates the most important perspective cue for object scaling and thus permits the inherent constancy-scaling effects of the human visual system to surface.
   
   4) Although distorted perspectivally, the space is nevertheless internally consistent. This is to be expected from secondary size-constancy effects.
   
   5) The technique of squinting to enhance one's depth of field, which van Gogh sometimes used, would reinforce cues to size constancy by essentially putting the station point behind the artist.
   
   Points 4 and 5 require further discussion.
   
   As noted earlier, secondary size constancy is the tendency for the sizes of objects to correlate with other perspective cues. Even in a painting with a very poorly defined or no major metric (such as in van Gogh's Bedroom), most perspective errors are not random. If they were, the errors would occur in both positive and negative directions about some mean value and would therefore average out. This is rarely the case, however. Usually the errors show a consistent trend. This is because once a given direction and magnitude of deviation has been established, other cues tend to be altered accordingly for the sake of consistency. This can be seen in van Gogh's Bedroom where different objects show similar effects. Although the objects themselves show different vanishing points, the size effect is nevertheless the same.
   
   Van Gogh is also known to have used squinting in order to increase his depth of field. This would cause both foreground and background objects to appear simultaneously more in focus and therefore would have the effect of putting the station point artificially in back of the observer. Durer illustrated a device to accomplish this in his treatise on perspective, but simply squinting strongly can produce a powerful effect of several feet.
   
   Schapiro, Heelan, and various other writers have commented on the sense of realism which van Gogh's paintings create in the viewer. But at this point we could ask why, if van Gogh's perspective space is in many ways so imprecise, we continue to see it as powerful and realistic? Partly it is due to the fact that although there are many spatial distortions present, the space is nevertheless consistent with psychophysical expectations and the distortions due to size constancy are of the proper psychophysical magnitude. This is perhaps to be expected given van Gogh's interest in objects and in the depiction of objects for their own sake. The result is that objects possess more autonomy in van Gogh's paintings than they would if he had taken pains to construct a unified perspective space and thus show appropriate psychophysical effects.
   
   The main reason, however, concerns a fundamental principle of mammalian visual systems. It has been demonstrated repeatedly in experiments that the human visual system is a poor detector of the absolute values of such things as brightness and distance. On the other hand, the visual system is very good at preserving relationships and relative levels of things. Our eyes, for example, throw away information about luminous intensity but conserve and even enhance information about relative brightness and contrast borders, as in the well-known case of Mach bands. This mechanism enables us to easily detect the outlines of objects under varying levels of illumination. In fact, the visual system is such a good extractor of lines that it creates them where they don't even exist or where they are only suggested, as in the well- known case of illusory and subjective contours.
   
   A similar phenomenon occurs in space perception. As I discussed earlier in this article, many experiments have shown that people rarely view paintings from the proper perspective point, and yet experience very little distortion in the perceived objects. This suggests that the visual system constructs an internal model which preserves the relations between the objects in a scene. When distortions occur, the visual system is capable of compensating internally for the perceived distortion. In practical terms, this means that the perspective may depart substantially, both quantitatively and qualitatively, from reality and yet be seen as realistic if it is not too greatly distorted and if the space is at least internally consistent.
   
   What all this shows is that artists are, in essence, perceptual problem solvers, or, as Rudolph Arnheim has said, "visual thinkers." Such a view is, I believe, preferable to the idea that the artist paints from some inexplicable or mysterious talent, or from some sort of abnormal psychology or pathology.



3. The book reads like a complicated mathematical college text book. The author either tries to impress you with his knowledge of the english language or confuse you with the ideology behind his observations in artistic composition. I found the book to be very confusing and at times boring enough to put it aside and read something else. The author does relate some good input when critiquing paintings but you need pay complete attention to the beginning of the book in order to understand his complicated formulas. It is definetely not an easy read, and not for the artist. This book is for the art critic who tries to find scientific formulas for the study of composition.



4. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the visual dynamics in a piece of art according to the sizes, positions, orientations and the balancing centers of its components. Paintings, sculptures and architectures are the subjects of discussions in the book. In addition to the balance between the components of a piece of art, the shape of a picture frame, the environment, the perspective prescribed by the artist and the viewer all play an important role in the interpretation of a piece art. The author takes an step-by-step approach to explain how the understanding of the roles of all these elements would help us to appreciate a piece of art. Many examples, modern and classical, are provided to demonstrate his points. I find his approach to understanding a piece of art interesting and revealing. This is one of the best books I ever read about arts. I think this book would benefit aspiring artists and art enthusiasts alike. I would hane given it five stars instead of four and a half if the pictures in the book were in color.

No comments about Breed Apart: From the Collections of the American Kennel Club.

1 comments about African Art in Transit (Cambridge Studies in Social & Cultural Anthropology).

1. This is a wonderful book which introduces the reader to African art in the context of the international market and art trade. As an African art collector, I learned a great deal about the "tricks" of the trade and the techniques of faking and market pricing. It is also fascinating to read about the lives of those who deal in African art, and how the trade impacts their religious convictions, as well as their personal and economic aspirations.

No comments about Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas: Selected Readings.