No comments about Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

No comments about Andreas Gursky.

2 comments about Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford.

1. One of the American masters of landscape painting in the nineteenth century was Sanford Robinson Gifford, and though he was highly celebrated in his lifetime, his name appears now only occasionally when the topic of the Hudson River School of art is discussed. This excellent monograph, which accompanied an exhibition of his work in 2003 - 2004, serves to restore the reputation of one of our less widely known artists who captured Americana on canvas and was an important leader of the Hudson River School of painting.
   
   More than seventy reproductions of Gifford's paintings and drawings grace the pages of this book - scenes of the Adirondacks and Catskills, luminous river scenes filled with the transparency of fog and light. But the book also serves as an historical document with photographs and information about Gifford and his travels abroad with the obvious influence of JMW Turner. His perception and use of ambient light so distinct to the Hudson River Valley are both discussed and illustrated.
   
   This is a fine monograph of an important artist: it is also a superb study in art history of one of the most eloquent schools of painting in American history. Recommended. Grady Harp, December 05



2. 150 pages of the book are devoted to the works on display at the exhibition (I saw it at the Amon Carter). Since most of the works belong to private collectors, once the exhibition finishes at the National Gallery in Washington, this book will be the only place you will be able to look at the body of Gifford's work. The plates are excellent. If you like other Hudson River School painters, you will want this book.

No comments about Lino Tagliapietra in Retrospect: A Modern Renaissance in Italian Glass.

4 comments about Art Deco: 1910-1939.

1. No problem.
   Long shipping, the book arrived some days after christmas.
   Olivier



2. Bought it - read it - refer to it as a source and to unashameably copy.
   Niggles;
   1) No art deco gardens. Is this an ommission or was this branch of human endeavour eschewed by the industrial age?
   2) Illustrations of pieces sometimes miss listing the media and all are missing the size.



3. This book is an absolute triumph. First, it is positively gorgeous - the images just leap off the pages. Second, the essays are more in-depth, engaging, and informative than any other book I've found on the subject. This book discusses every facet of Art Deco as well: it explores the origins at the Paris Exhibition in 1925, goes through the influence in East Asia, Latin America, and South Africa, not to mention Europe. A great chapter on Deco in Hollywood; also explores all of the sources, iconography - and all of this on top of covering every aspect of the movement - ceramics, jewelry, fashion, architecture, glass, photography, graphic design, bookbindings, travel and transport, and so so much more - with stunning visuals. A fantastic read, a great resource, a beautiful work, and an absolute MUST for anyone interested in the subject! Well worth the money, and a fantastic addition to any library. Highly recommended!



4. A sumptuous coffee-table book of this exuberant art style and I think it could well become the standard book on the subject. The forty essays are divided into four sections, Sources and Iconography, 1925 Paris Exhibition, Spread of Deco and finally Deco World, and I liked the way, especially in Sources and Iconography, that the authors explain how various art styles were moulded into deco art which culminated in the very influential 1925 Paris show.
   
   I thought the last two sections were a fascinating coverage of how Art Deco spread around the world, mainly as architecture and fashion, though in Europe also as a fine art style. In North America, it influenced a huge range of commercial products. Perhaps this was the only art form that was truly democratic in that it was available (as streamlining) to be seen or bought on any Main Street across the Nation.
   
   The design and printing are excellent. Many of the photos, especially color, are presented whole page, the rest are all well sized, and they all have captions. The back of the book has a very comprehensive bibliography, fortunately listed as relating to each chapter rather than just an alphabetical list, the index is divided into two, Names and Subject. I was very impressed with this attention to detail and with the excellent text, images and production surely `Art Deco 1910-1939' will be read for many years to come.
   
   ***FOR A LOOK INSIDE click 'customer images' under the cover.

3 comments about The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration.

1. The ideas and concepts in this book are wonderful. When I am not looking at it for inspiration, I am looking at just for sheer enjoyment.



2. A book that no designer should be without. A lasting source of inspiration.



3. Here's how to start a studio, publicize it, become a superstar, and change the world: (1) From birth, draw like a Renaissance angel. (2) Be one of 15 percent of applicants selected to attend New York's Cooper Union. (3) Get fired from your first job, or hate it and quit. (4) Surround yourself with like-minded, equally talented partners. (5) Follow your heart, put forth your ideas, be fearless. (6) In a grid-locked Modernist era, produce fanciful, hand-drawn work. (7) Keep doing it for 50 years. Over 25 of those years, distribute 86 issues of a self-promotional publication that still continues to inspire.
   
   For a quarter-century, members of Push Pin Studio used every art technique -- woodcut, charcoal, watercolor, collage, pen-and-ink, color adhesive film -- to interpret subjects including Good and Evil, Black and White, and Teens and Bikers. Topics ranged from the serious ("Violence and the American Dream") to the silly ("The Mouth").
   
   Milton Glaser has been known to say that nobody draws any more. This book, which features at least one cover and spread from each issue -- many tattered and yellowing -- may spawn a revival of the artist's hand as a design tool, and a revival of the one-color job. The first 30 or so issues of the Graphic, with a couple of virtuoso two- and three-color exceptions, are a lesson in how to do brilliant work in black on newsprint. Contrast is the designer's best friend and weapon: white space against black, tiny against huge, curlicue against justified column of type. Wit is a powerful tool, too.
   
   A head-and-shoulders portrait of a large barnyard rooster graces the book's cover. Thickly outlined on benday-dotted background, he sports a tuxedo shirt, bow-tie, monocle, dotted beak, and bright red wattle. I'd like to think that the mascot choice has more to do with the concept of "something to crow about" than being fearful-or cuckolded. In a phone interview, Seymour Chwast set me straight by listing the bird's qualities: authoritative, prolific, sophisticated, and on-time. Ah-ha, the real meaning is "the early bird meets the deadline," with a few grains of self-mockery thrown in.
   
   If Push Pin did not singlehandedly transform mainstream culture, as Steven Heller suggests in the introduction, it had a symbiotic relationship with it. Push Pin took from everything around them: from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco, from old signboards and newspapers, American primitives and wood-type specimens, from current art and music, fashion and advertising. The faces in Chwast's "Dante's Inferno" poster of 1967 echo Richard Avendon's solarized Beatles portraits. The Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine -- and the rainbows-and-butterflies trend in animation that ensued -- owed its aesthetic to Push Pin. It will take a more diligent researcher than I to ascertain whether the color and line that burst through in the Push Pin Graphic issue 52 (and morphed into Chwast's signature style) was inspired by psychedelic rock posters, or whether the Push Pin style reached San Francisco concert promoters first.
   
   Content aside, the Push Pin Graphic is a book well worth examining for its own design: the hefty squarish format, sense of scale and pacing, fine color and black- and-white printing on uncoated stock. The details also merit pleasurable study: old-fashioned typefaces like Cheltenham and Stymie set in old-fashioned ways like centered and flush-left-and-right; even the placement of the folios on the page. Just as the subject matter of each issue of the Push Pin Graphic mirrored goings-on in the world, the design and pacing of the book mirror the issues being featured. As the Graphic became more eclectic and colorful and began to function as self-promotion for a larger group of artists, the pages of the book become more patterned and colorful. Martin Venezky has honored the Push Pin style while designing a book that's 100 percent up-to-date.
   
   This book may be a walk down memory lane, but it's far from an epitaph. Glaser, 75, now working on posters, books, a museum exhibition, and performance art with a political bent, recently said, "Retiring is for people who fundamentally hate what they do." Chwast, 73, added, "Every era had its doubts, but we kept going. The culture -- music, posters, films, kept rubbing off on us, and we keep reinventing it and rubbing it back on them."
   
   If the Push Pin conviction, zest, and humor rubs off on today's readers -- and if some of them decide to shut down their computers and digital cameras for a little while and pick up a brush or pen and ink -- this book will be a great success.

1 comments about Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle.

1. Okay, we sort of tell kids that art is a good thing. We tell them that artists are to be admired. We sort of tell them poetry is a fine thing, but God forbid anyone really teaches this stuff any more! When looking through this book I was awed and angered. Presented here are some of the most influential artists, of nearly every medium, that worked in America during the late 20th Century, but I would like to see how many of these names have any familiarity to people.
   
   I conducted my own little experiment. I asked people to tell me who Allen Ginsberg was. I chose Ginsberg because I thought he had the most recognizable name. Out of the 20 I asked, three were able to tell me they "thought" he was a writer. One told me he was a poet, but when I asked if he wrote "Howl!" or "A Coney Island of the Mind", he didn't know. (He wrote "Howl!" Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote the other.)
   
   Get this book and let it lead you to dozens more books and see the depth of artistic experiment that Wallace Berman encouraged. Then go get outraged and start loudly reciting poetry on the train platform while you're waiting to get into the city for your job at the bank.
   
   This beautiful coffee table book is an intriguing study of the people and their lasting contributions to our culture. It should be in every library and in every school that claims it is educating our children.

2 comments about Noble Hounds and Dear Companions: The Royal Photograph Collection.

1. Loved the pictures and explanations of all the family members and their dogs. Very interesting book. I enjoyed finding out about the varioues nobility and how they saw dogs, how important dogs were to some of them. Loved the beautiful pics too.



2. I have long been an admirer of the British Monarchy, for over. I remember skipping school to watch Princess Anne get married. (The first time in the early 70s)
   
   I've known they were animal lovers but this book just shows you how much they cared for their furry friends. I am a dog lover to the max, and this book was just so fascinating.

2 comments about William Kentridge (Contemporary Artists).

1. William Kentridge is a white South African born in 1955. He is best known for animations, based on large charcoal paintings, which have as their subject the complexity of living a meaningful life in the warped society of South Africa.

   Kentridge makes the films by working on the charcoal paintings, then clicking the film camera one frame at a time. He then walks back to the painting and works on it, before exposing another twenty-fifth of a second.

   Kentridge is articulate and interesting and has established himself as a great artist in the tradition of Hogarth, Daumier and the German expressionists. His exhibition, which closed here in Los Angeles last week, was breathtaking. This book is the catalog of that exhibition.




2. I leave off a "star" only because viewing Kentridge's drawings can not substitute the experience of viewing his films. Indeed, looking the charcoal drawings I wonder at what stage of the sequence it is in. Is this the last step in the drawing? Looking at a drawing outside of its time base can also be a positive. I love searching the surface for smudge marks and erased hands and arms. His drawings end up being a record of movement (something that most single drawings fail to capture). For anyone who doesn't know, by the way, Kentridge animates his charcoal drawings using filmic stop motion techniques. The results are amazing. Anyone interested in drawing and painting, the birth of early film, and South African Politics: here is your artist.

5 comments about Michelangelo: The Vatican Frescoes.

1. I found this book to be a very beautiful presentation of Michelangelo's fresco's inside the Sistine Chapel. The pictures are very clear and the text is good, although the fact that it is written by non-native English speakers is apparent. Anyone wanting to remember their experience of viewing the Sistine Chapel in Rome will be pleased by buying this book. At least I was.



2. The image quality in this book is excellent. I have never been to Vatican. So it's hard to judge whether the color is right. I just try to use this book to study anatomy after Michelangelo. For some parts of frescoes, this book provides enlarged pictures. Some images show the frescoes before restoration, although not in detail. In general, it's a great reference book for my study.



3. Being an admirer of the magnificent Michelangelo I am very pleased to have acquired this book. The pictures are beautifully printed. By the end of the book I wish to revisit the Sistine Chapel to view those parts printed in the book which I have obviously missed with my naked eyes. The details of the restoration work is an added bonus. To get the most of this book, please read it together with "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King. You will not regret the experience. Michelangelo's frescoes are simply sublime!



4. The photographs in this book are too good to be believed. I have never had an art book on the Sistine Chapel before that so moved me.
   It was obviously produced with great care -- the colors look perfect, the focus is perfect. I can't rave about this book enough. And so complete! You will know every nook and cranny of the Chapel when you finish this book.
   Well worth more than what you pay for it.



5. This is an absolutely superb book, largely because the reproductions of the frescoes are excellent and really capture the colors that you see when you visit the Chapel. I have found many art books disappointing, because they simply fail to capture the works they present. I first saw this book in an American bookstore after visiting the Sistine Chapel, and really thrilled to see if after looking at several other books where colors were much duller and the images simply not as sharp. In addition to its fine colors, the book provides many fine closeups of each individual section. The text is also very good, describing the subjects of the painting, the history behind the paintings, ansd also the recent restorstion. This is a must-have book!