Like nature, only better. Nature with all the awkward bits smoothed out. And then picturesque, like a landscape painting, states Jim Lewis' protagonist, defining an English garden in Cecily Brown's newest book of paintings. An imaginative pas de deux, The English Garden sees British painter Brown (born 1969) and American writer Lewis (born 1963) contribute acutely detailed and darkly sensuous allusions to the traditional 18th-century English landscape garden. Thirty-nine of Brown's paintings are interspersed throughout this compact hardcover publication as tipped-in images. The largely abstract works, with glimpses of figurative elements, are a dichotomy of warm and subdued strokes of color, each containing an expansive landscape unto itself. Novelist and critic Jim Lewis' story transports the reader to the English countryside and investigates the seductive pull of the natural world in tandem with Brown's paintings. Combining two major voices in contemporary literature and painting, this volume is a truly gorgeous production.
PUBLISHER Karma, New York
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 6.25 x 6.75 in. / 72 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/28/2015 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 128
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781942607038TRADE List Price: $35.00 CAD $47.50 GBP £30.00
Published by Royal Academy Publications. Text by Monty Don, Ann Dumas, Heather Lemonedes, Jamies Priest, William Robinson.
While depictions of gardens are found throughout history, the impressionists were among the first to portray gardens directly from life, focusing on their color and form rather than using them as a background. This volume explores the close, symbiotic relationship between artists and gardens that developed during the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries, centering on Monet, a great horticulturalist as well as a great artist who cultivated gardens wherever he lived, and the creation of his masterpiece garden at Giverny, where he painted his renowned water-lilies series. Beautifully illustrated with masterpieces by Monet and later painters—Renoir, Bonnard, Sargent, Klee, Kandinsky and Matisse, among others—Painting the Modern Garden traces the evolution of the garden theme from impressionist visions of light and atmosphere to retreats for reverie, sites for bold experimentation, sanctuaries, and, ultimately, signifiers of a world restored to order—a paradise regained.
Karen Kilimnik takes pictures with the same gesture she paints with: an unerring sense of the glut of shiny surface beauty, under which lurk the shades of monstrous things unseen and unspoken. She takes pictures with a shrewd, informed eye. She adores kitsch, but she knows how phony it is and how much this phoniness makes it irresistible. She is a wise old soul but she's absolutely determined to preserve the innocence and vulnerability of a young and restless mind. Kilimnik takes pictures of what she unconditionally loves, and this love is eclectic and deeply darkly romantic. She photographs idylls ad nauseam: the rolling hills of the Cotswolds in south central England, so leafy they almost seem unreal; a ladies' bicycle, hedge-lined streets, sheep in the shadow of a tree, cows in the morning mist, a squirrel that seems to be nibbling on a flower, sitting ducks on the banks of a stream. Kilimnik views profane reality through the mercilessly wide-open eyes of her camera lens, transforming it in her photographs into a stage for her fabulously dreamy / nightmarish fairytale figurations and arrangements. When reality does not suffice, she embellishes it, trimming the trees in the garden, for example, with glass Christmas ornaments or with fairy lights. Running through Kilimnik's photographic work are several motifs we know from her painting. And the two come together in her obsession with photographing details from her own paintings over and over again, such as the magnificent palace walls she has painted, as though beseeching us to agree that her painted fictions are no less real than so-called reality.
Botanical Illustration in Europe and America 1600-1850
Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Nancy Keeler.
Originally developed as an aid to professional herbalists, botanical illustration quickly blossomed into an art form in its own right. The first flower books were intended as medicinal guides, or else illustrated volumes that catalogued the elaborate and extensive gardens of the well-to-do. But when Carl Linnaeus first classified the plant kingdom in 1735, the botanical book quickly took on a more scientific cast. By the nineteenth century, the flourishing of botanical publications reflected both the rapid rise of gardening as an amateur hobby and the desire of artists and decorators for new visual resources. Gardens in Perpetual Bloom: Botanical Illustration in Europe and America 1600–1850 traces the appreciation of flowers and their depiction, from the studious world of monks and princes to the era of the gardening enthusiast. The book's 110 prints and drawings—which include masterful engravings by Georg Dionysus Ehret, the eighteenth century's most accomplished botanical artist, and hand-colored prints by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the premier draftsman of flowers for Marie Antoinette and Josephine Bonaparte—are remarkable for their technical virtuosity, delicate tonalities, scientific accuracy and seemingly infinite variety. Gardens in Perpetual Bloom is both a valuable historical survey and an affordable, attractively designed volume of jewel-like beauty.
Published by Planthouse, Inc.. By Susan Orlean and Philip Taaffe.
This one-of-a-kind collaboration between acclaimed author Susan Orlean and celebrated artist Philip Taaffe unites the literary and the visual, the nostalgic and the optimistic, and brings greenery to your bookshelf. Taking inspiration from the rapidly dwindling "flower district" of New York City, Orlean and Taaffe offer tandem musings on the conceit of "the floral ghost." Orlean’s essay, one of her first botanically themed writings since she penned the widely lauded The Orchid Thief, reflects on a poignant moment when she first visited the district in its resplendent heyday. Her text is accompanied by Taaffe’s colorful silkscreen monotypes—a bouquet of paper and ink recalling the unique yet universal nature of time passing and petals fading. An evocative rendering of both the memories of youth and the ephemeral nature of the cityscape, The Floral Ghost makes an elegant gift for every aspiring writer, artist and dreamer who moves to a city to make his or her mark or who admires its mutable glory from afar. Susan Orlean (born 1955) is the bestselling author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Her 2011 book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, was a New York Times bestseller. Orlean has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York. Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He has exhibited worldwide since his first solo exhibition in New York, in 1982. Taaffe has traveled widely in the Middle East, South America and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the 1993 book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles. His work is in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Taaffe lives and works in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.
PUBLISHER Planthouse, Inc.
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 6.5 x 6.5 in. / 36 pgs / 33 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/22/2016 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2016 p. 27
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780986281495TRADE List Price: $22.00 CAD $30.50 GBP £20.00
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Diane Radycki.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) painted her last self-portrait in 1907, while she was in her third trimester. In the painting she gazes straight at the viewer, holding up two flowers—symbols representing the creativity and procreativity of women artists—and resting a protective hand atop her swelling belly. Modersohn-Becker would die three weeks after giving birth, at age 31, still to be recognized as the first woman artist to challenge centuries of representations of the female body. An essay by art historian Diane Radycki surveys Modersohn-Becker's career and her posthumous recognition.
Published by Koenig Books. Foreword by Beatrix Ruf. Introduction by Bart Rutten, Geurt Imanse. Text by Patrice Deparpe, Maurice Rummens.
This substantial new hardcover is published to accompany an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Readers are transported through the museum's Matisse works--an array of Eastern nudes, colorful fabrics, carpets, potted plants and idyllic landscapes--plus a selection of additional paintings, sculptures and works on paper by the French master.
At the heart of the exhibition is one of the most beloved works in the Stedelijk's collection: the monumental paper cut-out "The Parakeet and the Mermaid" (1952-53), presented with other Matisse cut-outs and rarely exhibited works in fabric and stained glass inspired by them. Arranged chronologically, the volume guides readers through Matisse's days in Paris, the birth of Fauvism, his representational work made in Nice, through to his work in Polynesia and Oceania. The Oasis of Matisse portrays the artist's output using contextualization with works by his contemporaries, offering a comprehensive overview of his influences. One of modern art's towering figures, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker before turning to paper cut-outs in the 1940s. From the clashing hues of his Fauvist works made in the South of France in 1904-5, to the harmonies of his Nice interiors from the 1920s, to this brilliant final chapter, Matisse followed a career-long path that he described as "construction by means of color."
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