Книги по истории искусства

Persian art and architecture have a rich heritage that stretches far beyond the borders of modern-day Iran, from the Abbasid monuments of Baghdad to the splendid Timurid buildings of Samarqand and Bukhara.

In this glorious volume a wealth of photographs capture this profusion in rich detail, creating a vibrant guide that will captivate anyone keen to explore the cultural achievements of this 
great civilization.

When the ancient land of Persia was conquered by the Arabs, its people embraced the coming of 
Islam but strove also to retain their own language and culture, celebrating their history in works of literature such as the epic Shahnama. This merging of influences resulted in a distinctive artistic style that spread through the Middle East, reflected in monumental architecture and in art forms that range from expressive miniature paintings to sumptuous carpets and ceramics.

The book follows a historical path across the Iranian world and examines the artistic legacies of great rulers and their dynasties, from the rebirth of Persian art under the Seljuqs, to the magnificent structures built by Timur-i Lang in Samarqand, to the cultural flowering that occurred under the Safavid dynasty through the patronage of Shah Abbas and his descendants, and beyond.

Palaces, mosques, madrasas and mausoleums display a mesmerizing decorative complexity, with form and ornament combining to create an indivisible whole. Spectacular polychrome tiles, intricate brickwork, curling arabesque motifs and calligraphic inscriptions attain a transcendent beauty, designed to reflect both the temporal power of the rulers who commissioned these works and the heavenly glory of creation

Culled from the archives of Magnum Photos, the world’s preeminent photo agency, Pop 60s celebrates the visionaries, icons, and memorable moments of the decade that transformed the fabric of American life. From Andy Warhol, Twiggy, and James Bond to Beatlemania, biker culture, and geodesic domes, the reverberations of the Swinging Sixties are felt in today’s art, music, design, and fashion.

This phenomenal collection of photographs spans the globe, including images of Tokyo nightlife, Brazilian Carnaval, and art happenings in New York City. Renowned photographers such as Dennis Stock, Eve Arnold, Danny Lyon, Thomas Hoepker, David Hurn, and many others contribute both their best-loved and their seldom-seen photographs. From naked spectators at the Isle of Wight Festival to literati at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, Pop 60s captures the spirit, style, and attitude of an unforgettable era.

Pop Art, an abbreviation of Popular Art, is a movement that found its origins in England in the 1950s but realised its full potential in New York in the 60s.

The name referred to the interest of a number of artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925) and Jasper Johns (born 1930), in the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop Art, led by the cult figure of Andy Warhol, was probably the most extraordinary innovation of 20th-century art. It put art into everyday terms and so helped close the gap between “high art" and “low art". The British artist Richard Hamilton defined Pop Art as: “popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, glamorous, and Big Business".

Richly documented and clearly structured, this book provides an overall view as well as a new and insightful perspective on Pop Art and the works of the artists who were at the forefront of this movement

This new title in the renowned Art & Ideas series is a thorough introduction to, and significant appraisal of, the art of Pop. 

Bradford Collins explains the essence of Pop art and examines its full history in a contemporary cultural and political context – the origins of the movement during the 1950s, the flourishing of Pop art in America and the UK during the 1960s, and its further incarnations and more widespread impact. 

The 250 illustrations include all the most classic examples of Pop art by such well-known figures as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as lesser-known works that have been neglected in recent years but are essential to a thorough understanding of Pop. 

The contemporary source material used by artists to make their works and consideration of what was in the media at the time support discussions of the inspiration, creation and impact of the art.

This book offers a radically new perspective on the so-called ‘Pop Art’ creative dynamic that has been around since the 1950s.

It does so by enhancing the term ‘Pop Art’ which has always been recognised as a misnomer, for it obscures far more than it clarifies. Instead, the book connects all the art in question to mass-culture which has always provided its core inspiration. Above all, the book suggests that this Mass-Culture Art has created a new Modernist tradition which is still flourishing. The book traces that tradition through the forty or more years since Pop/Mass-Culture Art first came into being in the 1950s, and locates it within its larger historical context.

Naturally the book discusses the major contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition right up to the present, in the process including a number of artists who have never previously been connected with so-called ‘Pop Art’ but who have always been primarily interested in mass-culture, and who are therefore partially or totally connected with Pop/Mass-Culture Art. The book reproduces in colour and discusses in great detail over 150 of the key works of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition. Often this involves the close reading of images whose meaning has largely escaped understanding previously. The result is a book that qualitatively is fully on a level with Eric Shanes’s other best-selling and award-winning writings.

About the author

Eric Shanes is primarily a painter who has exhibited many times in London and elsewhere. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on Britain’s greatest visual artist, J.M.W. Turner, and the author of ten bestselling books and catalogues on the life and work of that major European figure. Additionally, Shanes has also written bestselling books and catalogues on Brancusi, Warhol, Hockney, The Golden Age of British Watercolours, and on the Impressionists in London. Parkstone International has published two books by Eric Shanes, one on J.M.W. Turner, the other on Andy Warhol. Shanes is a Vice-President of the Turner Society and its current Chairman, as well as the Founding Editor of Turner Studies, a scholarly journal published by the Tate Gallery. He has also frequently contributed articles on Turner, Brancusi and other artists to specialist and popular journals and newspapers. In 2000-2001 he curated the major exhibition entitled ‘Turner: The Great Watercolours’ that was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London to mark the 150th anniversary of Turner’s death. Shanes lectures on traditional, modern and contemporary art all over the world

While Impressionism marked the first steps toward modern painting by revolutionising an artistic medium stifled by academic conventions, Post-Impressionism, even more revolutionary, completely liberated colour and opened it to new, unknown horizons. Anchored in his epoch, relying on the new chromatic studies of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Georges Seurat transcribed the chemist’s theory of colours into tiny points that created an entire image. With his heavy strokes,Van Gogh illustrated the midday sun, while Cézanne renounced perspective. Rich in its variety and in the singularity of its artists, Post-Impressionism was a passage taken by all the well-known figures of 20th century painting, and which is here presented, for the great pleasure of the reader, by Nathalia Brodskaïa.

About the author:
Nathalia Brodskaïa is a curator at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. She has published monographs on Rousseau, Renoir, Derain, Vlaminck, and Van Dongen, as well as many books on the Fauves and Naïve Art. She is currently working on a study of French painters at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

From crowded dance halls to smoky cabarets, this vibrant collection of posters from the Belle Époque explores the birth, development, and continued popularity of a graphic genre.

Thanks to innovations in color lithography, the streets of fin-de-siècle Paris were punctuated with brightly hued posters featuring bold typography and playful imagery. Many of these posters were torn down almost as soon as they were pastedup, finding their way into private homes and, eventually, museums and collections all over the world. Although many artists contributed to the affichomanie, or “poster craze,” one of the most famous among them was Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec. This gorgeous book offers exquisite reproductions of more than one hundred posters, including those by Lautrec and his contemporaries Bonnard, Picasso, Chéret and Mucha. Advertising everything from tony theater productions to the licentious cancan, bicycles to biscuits, these posters range from cheerfully exuberant to slyly decadent. In her essay, Mary Weaver Chapin captures the voices of the artists, collectors, and critics who fueled the poster craze of the 1890s. The result is a visual spectacle, a lively discourse on the value and purpose of art, and a celebration of a historically and creatively dynamic era.

The radical ideas associated with Postmodernism swept through the arts in the 1970s, but have always been hard to summarise.

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion presents the movement as not merely an aesthetic vocabulary, but also as a subversive attitude a new way of looking at the world. Bringing together practitioners, theorists and critics, this groundbreaking book assesses the impact of the phenomenon on all areas of art and design. It covers architecture, interiors and urban planning; product, graphic and furniture design; the fashion and style industries; and photography, film, television and video everything from MTV and Grace Jones, to White Noise and Bladerunner, Thierry Mugler and Commes des Garcons.

143 illustrations

In Victorian England, with the country swept up in the Industrial Revolution, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, close to William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement, yearned for a return to bygone values. Wishing to revive the pure and noble forms of the Italian Renaissance, the major painters of the circle such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, in opposition to the academicism of the time, favoured realism and biblical themes over the affected canons of the nineteenth century. This work, with its captivating text and rich illustrations, describes with enthusiasm this singular movement which notably inspired the followers of Art Nouveau and Symbolism.

Emile Prisse d'Avennes (1807–1879), a French Orientalist, author and artist, was one of the greatest pre-20th century Egyptologists. An ardent admirer of the superb skills of Egyptian and Oriental artisans, he was enamoured of Arabic art. As a youth, he dreamed of exploring the Orient, and at 19 began travelling to Greece and Palestine. Over the next 40 years, he explored Syria, Arabia, Persia, and resided in Egypt and Algeria. Converting to Islam, he travelled Egypt disguised as an Arab, using the name Edris Effendi. A student of ancient Egyptian and Islamic cultures, he later wrote: "We shall discuss all the arts, all the industries cultivated by Orientals with so much taste, brilliance, and fantasy. We will present splendid reproductions of the monuments, objects of art and luxury, which provide evidence of an advanced civilization, the influence of which has been felt even in Europe."

In 1848/1851 Prisse d'Avennes published his Oriental Album in London (Oriental Album. Characters, Costumes, and Modes of Life, the Valley of the Nile). This brilliant collection of 32 chromolithographs illustrating the people and costumes of the Nile Valley was accompanied by a commentary by renowned Orientalist and Egyptologist James Augustus St. John. After again travelling to North Africa, Prisse d'Avennes returned to France in 1860, bearing the fruits of his journeys - hundreds of folio drawings, photographs, sketches, plans and 400 meters of bas-reliefs. Fascinated by the symmetry, complexity, and opulence of Egyptian and Arabic art, he drew from this vast collection to create compilations of the finest examples of art and architecture, which also took into account historical, social, and religious contexts. In 1877, he published his outstanding survey on Islamic art and architecture, Arab Art (L'Art arabe d'après les monuments du Kaire, 1869–1877), in Paris. This publication reproduces the three atlas volumes containing 200 plates - 137 of them magnificent chromolithographs - mainly by Prisse d'Avennes. L’Art arabe is an indispensable compendium on the development of Arabic art, portraying its splendour and diversity, and a work of supreme draftsmanship.

The authors:

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom are a husband-and-wife team of teachers and writers on virtually all aspects of Islamic art and architecture. They share both the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Together and singly they have written or edited a score of books and hundreds of articles on subjects ranging from the Dome of the Rock to modern calligraphy. Most recently they edited Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture.

Treasures of the Nile. The Egyptian explorations of Émile Prisse d’Avennes

The complete, revelatory illustrations of Egyptologist Émile Prisse d’Avennes, one of the first European explorers to fall obsessively in love with the realm of the pharaohs. This unsurpassed collection covers Egyptian architecture, drawing, sculpture, and painting in a visual and archaeological feast of symmetry and complexity, mystery and opulence.

A lifelong devotee of ancient Egyptian and Oriental culture, the French author, artist, and scholar Achille-Constant-Théodore-Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807–1879) is famed as one of the most influential Egyptologists, long before the discipline was even properly established.

Prisse first embarked on his explorations in 1836, documenting sites throughout the Nile Valley, often under his Egyptian pseudonym, Edris Effendi. Prisse’s first publication of notes, drawings, and squeezes (a kind of frottage) came in the form of Les Monuments égyptiens, a modest collection of 51 plates, but one met with considerable acclaim in popular and intellectual circles. Encouraged by his success, Prisse returned to Egypt in the late 1850s to expand his work into the collection L’Histoire de l’art égyptien — together with his first volume, these two tomes make up a truly complete survey of Egyptian art.

His albums cover architecture, drawing, sculpture, painting, and industrial or minor arts, with sections, plans, architectural details, and surface decoration all documented with utmost sensitivity and accuracy. Even when compared to the products of the great state-sponsored expeditions to Egypt of this period, Prisse’s compendium remains the largest, single-handed illustrated record of Egyptian art in existence.

Discover the complete collection of Prisse’s unsurpassed illustrations in a visual and archaeological feast of symmetry and complexity. Once exclusively available as an XL-sized title, this Bibliotheca Universalis edition captures all the mystery and opulence of Prisse’s groundbreaking collection in an affordable, compact format.

The author:

Salima Ikram is a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and has participated in many Egyptian archaeological projects. After double majoring in history as well as Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, she received her MPhil and PhD in Egyptian Archaeology from Cambridge University (UK). She has directed the Animal Mummy Project, co-directed the Predynastic Gallery Project and is co-director of the North Kharga Oasis Survey. As an acknowledged expert she has lectured on her work all over the world. Salima Ikram is also the author of several books on Egyptian Archaeology, publishes in both scholarly and popular journals, and is a contributor to various magazines.

About the series:

Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!

Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together more than 100 of our all-time favourite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.

Bookworm’s delight — never bore, always excite!

Art as we know it today would not exist without the Renaissance. Widely considered the most influential phenomenon in European art, architecture, literature, and science, the movement revolutionized the Western conception of reality and heralded the emergence of modernity out of the Middle Ages.

The Renaissance first gained momentum in Italy, at the end of the 14th century, spreading across Europe over the course of the next centuries, with dynamic epicenters in Florence, the Low Countries, and Germany. The movement found its intellectual basis in humanism, derived from classical Greek philosophy. Across art, science, literature, and politics, proponents of the Renaissance avowed that man was the “measure of all things” and determined to replace scholastic medieval confines with a revival of antiquity.

Under the influence of humanism, artists advanced anatomy and geometry to reach new feats of figurative accuracy and revolutionize renderings of perspective to reflect the human experience of place in space. In Flemish painting, artists such as Bruegel brought new techniques and an everyday sensibility to landscapes and still lifes while in Germany, Dürer and Cranach pioneered an unprecedented drama and psychology in woodcut and engraving.

From Florence to Nuremberg, Venice to Bruges, this essential introduction in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series provide a dependable foundation to the transformative reach and sweep of the Renaissance era. Through the movement’s famed luminaries and lesser-known proponents, its social and political circumstances, and its diversions and developments over time and geography, we take in an extraordinary phenomenon, transformative centuries of change that proffered individual genius, regional variety, and a wholesale reconfiguration of seeing and representing the world.

Featured artists include: Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, Hieronymus Bosch, Sandro Botticelli, Pieter Brueghel, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, El Greco, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein the Younger, Fra Filippo Lippi, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, Paolo Uccello, Veronese, and Leonardo da Vinci.

About the series:

- Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre series features:
- approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions
- a detailed illustrated introduction plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural, and social events that took place during that period
- a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Широкое культурное и идеологическое движение, Возрождение, или Ренессанс, было периодом интенсивного литературного, художественного и научного творчества, охватившего Европу в период между XIV и XVI веками и знаменовавшим собой переход от средневековой к современной концепции интеллектуальной жизни.

В период раннего Возрождения сосредоточившиеся и вскормленные во Флоренции и Италии искусство и культура претерпели радикальное обновление, которое постепенно распространилось по всей Европе различными средствами и стилистическими проявлениями. Возрождение основывалось на обновленном интересе к Древнему миру – от философии до литературы, от мифологии до изобразительного искусства, – неоплатонической философии и гуманизму. Научные интересы включали познание природы и человека, в том числе, его анатомии, и поиск новых технологий. Гармоничное сочетание основных искусств вырастало над уровнем механического воспроизведения, чтобы превратиться в свободное выражение теперь уже консолидированных интеллектуальных прерогатив мастера.

Фундаментальный вклад королевских дворов, правителей, покровителей и деятелей церкви, которые использовали новые стилистические языки для украшения своих дворцов и поместий, был естественным следствием великолепия искусств.

In this richly illustrated book, Xavier Canonne, director of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, dives into René Magritte’s photo and film archive, revealing a lesser-known side of the surrealist master.

Discovered in the 1970s, more than 10 years after the artist’s death, this collection gives us access to a family album, an informal Magritte, from his childhood to the last years of his life. We see Magritte with his parents and brothers, as a newly married man with his wife Georgette, and with his contemporaries in the Brussels Surrealist group. Spontaneous snapshots are complemented by posed scenes, including improvised tableaus with his fellow artists, parodies of famous movies consciously arranged with Georgette, portraits of Magritte at his easel at home, and staged photographs as models for his paintings.

Images where the artist and his friends hide their faces or turn away from the camera particularly resonate with his paintings and his investigation of the ‘hidden visible’. While other Surrealists such as Man Ray and Raoul Ubac made photography an essential part of their work, Magritte remained a true painter. Yet this book demonstrates that his photographs and films are so pervaded with his spirit that they are inseparable from his oeuvre of paintings. Far from being merely entertaining occasional images, they shed a familiar light on the painter’s thought and evidence the same investigation of the mysteries of the world.

Deriving from the French word rocaille, in reference to the curved forms of shellfish, and the Italian barocco, the French created the term Rococo. Appearing at the beginning of the 18th century, it rapidly spread to the whole of Europe. Extravagant and light, Rococo responded perfectly to the offhandedness of the aristocracy of the time. In many aspects, this art was linked to its Baroque predecessor, and is thus also referred to as late Baroque style. While artists such as Tiepolo, Boucher and Reynolds carried the style to its apogee, the movement was often condemned for its superficiality. In the second half of the 18th century, Rococo began its decline. At the end of the century, facing the advent of Neoclassicism, it was plunged into obscurity. It had to wait nearly a century before art historians could restore it to the radiance of its olden age, which is rediscovered in this work by Klaus H. Carl and Victoria Charles.

About the Authors:

Victoria Charles is a professor of art history. She has published many works and has regularly contributed to Art Information, an international guide to contemporary art. Writing frequently for specialised journals and magazines, Victoria Charles recently contributed to a collective work, 1000 Paintings of Genius.
Klaus H. Carl is the author of numerous works on the history of large cities, and is also a well-known photographer of nature. A teacher by profession, he also took part, alongside Victoria Charles, in the writing of 1000 Paintings of Genius.