Authors: Al Seckel.
Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Sterling
Publication Date: 2007-08-01


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Jim Coddington. Robert Lubar. Jordana Mendelson. Adele Nelson. Joan Miro.
Hardcover, 242 pages
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication Date: 2008-11-01


Reviews :

    Taking Joan Miro's notorious declaration of 1927--"I want to assassinate painting"--as its point of departure, this richly illustrated volume is the first to focus on Miro the "anti-painter," identifying the core practices and strategies the artist used to challenge painting between 1927 and 1937. Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 surveys the various material, iconographical and rhetorical forms of Miro's attacks on painting by presenting, in chronological sequence, 12 distinct series of works, beginning with a remarkable group of paintings on unprimed canvas and concluding with Miro's return to Realism in "Still Life with Old Shoe" (1937). Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, stylistic heterogeneity and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key tactics of aggression that are explored in this extraordinary presentation of the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects and drawings Miro produced during this crucial decade of his long career. This volume integrates close scrutiny of Miro's materials and processes with historical and iconographic analysis, leading to an expanded understanding of the underappreciated aggressiveness of an artist long regarded as Surrealism's most lyrical painter-poet.
Joan Miro was born in 1893 in Barcelona. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, and through 1931, Miro generally spent half of each year in the French capitol and half in his native Catalonia, returning to live in France after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One of the twentieth century's greatest Modern artists, Miro created a pictorial world of intense imaginative power, in which visionary and cosmic elements are inextricably intertwined with the earthly and mundane. He died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain....

Authors: Robert Descharnes. Gilles Neret.
Hardcover, 780 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2007-08-01
Edition: 25th

Reviews :

    TASCHEN's 25th anniversary ? Special edition! Two large-format hardcover volumes in a slipcase at a special bestseller price Picasso called Dal? "an outboard motor that's always running." Dal? thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dal? (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics?and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This lively monograph presents the infamous Surrealist in full color and in his own words. His provocative imagery is all here, from the soft watches to the notorious burning giraffe. A friend of the artist for over thirty years, privy to the reality behind Dal?'s public image, author Robert Descharnes is uniquely qualified to analyze Dal??both the man and the myth....

Authors: Zdzilsaw Beksinski.
Hardcover, 80 pages
Publisher: Morpheus International
Publication Date: 1998-12-08


Reviews :

    This art book captures 30 years in the career of Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. The subject matter ranges from apocalyptic landscapes with towering edifices and zombie-like figures, to scenes of ghostly calm. His haunting, surreal works convey a sense of mystery and are often disturbingly dark....

Authors: Boris Artzybasheff.
Hardcover, 96 pages
Publisher: Titan Books
Publication Date: 2008-10-21


Reviews :

    A striking collection of extraordinary images from one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed and unique American artists.

This fantastical collection teems with ironic imagery which documents our culture’s vanity, aggression, dreams, and neuroses with biting wit and wisdom. Boris Artzybasheff’s striking graphic style, which includes everything from grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, to the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion, is displayed to full effect in this seminal collection of his work.

A stunning collection from an artist with a strong sense of design and humour!...

Authors: Alastair Brotchie. Mel Gooding.
Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Shambhala
Publication Date: 1995-07-04


Reviews :

    This delightful book opens up for everyone the unorthodox creative methods of the Surrealist school of artists and poets that flourished in Europe in the early 1900s. Outrageous language games, alternative card games, "Dream Lotto," and automatic techniques for making poems, stories, collages, and photomontages are accompanied by the art of Max Ernst, Hans Arp, and Tristan Tzara....

    Surrealism is far more than some dead art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. This delightful little book is packed with word and image games that surrealists developed to create their written and graphical art. If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft. And it makes a great book of activities for parties that you want to rise above petite bourgeois posturing. Highly Recommended....

Authors: Andre Breton.
Paperback, 316 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publication Date: 1969-06-15


Reviews :

    Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism
...

Authors: Dorothea Dietrich. Brigid Doherty. Sabine Kriebel. Janine Mileaf. Michael Taylor. Matthew Witkovsky. Hans Jean Arp. Tristan Tzara. Marcel Duchamp. Kurt Schwitters. Francis Picabia. Max Ernst.
Paperback, 536 pages
Publisher: National Gallery of Art, Washington/D.A.P.
Publication Date: 2008-03-01


Reviews :

    Now available in paperback, this lavishly illustrated and astonishingly comprehensive volume stands as the definitive study of the influential but deliberately elusive international Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Organized according to the primary city centers where this shifting, quintessentially avant garde movement emerged, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris features the work of 40 key artists, both infamous and lesser-known, including Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, to name just a few, in media spanning painting, sculpture, photography, collage, photomontage, prints and graphic work. Dynamically designed with an uncommon intelligence suited to the complexity of the movement itself, it contains hundreds of reproductions of works which, until the major traveling exhibition of 2005 and 2006 for which this book was originally produced, had for the most part never been seen in one place together. Documentary images, topical essays and an invaluable illustrated chronology of the movement make this volume uniquely essential, along with witty chronicles of events in each city center; a selected bibliography; and biographies of each artist accompanied by Dada-era photographs....

Authors: Marcel Paquet.
Paperback, 96 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
Edition: Revised

Reviews :

    The illustrations in this work constitute a comprehensive catalogue of the visible thought of the artist. Taking the form of the body in painting or of the relations between image and word, this book presents the poetic enigmas of the Belgian surrealist....

Authors: Jacques Meuris.
Hardcover, 216 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Edition: 25th

Reviews :

    The works of René Magritte (1898 - 1967) and the ideas that underlie them are a special case both in the history of modern art and in surrealist painting. In the search for the "mystery" in which things and organisms are enveloped, Magritte created pictures which, taking everyday reality as their starting point, were to follow a different logic from that to which we are accustomed. Magritte depicts the world of reality in such unsecretive superficiality that the beholder of his pictures is forced to reflect that the mystery of it is not evoked by some sentimental transfiguration, but rather by the logic of his thoughts and associations. Magritte thus invented an inimitable pictorial language which he uses to question our usual comprehension of pictures. In this book, Jacques Meuris traces Magritte's artistic development from its beginnings until the end of his life, and in doing so underlines the originality of this great Belgian Surrealist....