Skira

Realizzato in occasione della grande mostra newyorkese, il volume "From Picasso to Koons. The Artist as Jeweler" propone una vasta panoramica sul gioiello d'artista del XX secolo attraverso le opere dei numerosi grandi artisti che si cimentarono con questa forma di artigianato: da Picasso a Warhol, da Niki de Saint-Phalle a Kapoor, da Louise Bourgeois a Spoerri, Vasarely, Soto, Morellet. Attraverso gli oltre duecento gioielli presenti in catalogo è possibile seguire l'evoluzione plastica degli artisti, studiandone in particolare il cambiamento stilistico nel passaggio da una scala di grandezza a un'altra. Allo stesso tempo, l'indagine di questi gioielli permette di scoprire una sfera più intima dei loro autori, svelandone il rapporto personale con il destinatario dell'opera, spesso una donna amata o una figlia. Oltre ad analizzare queste preziose opere, il volume mette in luce il ruolo fondamentale della donna nel sostenere l'artista in veste di collezionista, interlocutrice, o musa ispiratrice. La collezione di Diane Venet viene presentata come un vero e proprio museo dall'atmosfera intima, dove si racconta una storia dell'arte davvero molto particolare.

The ultimate reference book on the ethnic jewelry of Asian peoples. A comprehensive picture of jewelry beginning with prehistory and continuing into the twentieth-century with the works of contemporary designers. Ivory, beads, leather, shells, enamel work, precious metals, and stones, alone or in combination, are all illustrated throughout. Pieces chosen for their exceptional quality and historical importance come to life here. In addition to their aesthetic beauty, this book explains the historic significance of the jewelry, all anchored in the social, religious, and political contexts that lend it meaning. Accompanied by wonderfully composed photographs, the captions describe the provenance and use of each piece. A concise introductory essay makes this book accessible to the general reader and provides valuable background information for jewelers, designers, art historians, collectors, and dealers.

An account of one of the most interesting phenomena of contemporary architecture: the return to the structure. Over the last ten years architecture would seem to have rediscovered engineering. Now that the post modern period has passed-in which the structure of buildings was camouflaged by coverings of every kind-architecture today seems to have undressed, almost as though wishing to show how it is made. The rediscovery in recent years of plastic form has brought about a closer relationship between architects and engineers. To this we must add the rise of new issues, such as that of environmental engineering, which has changed from being solely a technical and aesthetic practice into a movement in environmentally conscious architecture. If there is a phenomenon today that is able to hold together the various expressions of contemporary architecture, it is this return to the structure and the methods with which it is realized. Through its six thematic categories, this book provides an account of one of the most interesting phenomena of contemporary construction-the laying bare of architecture.

An exhibition catalog that features an impressive retrospective, covering the last fifty years in chronological order. Don McCullin (born 1935, London) is one of the most important photographers of our time. For more than fifty years, his uncompromising black-and-white photographs have shaped our awareness and understanding of modern conflict and its consequences. His images tell the remarkable story of his life and work, including his most famous assignments in Berlin, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. The Winner of the Warsaw Gold Medal and the World Press Photographer Award, he was awarded the ICP Cornell Capa Award in 2006. Key periods in McCullin's life, including his early experiences of evacuation and the Blitz, his commissions from Berlin in 1961 and Cyprus in 1964, and his most famous work for the Sunday Times are here explored alongside more recent projects with Christian Aid, his photographs of last tribes in the Omo River Valley, South Kenya, and Irian Jaya, New Guinea, and, in the last few years, those of still-life and English landscapes at his home in Somerset. A photographic journey across the ruins and landscapes of the boundaries of the Roman Empire completes the volume.

The Museo Ferragamo in Florence pays homage to Marilyn Monroe with a major exhibition and a catalog dedicated to her a half century after her death. Like many divas of the silver screen, Marilyn Monroe loved to wear Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. The exhibition and catalogue dedicated to her are the result of long research and preparatory work, presenting items from the actress's wardrobe worn on the set or in her private life, as well as important documents that reveal the actress's managerial side, her skill and determination in building and grooming her success. In this volume, the curators have sought to interpret a comprehensive collection of famous photographs taken in Marilyn's day-to-day life (by such notable photographers as Beaton, Stern, Barris, Greene) that portray Marilyn in "classic" poses by comparing them with famous works of art from the past that represent similar poses and expressions, from the balanced pathos of French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze's Alessandro morente to Botticelli's Venus. The catalog gathers together all the photos of clothing and Ferragamo footwear, the documents in the exhibition, and a very large group of photographs and exceptional works of art from such prestigious institutions as the Museo Canova and the Warhol Foundation, and from private collections in Italy and abroad. The catalog also includes essays addressing such themes as classic and modern beauty, Marilyn's biography, and her relationship with other women, as well as an introduction by Stefania Ricci and Sergio Risaliti, exhibition curators.

A collection of some two hundred cartoon strips dedicated to the Beatles, many of which are extremely rare and now inaccessible. Forty years after their break up, the Beatles remain the biggest phenomenon of music and mass culture in the world of entertainment. The book for the first time investigates and documents the interest that cartoonists, publishers, and enthusiasts have shown in their special relationship with the universe of comic strips--a rich and variegated relationship with thousands of publications, in every part of the world, and a production that continues to the present day. In some stories the Beatles are the protagonists, in others they make cameo appearances, while others feature their lyrics transformed into comic strips. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fab Four's first single ("Love Me Do"), the book celebrates the band with a festive, fun and original product, conveying a dimension that does not age, transmitting the legend that endures through the years and changing fashions.

The new, updated edition of the Skira best seller on twentieth-century art. This book collects and documents the birth, development, and decline of the twentieth-century artistic movements in Italy and abroad up to the present.

One of the most eclectic, celebrated and influential figures of the second half of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol is an emblem of American culture of the sixties and seventies. The Andy Warhol Show sheds light not only on the revolutionary role that Warhol played in art but also his influence on graphic design, communication and fashion. Introduced by the editors Gianni Mercurio and Daniela Morera, the exhibition catalogue includes new essays by Bruno Bischofberger, Victor Bokris, Ronald Feldman, Glenn 'O Brien and a critical essay by Demetrio Paparoni. The main nucleus of works reproduced in this striking catalogue is impressive: in addition to the 200 paintings which span his entire career, the book showcases a rich collection of photographs, graphic works and drawings, including Warhol's early illustrations for fashion magazines. The fundamental themes of the Warhol aesthetic can be seen here in some of their most representative examples: the beauty-success-power myth (portraits of Marilyn, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, Jaqueline Kennedy, Mao); consumerism (Campbell's Soup, Brillo Box, Dollar Sign); advertising, serial repetition of an image, the tragic symbols of catastrophe and death (Suicide, Electric Chair); portraits of artists, dealers, friends such as Leo Castelli, Keith Haring, Dennis Hopper; the passage through abstract art (Camouflage, Shadows); collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente; and The Last Supper, Warhol's final series of works.

A richly illustrated and extremely enjoyable reference book on the historical evolution of the nude. From the Paleolithic "great mothers" to the Greek athletes, from the Venus of Urbino by Titian to Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, from the Odalisque by Boucher to those by Ingres, to the Amazons of Helmut Newton and the desolate, lifeless bodies of Andres Serrano, the nude is the theme of artistic representation par excellence. The nude body as the incarnation of perfect beauty and the suspicions concerning its sensuality imposed by Christian culture; the renewed triumph of ancient beauty in the Renaissance and the study of anatomy; the visual licentiousness of the eighteenth century and the photographic nude; ideal beauty, eroticism, pornography; the nude also as representation of the ugly and its flaunted truthfulness in the art of the twentieth century; the nude that itself becomes a work of art in the avant-garde of the post-WWII period, with performance, body art and experimental theater. These threads of the narration make for a deeply informative historical exploration of the nude in Western art, all conducted around a rich apparatus of images.

A beautifully illustrated catalogue on the most comprehensive and ambitious full-scale retrospective of Munchs artistic oeuvre ever. In conjunction with the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edvard Munch (18631944) in 2013, a once in a lifetime exhibition is produced by the Munch Museum and the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Oslo. Munch 150 is the most comprehensive and ambitious full-scale retrospective of Munchs artistic oeuvre ever. It includes both an exceptional number of highlights, as well as some works that are less known, and is based on extensive loans from public and private collections. The exhibition and its catalogue encompass the entire development of Munchs art from the 1880s to his death in 1944; the primary focus will be on Munchs paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs. They cover Munchs oeuvre in an overarching perspective: Self-presentation and self-portraiture; Places and perception; Visual rhetoric; The Frieze of Life as a lifelong project; Munch and public life; Narration and abstraction; Figure and representation; The staging of gender; and The construction of Munch after 1944. The catalogue also reflects Munch scholarship from recent decades revitalizing the artists importance, and include a timeline, a biography, and an index of names and places.

Monografie je poctou Marilyn u příležitosti 50. výročí její smrti. Je plodem pečlivého výzkumu editorů Stefanie Ricci a Sergia Risaliti i Museo Salvatore Ferragamo. Představují se v ní fotografie, oděvy, obuv a některé osobní věci této filmové hvězdy spolu s důležitými dokumenty odhalujícími její složitou osobnost. Pozoruhodná série snímků Marilyn v každodenním životě je porovnána se silou archetypu a trvající legendou, jejíž velikost nejspíše spočívá v ambivalentní povaze této ženské ikony a postavy popkultury. Na základě studia pramenů a bulvárních informací se autoři pokusili interpretovat pozoruhodnou genezi některých proslulých uměleckých fotografií (Beaton, Stern, Barris, Greene), které Marilyn zachycují v "klasických" pózách. Současně tyto portréty srovnávají s některými nejslavnějšími uměleckými díly minulosti, v nichž lze najít tytéž pózy a výrazy.

This third volume in Skira's History of Photography series serves as a major reference in the field of photography. The third volume (1941-1980) of the Skira History of Photography series considers the years signed by the revolution of color that marked the start of a radical change in the very nature of amateur photography. At the same time, through photojournalism, photography became a mirror of society and a tool for attempts to change it. This monograph traces the historical evolution of photography, focusing on artists such as Helen Levitt, Weegee, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Sudek, William Klein, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Shomei Tomatsu, William Eugene Smith, Gerhard Richter, Bernhard and Hilla Becher, Ugo Mulas, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Clark, just to name a few. The essays provide an in-depth discussion of some of the primary themes of the historical period: the evolution of documentary photography between 1950 and 1980, the color revolution, and the relationship between photography and conceptual art.

The prestigious new volume by Skira devoted to international contemporary photography is focused on some of the greatest American masters of the twentieth-century. This will be the first of two books (with the second coming in 2014) that seek to illustrate the outstanding quality and variety of the works which have marked American photography from the mid-twentieth-century to the present day. This first volume presents a detailed and annotated selection of works executed between the 1940s and 1970s by twenty photographers of undisputed importance--from Edward Weston and Robert Adams to Minor White and Garry Winogrand, from Lee Friedlander down to Stephen Shore--whose pursuits represent benchmarks in the history of contemporary photography. As in the case of other titles in the series, the reproductions of all the works are accompanied by a critical apparatus with texts discussing the area, artists, and research explored.

A reference book written by collectors for collectors. An essential guide to estimate and buy vintage motorbikes from this prestigious international brand. Ninety years after the first BMW, the R32, was created in 1923, this magnificent volume serves as a unique source of reference for all collectors and enthusiasts of vintage BMW motorbikes. With precise images and technical information on every single model produced between 1923 and 2000, this book provides precious advice and suggestions, as well as in-depth analysis of the motorbikes' characteristics. For the first time, all the specific details are gathered in a single publication: chassis, motor numbers, and engines of every model, economic values, and original auto parts. This accurate and practical guide is accompanied by a historic overview of the Bayerische Motoren Werke, from its origins in 1917 to the present day.

Accompanying a ground-breaking exhibition, this is the first comprehensive survey of the magnificent artistic traditions of the Plains Indians. The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky celebrates the extraordinary beauty, power, and spiritual resonance of Plains Indian art throughout time. Richly illustrated, this monumental volume includes a wealth of masterworks from European and North American collections, ranging from a 2,000-year-old Human Effigy stone pipe to a 2011 beaded adaptation of designer shoes. Works of art collected centuries ago by French traders and travellers are presented together with those acquired by Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition of 1804-6, along with objects from the early reservation era and contemporary works based in traditional forms and ideas. The distinct Plains aesthetic-intertwined with the natural world, ephemeral, and materially rich-is revealed through an array of forms and mediums: painting and drawing; sculptural works in stone, wood, antler, and shell; porcupine quill and glass bead embroidery; feather work; painted robes depicting figures and geometric shapes; and richly ornamented clothing and ceremonial objects. Many nations are represented-Osage, Quapaw, Omaha, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Mesquakie, Kansa, and others. With newly researched texts by leading scholars, this important book charts the continuum of centuries of artistic tradition and reflects the significant place that Plains Indian culture holds in European history and in the heritage of North America.

Twenty-five years after Mapplethorpe's death, an overview on his nudes, portraits, self-portraits, floral still lifes, and other works compiled by the art critic Germano Celant. Robert Mapplethorpe's wide, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Since 1977, Germano Celant has studied the life and work of Robert Mapplethorpe, participating in interviews and writing essays for several publications and exhibitions. For the first time, this volume gathers the complete anthology of Celant's writings on the artist: from the 1983 exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, with the collaboration of the artist himself, to the posthumous writings published in the catalogs prepared on the occasion of the exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, since 1990.This publication, through over 140 images and texts that appear both personal and scientific, aims to pay tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe's contribution to the history of photography.