Alfredo Boulton

Alfredo Boulton
Author: Idurre Alonso
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2023-07-18
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1606068202

This lavishly illustrated volume examines the work of the Venezuelan photographer and art historian Alfredo Boulton, one of the main intellectuals of Latin American modernity. Alfredo Boulton (1908–1995) is considered one of the most important champions of modern art in Venezuela and a key intellectual of twentieth-century modernism. He was a pioneer of modern photography, an art critic, a researcher and historian of Venezuelan art, a friend to many of the great artists and architects of the twentieth century, and an expert on the imagery of the heroes of his country’s independence. Yet, Boulton is shockingly underrecognized outside of his native land. The few exhibitions related to his work have focused exclusively on his photographic production; never has there been a project that looks at the full range of Boulton’s efforts, foregrounding his influence on the shaping of Venezuelan art. This volume addresses these lacunae by analyzing Boulton’s groundbreaking photographic practice, his central role in the construction of a modern national artistic canon, and his influence in formalizing and developing art history and criticism in Venezuela. Based on the extensive materials held in Boulton’s archive at the Getty Research Institute, Alfredo Boulton brings together essays by leading scholars in the field to offer a commanding, original perspective on his contributions to the formation of a distinctive modernity at home and beyond. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from August 29, 2023, to January 21, 2024.

Refined Material

Refined Material
Author: Sean Nesselrode Moncada
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2023-08-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0520392469

"Beginning with the oil blowout in 1922 that is considered the moment that marked Venezuela's entry into a 'modern' era, Refined Material explores the integral relationship between Venezuelan oil industry and artistic production. In this groundbreaking study, Sean Nesselrode Moncada examines Venezuela's mid-century art and architecture in an argument that reinforces the inextricability of the rise of a capitalist and centralized state from life, activism, and art. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. Looking at five different but interrelated case studies--a print magazine, a planned housing community, a luxury hotel, a kinetic museum installation, and a documentary film--this book brings forth a novel reading to the renowned Venezuelan modernist canon and reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another"--

Fotografía impresa en Venezuela

Fotografía impresa en Venezuela
Author: Sagrario Berti
Publisher:
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2018
Genre: Illustration of books
ISBN: 9789807780568

Printed Photography in Venezuela provides a comprehensive inventory of photographically illustrated books published in Venezuela from 1945 to 2017. The research attempts to trace the history of the illustrated book with photographs examining the relationship between photography, literature, graphic design and editing; that is the coexistence of these disciplines in books. The book is structured according to thematic continuities, temporal synchronicities and similar editorial purposes, and has been organized in two sections. In the first one it examines books financed by the State and by oil companies. The threads of the printed works published since the 1950s, clearly reflect the government of the president in office and represent an idea of a "prosperous" nation, as happens with El Farol magazine, sponsored by Creole Petroleum Corporation. Those publications in the democratic period (1958) represent "social welfare" and describe the contradictions of progress and modernity in Caracas; while those printed during the last three five-year periods disseminate and extol national identities related to the Socialist Revolution. In this section the main thematic axes of the editorial production format the proposals adjusted to the model of the coffee table book. From the coffee table book, it traces the social life of illustrated books with photography, their cultural trajectory and resocialization in different contexts. To outline this itinerary, we have described its morphology, uses and functions, considering the institution or editors that printed them and for what purpose. When dealing with corporate gifts (non-venal editions), we examine in its value regime as a symbolic object, as well as in the re-stylization of contents through shapes or graphic elements. Coffee table books are transportable cultural objects, which not only cross territories as souvenirs, but also occupy domestic spaces and are intended for second-hand trade or for collecting. Also, in this first section, the book explores the local-national documentary photographic tendency present in books about nature, fauna, indigenous communities or the lives of inhabitants of rural areas. In the second part of the book are interpreted the authorial discourses whose contents and formulations are associated with Luis Camnitzer's ideas on Latin American conceptualism, in the sense that they are illustrated books whose "aesthetic expresses a concern for reality, rather than for abstraction". Prints, pamphlets or books where politics is used as a theme to create artistic forms. Thus, for example, it can be seen that some of these printed devices -those edited by the El Techo de la Ballena (1961-1969) collective, for instance- are conceptualist resources used by some authors to agitate and occasionally denounce the socio-political and cultural contradictions of the country in the 60's. On the other hand, it analyzes the discursive continuities authors-photographers who register or explore reality in an analytical way, ordering it by means of sequences or systematizing it in autonomous art forms, in catalogs, for instance. In the selected books, the photography dialogues with other narrative resources: graphic design and literature configuring pre-existing texts, usually poetic and, in some cases, representing political issues or social themes. Occasionally, photography is used to certify statistics for their indicial quality, to evoke past or restilize realities through graphic design medium: different types of paper, typographic fonts or printing techniques. In summary: this publication seeks to clarify the directionality of meaning proposed in illustrated books with photography, coffee table books, magazines, brochures, catalogues, posters and photobooks. With this purpose, the book explores subjects through of political, social, artistic ideologies, and also ideas of nation embodied in the corporate or authorial initiatives that shaped them. Printed Photography in Venezuela presents in short, a transversal and multiple reading that points to the assessment of the work as a whole and to make visible and make the book tangible.

El espíritu impreso de una idea

El espíritu impreso de una idea
Author: Pepa Cassinello
Publisher: Editorial CSIC - CSIC Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2008
Genre: Architectural criticism
ISBN: 9788400086541

En mayo de 1934, el Instituto Técnico de la Construcción y Edificación, recién creado por Eduardo Torroja y un selecto grupo de arquitectos e ingenieros, inicia la edición de la revista Hormigón y Acero que, desgraciadamente, sólo tuvo 26 números, mensuales, hasta junio de 1936. En 1941, el mismo Instituto reanuda sus actividades y comprende la importancia de seguir transmitiendo los conocimientos e innovaciones resultantes de sus actuaciones mediante una publicación técnica específica de la construcción. Aparecen entonces los Anales del Instituto Técnico de la Construcción y Edificación , que se publican cada año hasta 1946, en que dicho Instituto se adhiere al Patronato Juan de la Cierva del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), pasando a ser un centro público de investigación en construcción, que se mantiene hasta nuestros días. No obstante, dos años después, hace ahora 60, se reanuda la actividad difusora del Instituto con una nueva publicación periódica, la revista Informes de la construcción , que se puede entender como la continuación de Hormigón y Acero y los Anales , y que se ha mantenido sin interrupción estos 12 lustros.

Arte en Venezuela, 1959-1979

Arte en Venezuela, 1959-1979
Author: Juan Carlos Palenzuela
Publisher:
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Extensive study of a significant period in the development of modern art production in Venezuela by historian and art critic Palenzuela. The 1960s and 1970s were turning points in the country's artistic development, after the last military dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, when new generations of artists, cultural events and artistic groups lead the way and set Venezuela's in the international scene of contemporary art during 2 decades that included El Techo de la Ballena, a cultural movement that started simultaneously in Colombia and Venezuela, and that was fundamental for 20th century Venezuelan art that included amongst its members artists and writers such as: Carlos Contramaestre, Juan Calzadilla, Caupolicán Ovalles, Edmundo Aray, Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Efraín Hurtado, Dámaso Ogaz, Salvador Garmendia, Alberto Brandt, Perán Erminy, Angel Luque, Gonzalo Castellanos and Antonio Moya. The edition also studies movements, salons and collective events sponsored by the State like the "School of Maracaibo", the Ruptura and the annual exhibitions "11 Tipos" of the Mendoza Exhibition Rooms representing the best examples of Informalist, Abstract, Cinetism, Conceptual and Figurative art lead by artist like: Hugo Baptista, Luisa Palacios, Mercedes Pardo, Luis Guevara Moreno, Alirio Rodriguez, Manuel Espinoza, Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero and. A great contribution to the literature.