Messerschmidt and Modernity

Messerschmidt and Modernity
Author: Antonia Boström
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2012-09-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892369744

An astonishing group of sixty-nine “Character Heads” by German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) has fascinated viewers, artists, and collectors for more than two centuries. The heads, carved in alabaster or cast in lead or tin alloy, were conceived outside the norm of conventional portrait sculpture and explore the furthest limits of human expression. Since their first exposure to the public in 1793, artists, including Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Arnulf Rainer (born 1929), and, more recently, Tony Cragg (born 1949) and Tony Bevan (born 1951), have responded to their overwhelming visual power. Lavishly illustrated, Messerschmidt and Modernity presents remarkable works created by and inspired by Messerschmidt, an artist both of and ahead of his time. The Character Heads situate the artist’s work squarely within the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, with its focus on expression and emotion. Yet their uncompromising style stands in sharp contrast to the florid Baroque style of Messerschmidt’s earlier sculptures for the court of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. With their strict frontality and narrow silhouettes, the Character Heads appear to contemporary eyes as having been conceived in a “modern” aesthetic. Their position at the apparent limits of rational art have made them compelling to successive generations of artists working in a variety of media.

Messerschmidt's Character Heads

Messerschmidt's Character Heads
Author: Michael Yonan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-09-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1315448386

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.

The Miombo in Transition

The Miombo in Transition
Author: Bruce Morgan Campbell
Publisher: CIFOR
Total Pages: 273
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Forest ecology
ISBN: 9798764072

Miombo woodlands and their use: overview and key issues. The ecology of miombo woodlands. Population biology of miombo tree. Miombo woodlands in the wider context: macro-economic and inter-sectoral influences. Rural households and miombo woodlands: use, value and management. Trade in woodland products from the miombo region. Managing miombo woodland. Institutional arrangements governing the use and the management of miombo woodlands. Miombo woodlands and rural livelihoods: options and opportunities.

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group
Author: Michael Duncan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781942884873

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti. Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group's artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group's work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group's sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

Jekel Loves Hyde

Jekel Loves Hyde
Author: Beth Fantaskey
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2010-05-31
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0143204041

Jill's dad has died by violent means and her Mum seems to have shut down, leaving Jill to deal with the aftermath of such a tragedy. At the funeral, the only person who offers the kind of support she needs is a boy who up until that moment has been just another face in the classroom. How is it that Tristan knows just how to comfort her? And how is that she lets him? Their relationship develops against the backdrop of the reality that they are descendents of the original Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and as they slowly uncover more of themselves to each other, so the surreal quality of their lives increases; and the danger.

Inside Francis Bacon

Inside Francis Bacon
Author: Christopher Bucklow
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0500971064

The third book in the Francis Bacon Studies series, this volume reveals fundamental insights into the artist’s character and psychology that will change existing perceptions. Very little is known about Francis Bacon’s early career, but this third installment in the Bacon estate’s groundbreaking series provides exciting new insight into and analysis of the elusive artist. Archived material recently added to the Estate of Francis Bacon’s collection—including the diaries of Bacon’s first two patrons and an extensive number of records kept by Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass—has allowed Francesca Pipe, Sophie Pretorius, and Martin Harrison to delve deeper into the artist’s formative years than ever before and revolutionize existing perceptions of Bacon’s character and psychology. Essays by Sarah Whitfield, Joyce Townsend, and Christopher Bucklow draw on biographical details of the artist’s life and technical analysis of his work. Utilizing this more traditional, art-historical approach, these scholars examine the complex relationships between Bacon and his peers and offer new insights into the artist’s methods and the system of metaphors within his paintings. This fascinating collection of scholarship will interest anyone looking to learn more about Francis Bacon, contemporary art, or the artistic imagination.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon
Author: Hugh Marlais Davies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN:

British artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992), one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century, is known for his expressive figurative paintings. Perhaps Bacon's most famous image - the so-called 'screaming pope' in Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) - became the touchstone for the longest series of paintings in his career, the Papal Portraits of 1953.In 1953 'haunted and obsessed by the image...by its perfection,' Bacon sought to reinvent Velázquez's seventeenth-century Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) in the paintings that are the focus of this book. Francis Bacon replaced the grand, official state portrait with an intimate, spontaneous 'candid camera' glimpse behind the well-ordered exterior. While the Spanish master Velázquez portayed the pope ex cathedra, Bacon captured him in camera, as if behind a closed door or through a one-way mirror.This series of eight papal portraits, painted during a period of just a few weeks in the summer of 1953, was brought together for the first time by noted Bacon scholar Hugh M. Davies for a 1999 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, along with several other works from the same period, including Sphinx I and two recently found Study after Velázquez paintings from 1950. This book includes a new essay by Davies, discussing the artist's influences and sources of imagery for the series, and a previously unpublished interview that Davies conducted with Bacon in 1973.

Thomas Schütte

Thomas Schütte
Author: Thomas Schütte
Publisher: Koenig Books
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN: 9783960980087

Thomas Sch�tte: United Enemies takes the artist's sculptural works from the past two decades as its starting point. The heavy bronze giants in United Enemies (2011), originate in small hastily sculptured ?gures with heads of modelling clay, created almost twenty years earlier. The book is richly illustrated and presents the sculptures, along with a selection of the artist's works on paper and architectural models. In his works he explores transformations of scale, and the intimate and personal is juxtaposed with the monumental and authoritarian. The main essay by Bente Larsen, Professor in Art History at the University of Oslo, focuses on the fragmented body and how this aesthetical and philosophical concept relates to Thomas Sch�tte's work.