LITMIR.BIZ

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” This quote alone from William Morris could summarise the ideology of the Arts & Crafts movement, which triggered a veritable reform in the applied arts in England. Founded by John Ruskin, then put into practice by William Morris, the Arts & Crafts movement promoted revolutionary ideas in Victorian England. In the middle of the “soulless” Industrial Era, when objects were standardised, the Arts & Crafts movement proposed a return to the aesthetic at the core of production. The work of artisans and meticulous design thus became the heart of this new ideology, which influenced styles throughout the world, translating the essential ideas of Arts & Crafts into design, architecture and painting.

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Universally celebrated for the intricacy of his pointillist canvases, Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was a painter whose stunning union of art and science produced uniquely compelling results. Seurat’s intricate paintings could take years to complete, with the magnificent results impressing the viewer with both their scientific complexity and visual impact. His Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte) has held its place among the most treasured and distinguished pieces of 20th-century art. Klaus H. Carl offers readers an intriguing glimpse into the detailed scientific technique behind Seurat’s pointillist masterpieces.

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Inspired by Monet’s work at a young age, Paul Signac (1863-1935) was a friend and disciple of Georges Seurat who combined the scientific precision of pointillism with the vivid colors and emotional expressivity of Impressionism. A close personal friend of Vincent van Gogh, who was a great admirer of his techniques, Signac traveled the world in search of inspiration for his monumental canvases. This book examines the intricacies of Signac’s celebrated technique, as well as showcasing the details of some of his most celebrated works.

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Lacan, the last owner of Courbet’s The Origin of the World, loved the painting so much that he couldn’t even bring himself to look at it. Instead, he hid it behind a “safer” painting. The Chinese called it the “valley of the roses” (watch out for the thorns!), the Persians, the “honey-pot” (watch out for the bees!), and the Greeks, “the mound of Venus” (mind the steep climb!); to each era its fantasies and its theories about the feminine mystique. Then there are the testimonies of poets, painters, and even of some famous psychiatrists. The Origin of the World is a work of art only suitable for lovers of intrigue.

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From the time he set up his first studio at the tender age of sixteen, Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was a legend in the art world. Rubens, whom he studied with as a child, said that he was his most talented pupil, and he went on to spectacularly fulfill this promise with a career as a celebrated court painter in England and Spain. Historians, scholars, and art lovers alike continue to recognize the sophistication and timeless beauty of his works. In this fascinating compendium of Van Dyck’s decades-long career, Natalia Gritsai highlights the best of the artist’s many masterpieces.

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Condemned by the Nazis as a degenerate artist, Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a German painter whose stark linearity and emotive use of color eloquently expressed the pain and trauma of war. In work such as his celebrated Fate of the Animals, Marc created a raw emotional expression of primitive violence which he called a premonition of the war which would eventually be the cause of his own untimely death at the age of 36.

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If, as the famous saying goes, you really are what you eat, then Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was a consummate painter of the human soul. This artist was a master draftsman whose finely wrought canvases captured the imagination of his generation. In this fascinating book, Liana De Girolami Cheney takes a closer look at the critical history of Arcimboldo’s work, from his initial popularity and the tragic obscurity that followed his death, to the ventual triumphant revival of his work and vision by Surrealist admirers of the 1920s.

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August Macke (1887-1914) was a master of German Expressionism, a movement which sprang up in the early 1900s with the intent to forego physical reality in search of its emotional counterpart, with a particular emphasis on expressing dark moods of tragedy and angst. Macke was a master of color and form, producing eye-catching canvases that evoke a strong sympathetic reaction in the viewer. He was equally at home portraying the sun drenched streets of Tunisia, the cloudy sky around the Bonn cathedral, and the faceless multitude of a crowded railway station. In this compelling text, Walter Cohen examines the brief life of an artist whose seemingly limitless potential was tragically cut short by his untimely death.

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Burne-Jones’ oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to create in paint a world of perfect beauty, as far removed from the Birmingham of his youth as possible. At that time Birmingham was a byword for the dire effects of unregulated capitalism – a booming, industrial conglomeration of unimaginable ugliness and squalor. The two great French symbolist painters, Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, immediately recognised Burne-Jones as an artistic fellow traveller. But, it is very unlikely that Burne-Jones would have accepted or even, perhaps, have understood the label of ‘symbolist’. Yet he seems to have been one of the most representative figures of the symbolist movement and of that pervasive mood termed “fin-de-siecle”. Burne-Jones is usually labelled as a Pre-Raphaelite. In fact he was never a member of the Brotherhood formed in 1848. Burne-Jones’ brand of Pre-Raphaelitism derives not from Hunt and Millais but from Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Burne-Jones’ work in the late 1850s is, moreover, closely based on Rossetti’s style. His feminine ideal is also taken from that of Rossetti, with abundant hair, prominent chins, columnar necks and androgynous bodies hidden by copious medieval gowns. The prominent chins remain a striking feature of both artists’ depictions of women. From the 1860s their ideal types diverge. As Rossetti’s women balloon into ever more fleshy opulence, Burne-Jones’ women become more virginal and ethereal to the point where, in some of the last pictures, the women look anorexic. In the early 1870s Burne-Jones painted several mythical or legendary pictures in which he seems to have been trying to exorcise the traumas of his celebrated affair with Mary Zambaco. No living British painter between Constable and Bacon enjoyed the kind of international acclaim that Burne-Jones was accorded in the early 1890s. This great reputation began to slip in the latter half of the decade, however, and it plummeted after 1900 with the triumph of Modernism. With hindsight we can see this flatness and the turning away from narrative as characteristic of early Modernism and the first hesitant steps towards Abstraction. It is not as odd at it seems that Kandinsky cited Rossetti and Burne-Jones as forerunners of Abstraction in his book, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”.

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Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (June 1599 – August 6 1660), known as Diego Vélasquez, was a painter of the Spanish Golden Age who had considerable influence at the court of King Philip IV. Along with Francisco Goya and Le Greco, he is generally considered to be one of the greatest artists in Spanish history. His style, whilst remaining very personal, belongs firmly in the Baroque movement. Velázquez’s two visits to Italy, evidenced by documents from that time, had a strong effect on the manner in which his work evolved. Besides numerous paintings with historical and cultural value, Diego Vélasquez painted numerous portraits of the Spanish Royal Family, other major European figures, and even of commoners. His artistic talent, according to general opinion, reached its peak in 1656 with the completion of Las Meninas, his great masterpiece. In the first quarter of the 19th century, Velázquez's style was taken as a model by Realist and Impressionist painters, in particular by Édouard Manet. Since then, further contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí have paid homage to their famous compatriot by recreating several of his most famous works.

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