Michael Hulse Libri

Le opere di Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) sono tra le più famose e costose al mondo. I suoi dipinti come i Girasoli, La notte stellata e Autoritratto con orecchio bendato sono diventati parte della memoria visiva occidentale. Tuttavia, mentre portava sulla tela i suoi colori vivaci, le pennellate energiche e le forme ben definite, van Gogh si trovava a combattere non solo contro l'indifferenza dei suoi contemporanei, ma anche contro i suoi demoni interiori e attacchi di confusione mentale. Soffriva sempre più di depressione e ansia, e si suicidò nel 1890, poco dopo il suo 37° compleanno. Questa introduzione segue il percorso di vita di Vincent van Gogh, dalle sue prime esperienze artistiche, passando per il suo periodo parigino, fino al suo ultimo fervente sfogo di energia nel sud della Francia durante gli ultimi due anni e mezzo della sua vita.

An introduction to the life and work of twentieth-century Russian artist Marc Chagall, discussing his cultural and historical importance, and including a chronology and over one hundred color illustrations with explanatory captions

In pursuit of pleasure in the belle époque Today, the painter and graphic artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) is considered as one of the most inspired portrayers of human figures. This physically handicapped scion of the old French nobility was fascinated by life around Montmartre, whose cafes, cabarets, dance halls, and bordellos presented him with the "theatre of life." More than any other artist, Toulouse-Lautrec captured the belle époque's pursuit of fleeting pleasure: directly and without flattery, his paintings, lithographs, and posters offer a masterly and timeless image of the age.

""Hindering the artist is a crime,"" wrote Egon Schiele in 1912. At the time he was in prison for disseminating immoral drawings. Throughout his work the note of defiance, provocation, and rebellion was sounded. Schiele's favorite subjects were female nudes and self-portraits, and he worked at his art with furious commitment, though it was not until shortly before his early death that he began to win real recognition. Today, with Oskar Kokoschka, he is seen as the most important of the Austrian artists who came after Klimt. This study examines the life and work of Egon Schiele through all the major oil paintings and many of his erotic drawings.

The creations of Jeff Koons (born 1955) are at once immediately accessible and eloquently art historical. From basketball tanks to flower puppies, his instantly recognizable work frolics with banal imagery as much as it integrates cultural references such as Surrealism and Pop Art. Koons’ art revels in visual pleasure, but also in the power to affront. He has made his name as much for stainless-steel rabbits as he has with his sinister sculpture of Michael Jackson, or his sexually explicit photographic series with then-wife Cicciolina. The result is mega-artist status. An indisputable king of contemporary visual culture, Koons is lauded by collectors, institutions, and the public alike. With landmark works and concise texts by Katy Siegel, Hans Werner Holzwarth, and Eckhard Schneider, this book offers the complete Koons at a glance, introducing an art world giant from his early inflatable flowers through to today. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

'That's brutal violence on a defenceless person, and quite unnecessary, declares Sophie, and she pulls with an audible tearing sound at the hair of the man lying in an untidy heap on the ground. What's unnecessary is best of all, says Rainer, who wants to go on fighting. We agreed on that.' It is the late 1950s. A man is out walking in a park in Vienna. He will be beaten up by four teenagers, not for his money, he has an average amount ? nor for anything he might have done to them, but because the youths are arrogant and very pleased with themselves. Their arrogance is their way of reacting to the maggot?ridden corpse that is Austria where everyone has a closet to hide their Nazi histories, their sexual perversions and their hatred of the foreigner. Elfriede Jelinek, who writes like an angel of all that is tawdry, shows in Wonderful, Wonderful Times how actions of the present are determined by thoughts of the past

Leggendo questo romanzo, cui Rilke lavorò ininterrottamente per anni e che pubblicò nel 1910, emerge la percezione della fatalità di un fallimento: quello rappresentato dalla sconsacrazione subita dall’arte nell’età moderna. Ma il “Malte”, libro tutto permeato d’interni e d’interiorità, di nomi e di nomi di cose, che riesce a tradurre in parola anche gli eventi più infimi e impercettibili, è una delle poche opere poste sulla soglia della modernità letteraria.

From the winner of the IMPAC Award, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.

"The definitive introduction to the scope and range of Picasso's work." The Times, London "I wanted to be a painter, and I became Picasso," declared Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in an apt survey of a triumphant career. He had good grounds for the confidence palpable in his statement, for in the history of 20th century art, his name stands out over all the others. In Picasso's paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculptures, he was tirelessly inventive and innovative, exhibiting an aesthetic bravado that kept him one step ahead of his contemporaries. From subject matter to new forms and techniques to new media, Picasso got there first. The Spanish artist's enormous output, from the eight-year-old's beginnings to the late work of a man of ninety-one, is surely one of the most diverse and creatively energetic in the whole history of art, and it is no exaggeration to see him as the genius of the century. Carsten-Peter Warncke's study is a thorough review of Picasso's entire oeuvre, from the early Blue and Rose Periods, through the analytic and synthetic cubism and classicist phase all the way up to the art of the old savage Picasso. Our study of Picasso, the most exhaustive record of his work to date, contains almost 1500 illustrations, from his earliest drawings to the master's very last painting. Extensive bibliography section as well as illustrated section about Picasso's life and work Index of Names