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Antoni Gaudí Spanish architect and designer, Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) was an important and influential figure in the history of contemporary Spanish art. His use of colour, application of a range of materials and the introduction of organic forms into his constructions were an innovation in the realm of architecture. In his journal, Gaudí freely expressed his own feelings on art, "the colours used in architecture have to be intense, logical and fertile." His completed works (the Casa Batlló, 1905-1907 and the Casa Milà, 1905-1910) and his incomplete works (the restoration of the Poblet Monastery and the altarpiece of Alella in Barcelona) illustrate the importance of this philosophy. His furniture designs were conceived with the same philosophy, as shown, for example, in his own office (1878) or the lamps in the Plaza Real in Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia (1882-1926) was a monumental project which eventually took over his life (it was still incomplete at the time of his death).
Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521-1821 Kelly Donahue-Wallace surveys the art and architecture created in the Spanish Viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and La Plata from the time of the conquest to the independence era. Emphasizing the viceregal capitals and their social, economic, religious, and political contexts, the author offers a chronological review of the major objects and monuments of the colonial era. In order to present fundamental differences between the early and later colonial periods, works are offered chronologically and separated by medium--painting, urban planning, religious architecture, and secular art--so the aspects of production, purpose, and response associated with each work are given full attention. Primary documents, including wills, diaries, and guild records are placed throughout the text to provide a deeper appreciation of the contexts in which the objects were made.
Constructing an Avant-Garde : Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups -- including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism -- but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman. Martins argues that artists of Brazil's postwar avant-garde updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. He describes defining episodes in Brazil's postwar avant-garde, discussing crucial critical texts, including Gullar's "Theory of the Non-Object," a phenomenological account of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and Mondrian; portraiture, self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and missed encounters with conceptualism; and monochrome, manifestos, and engagement. The Brazilian avant-garde's hijacking of modernism, Martins shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their international minimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Reconfiguring not only art history but their own history, Brazilian avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challenges from a unique -- and oblique -- standpoint.
Devouring Frida : The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo Beginning in the late 1970's Frida Kahlo achieved cult heroine status less for her richly surrealist self-portraits than by the popularization of the events of her tumultuous life. Her images were splashed across billboards magazine ads, and postcards; fashion designers copied the so-called "Frida" look in hairstyles and dress; and "Fridamania" even extended to T-shirts, jewelry, and nail polish. Margaret A. Lindauer argues that this mass market assimilation of Kahlo's identity has consistently detracted from appreciation of her work, leading instead to narrow interpretations based on "an entrenched narrative of suffering." While she agrees that Kahlo's political and feminist activism, her stormy marriage to fellow artist Diego Reviera, and the tragic reality of a progressively debilitated body did represent a biography colored by emotional and physical upheaval, she questions an "author-equals-the-work" critical tradition that assumes a :one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting." In kahlo's case, Lindauer says, such assumptions created a devouring mythology, an iconization that separates us from rather than leads us to the real significance of the oeuvre. Accompanied by 26 illustrations and deep analysis of Kahlo's central themes, this provocative, semiotic study recontextualizes an important figure in art history at the same time it addresses key questions about the language of interpretation, the nature of veneration, and the truths within self-representation. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.
Diego Rivera Diego Rivera is celebrated by Gerry Souter as a virtuoso Mexican muralist, where he could express at once his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions. His easel paintings and drawings also constitute a large body of both his early and late work and are represented in the book. Gerry Souter, the author of the remarkable Frida Kahlo, overcomes his huge admiration for Diego Rivera to give the artist a human dimension, found in his political choices, his love affairs and his belief that this truth was Mexico, the language of his thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place.
Diego Velázquez Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) is one of the world's most famous artists. Representative of 17th-century European painting, he worked for the Spanish court and for the most important figures, completing numerous portraits. Yet, passionate about the human figure, his oeuvre also encompasses bodeg#65533;nes, representations of daily life in the taverns and kitchens of Spain. Considered the father of Spanish painting, Vel#65533;zquez inspired entire generations of the artists who followed him, including Picasso, Dal#65533;, and Bacon. His mysterious painting Las Meninas, which contains the essence of his work, is still today an inexhaustible source for writing and research.
Folk Treasures of Mexico In his foreword, former New York governor and vice president of the United States Nelson A. Rockefeller remembers his first trip to Mexico in 1933 and his subsequent, life-long fascination with the Mexican people and their popular art. Rockefeller¿s collection of more than 3,000 pieces of Mexican folk art is widely considered to be the most exceptional in the U.S., and Folk Treasures of Mexico celebrates these icons with more than 150 photos of the pieces, many of which are quite rare. In the main text, Marion Oettinger, Jr., curator of Latin American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, describes the objects according to function: utilitarian, ceremonial, decorative, or for play. Among the many noteworthy objects are a wooden-carved centurion helmet mask from the eighteenth century depicting a Roman guard, which is one of the few remaining masks of this type in existence, and a nineteenth century ceramic pitcher from Oaxaca that combines many stylistic techniques. Other objects include a variety of children¿s toys, clothing, and items for eating and drinking. Originally published in 1990, the book contains a preface by Rockefeller¿s daughter, Ann Rockefeller Roberts, who was instrumental in finding permanent homes for her father¿s stunning collection, which can now be found in the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. Including a glossary, bibliography, and chronology, Folk Treasures of Mexico is a must-read for anyone interested in Latin American art, culture, and history.
Goya Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity to live and multiply his experiences, to fight and work, he can produce great art without classical decorum and traditional respectability. He was born in 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small mountain village of a hundred inhabitants. As a child he worked in the fields with his two brothers and his sister until his talent for drawing put an end to his misery. At fourteen, supported by a wealthy patron, he went to Saragossa to study with a court painter and later, when he was nineteen, on to Madrid. Up to his thirty-seventh year, if we leave out of account the tapestry cartoons of unheralded decorative quality and five small pictures, Goya painted nothing of any significance, but once in control of his refractory powers, he produced masterpieces with the speed of Rubens. His court appointment was followed by a decade of incessant activity - years of painting and scandal, with intervals of bad health. Goya's etchings demonstrate a draughtsmanship of the first rank. In paint, like Velázquez, he is more or less dependent on the model, but not in the detached fashion of the expert in still-life. If a woman was ugly, he made her a despicable horror; if she was alluring, he dramatised her charm. He preferred to finish his portraits at one sitting and was a tyrant with his models. Like Velázquez, he concentrated on faces, but he drew his heads cunningly, and constructed them out of tones of transparent greys. Monstrous forms inhabit his black-and-white world: these are his most profoundly deliberated productions. His fantastic figures, as he called them, fill us with a sense of ignoble joy, aggravate our devilish instincts and delight us with the uncharitable ecstasies of destruction. His genius attained its highest point in his etchings on the horrors of war. When placed beside the work of Goya, other pictures of war pale into sentimental studies of cruelty. He avoided the scattered action of the battlefield, and confined himself to isolated scenes of butchery. Nowhere else did he display such mastery of form and movement, such dramatic gestures and appalling effects of light and darkness. In all directions Goya renewed and innovated.
Pablo Picasso Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist''s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning children''s games, he traced his first pictures in the sand. This early self-expression held out promise of a rare gift. Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and it was there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Picasso''s father was a painter and professor at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Picasso learnt from him the basics of formal academic art training. Then he studied at the Academy of Arts in Madrid but never finished his degree. Picasso, who was not yet eighteen, had reached the point of his greatest rebelliousness; he repudiated academia''s anemic aesthetics along with realism''s pedestrian prose and, quite naturally, joined those who called themselves modernists, the non-conformist artists and writers, those whom Sabartés called "the élite of Catalan thought" and who were grouped around the artists'' café Els Quatre Gats. During 1899 and 1900 the only subjects Picasso deemed worthy of painting were those which reflected the "final truth"; the transience of human life and the inevitability of death. His early works, ranged under the name of "Blue Period" (1901-1904), consist in blue-tinted paintings influenced by a trip through Spain and the death of his friend, Casagemas. Even though Picasso himself repeatedly insisted on the inner, subjective nature of the Blue Period, its genesis and, especially, the monochromatic blue were for many years explained as merely the results of various aesthetic influences. Between 1905 and 1907, Picasso entered a new phase, called "Rose Period" characterised by a more cheerful style with orange and pink colours. In Gosol, in the summer of 1906 the nude female form assumed an extraordinary importance for Picasso; he equated a depersonalised, aboriginal, simple nakedness with the concept of "woman". The importance that female nudes were to assume as subjects for Picasso in the next few months (in the winter and spring of 1907) came when he developed the composition of the large painting, Les Demoiselles d''Avignon. Just as African art is usually considered the factor leading to the development of Picasso''s classic aesthetics in 1907, the lessons of Cézanne are perceived as the cornerstone of this new progression. This relates, first of all, to a spatial conception of the canvas as a composed entity, subjected to a certain constructive system. Georges Braque, with whom Picasso became friends in the autumn of 1908 and together with whom he led Cubism during the six years of its apogee, was amazed by the similarity of Picasso''s pictorial experiments to his own. He explained that: "Cubism''s main direction was the materialisation of space." After his Cubist period, in the 1920s, Picasso returned to a more figurative style and got closer to the surrealist movement. He represented distorted and monstrous bodies but in a very personal style. After the bombing of Guernica during 1937, Picasso made one of his most famous works which starkly symbolises the horrors of that war and, indeed, all wars. In the 1960s, his art changed again and Picasso began looking at the art of great masters and based his paintings on ones by Velázquez, Poussin, Goya, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix. Picasso''s final works were a mixture of style, becoming more colourful, expressive and optimistic. Picasso died in 1973, in his villa in Mougins. The Russian Symbolist Georgy Chulkov wrote: "Picasso''s death is tragic. Yet how blind and naïve are those who believe in imitating Picasso and learning from him. Learning what? For these forms have no corresponding emotions outside of Hell. But to be in Hell means to anticipate death. The Cubists are hardly privy to such unlimited knowledge".
Readings in Latin American Modern Art This important and welcome volume is the first English-language anthology of writings on Latin American modern art of the twentieth century. The book includes some fifty seminal essays and documents--including statements, interviews, and manifestoes by artists--that encompass the broad diversity of this emerging field. Many of these materials are difficult to access and some are translated here for the first time. Together the selections explore the breadth and depth of Latin American modern art as well as its distinctive evolution apart from American and European art history. Included in this collection are fascinating ideas and insights on the impact of the avant-garde in the 1920s, the Mexican mural movement, Surrealism and other fantasy-based styles, modern architecture, geometric and optical art, concrete and neo-concrete art, and political conceptualism. For students and scholars of Latin American art, the volume offers an invaluable collection of primary and secondary sources.
Salvador Dali Salvador Dal#65533; (1904-1989) is best known for his unique and striking style with an extraordinary repertoire reaching out across film, painting, photography, and sculpture. Whilst his name may be most commonly associated with Surrealism, Dal#65533; consummately displayed mastery over such broad genres as classical, modernist, and Cubist styles. A crucial figure in art history, Dal#65533; has inspired countless literary works and this edifying Best Of volume gives readers a fascinating insight into the life and career highlights of one of art's most controversial and exciting pioneers.
Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America This anthology centers on the visual representation of woman in early modern Latin America, that is, the social and cultural construction and definition of female identity as evidenced by the art document. Artists in this period were collectively aware of a vocabulary of gender that could be tailored to deliver varying messages about the position of women in vice regal culture and society. This volume is organized not in the predictable linear framework, by periods and centuries, but rather by the realization that throughout much of this period, Spanish authorities and others envisaged the Spanish colonies of the Americas in gendered terms. Proffered as the female body, the "New" (virginal by implication) World was at differing times adored, pursued, courted, seduced, defiled, exploited, reviled, and denounced by those (males) who encountered "her." This mentality is born out in the various forms of female representation that are discussed in this fully illustrated book. Contributors include: C. Cody Barteet, Maria Elena Bernal-Garcia, Magali M. Carrera, Carol E. Damian, Carolyn Dean, Catherine R. DiCesare, Lori Boornazian Diel, Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Ray Hernandez-Duran, Andrea Lepage, Kellen Kee McIntyre, Penny Morrill, Elizabeth Q. Perry, Richard E. Phillips, Michael J. Schreffler, and Christopher C. Wilson. ERRATUM TO CHAPTER 7 Ray Hernandez-Duran, "El Encuentro de Cortes y Moctezuma: The Betrothal of Two Worlds in Eighteenth-Century New Spain" (pp. 181-206). On page 194, second paragraph, third sentence, should read: "Marina's absence in the encounter painting, where she normally mediates contact between the men, emphasizes the phallogocentric aspect of the historic meeting." The original phrasing, using the pivotal term, 'phallogocentric' (a reference to a gendered form of exchange or communication) was changed to 'phallus-centered, ' which not only alters a central idea in the argument, but actually has nothing to do with the image in question.

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The Alhambra Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series(Part I and Part II) The Alhambra has long been a byword for exotic and melancholy beauty. In his absorbing new book, Robert Irwin, Arabist and novelist, examines its history and allure. The Alhambra is the only Muslim palace to have survived since the Middle Ages. Built by a threatened dynasty of Muslim Spain, it was preserved as a monument to the triumph of Christianity. Every day thousands of tourists enter this magnificent site to be awestruck by its towers and courts, its fountained gardens, its honeycombed ceilings and intricate tile work. It is a complex full of mysteries--even its purpose is unclear. Its sophisticated ornamentation is not indiscriminate but full of hidden meaning. Its most impressive buildings were designed not by architects, but by philosophers and poets. The Alhambra, which resembles a fairy-tale palace, was constructed by slave labor in an era of economic decline, plague, and political violence. Its sumptuously appointed halls have lain witness to murder and mayhem. Yet its influence on art and on literature--including Orientalist painting and the architecture of cinemas, Washington Irving and Jorge Luis Borges--has been lasting and significant. As our guide to this architectural masterpiece, Robert Irwin allows us to fully understand the impact of the Alhambra.
Art of Latin America, 1900-1980 When Marta Traba died in a plane crash outside Madrid on November 27, 1983, the art world lost one of its most distinguished - and most outspoken - contemporary critics. The focus of stormy controversy in the UK when she was denied residency by the Reagan administration because of her political views, Traba had been active for decades in the field of art criticism. She was on her way to a symposium in Bogota, where she and her husband, Angel Rama, were to be guests of honour, when she died. The manuscript of the present book was recovered after her death. In "Art of Latin America", Marta Traba offers new insights into the work of Latin America's most significant 20th-century artists. She argues, for instance, that the Mexican Muralist Movement - traditionally seen as a consequence of the Mexican Revolution - in fact reflected a new attitude toward art which had its origins in European Modernism. She shows how countries with significant numbers of European immigrants, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, became centres of lively experimentation in matters of form, while countries with large Indian populations were more subject to the movement's political influence. She also examines the growing Latin American avant garde of the 1950s, and the subsequent reaction to it that led to a renewal of drawing and printmaking. Illustrated with more than 100 full-colour reproductions of some of the finest works of 20th-century Latin American art, this book should be of interest not only to art historians and students of Latin America, but to all with an interest in contemporary art.
The Art of Mesoamerica : from Olmec to Aztec Mary Ellen Miller evocatively surveys the artistic achievements of the high pre-Columbian civilizations--Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Aztecas well as those of their less well-known contemporaries. Their pyramids and palaces, jades and brightly colored paintings emerge from these pages as vividly as when they first astonished Cortes's men in 1519.The fourth edition of this standard work includes exciting new discoveries, from Palenque, Mexico, where architecture and sculpture reveal a dramatic eighth century, to San Bartolo, Guatemala, where Maya paintings have riveted an international audience. Continuing hieroglyphic decipherments provide fresh insights. The revised edition of the Art of Mesoamerica is the ideal companion for art historians, students, and travelers alike.
Diego Rivera Diego Rivera is regarded as one of the greatest Mexican artists of the 20th century - an audacious muralist, voracious lover and ardent leftist who befriended Picasso. In this part biography, part appreciation, writer Pete Hamill turns a novelist's eye to Rivera's tempestuous career.
El Greco of Toledo Catalog for 1982 exhibition at The Toledo Museum of Art, Museo del Prado, National Gallery of Art and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Essays by Jonathan Brown, William B. Jordan, Richard L. Kagan and Alfronso E. Perez Sanchez. Extensively illustrated. El Greco (1541-1614), born Domenikos Theotokopoulos, was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance.
Frida Kahlo : The Complete Paintings Among the few women artists who have transcended art history, none had a meteoric rise quite like Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Her unmistakable face, depicted in over fifty extraordinary self-portraits, has been admired by generations; along with hundreds of photographs taken by notable artists such as Edward Weston, Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Martin Munkácsi, they made Frida Kahlo an iconic image of 20th century art. After an accident in her early youth, Frida became a painter of her own free will. Her marriage to Diego Rivera in 1929 placed her at the forefront of an artistic scene not only in the cultural Renaissance of Mexico, but also in the United States. Her work garnered praise from the poet André Breton, who added the Mexican painter to the ranks of international surrealism and exhibited her work in Paris in 1939 to the admiration of Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp. We access the intimacy of Frida's affections and passions through a selection of drawings, pages from her personal diary, letters, and an extensive illustrated biography featuring photos of Frida, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida's home and the center of her universe. This large-format XXL book allows readers to admire Frida Kahlo's paintings like never before, including unprecedented detail shots and famous photographs. It presents pieces in private collections and reproduces works that were previously lost or have not been exhibited for more than 80 years, forming the most extensive study of Kahlo's work and life to date.
Frida Kahlo: Masterpieces of Art The painful, exquisite art of Mexico's favourite artist was a product of immense physical pain, and an emotional tumultuous life. The new book features the range and power of her heavily autobiographical work, from the early, disturbing explorations of personal suffering to the more dulled, painkiller-drenched paintings of her later life.
Frida Kahlo : The Painter and Her Work When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, she left behind a slender oeuvre. It consists of 143 paintings of small size, rarely larger than 20 x 30 inches, many of them now considered icons of 20th century art, most of them self-portraits. The reasons for this ostensible narcissism were closely bound up with Kahlo's biography, with the country and epoch in which she grew up, and with her decidedly eccentric character. It was no coincidence that the major enigmatic minds of the 16th century, namely Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were among her favorite painters. For Frida Kahlo never displayed her wounds directly--be it the physical wounds caused by accidents and illness, or the psychological inner wounds. Hers is a subtly enciphered symbolic language, rich in metaphors drawn from almost all the world's cultures. Aztec myths of creation, Far Eastern and Classical Greek mythology, and popular Catholic beliefs all mingle in Kahlo's pictures with Mexican folklore and the stuff of quotidian life, with Marx and Freud. Andr Breton, one of her many admirers among the European avant-garde, once described Kahlo's art as a "colored ribbon round a bomb." Exotic and explosive, sensuous and fascinatingly vital in terms of artistic statement, Kahlo's paintings shed a complex and often frightening light on her soul, her "inner reality," as she called it. If the incessant commercial marketing of Kahlo's paintings over the past decade has obscured a clear view of her extraordinary oeuvre, this present monograph attempts to make amends. "Frida Kahlo: The Painter and Her Work" returns to the heart, to 42 select masterpieces, reproduced in full and in detail. The painterly quality, the beauty, and the immense wealth of details in Kahlo's paintings is laid out before the reader's eyes, as is the abyss in which the artist found herself.
Goya Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns. With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life. In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work. Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.
Picasso and the Invention of Cubism This work seeks to transform our understanding of Cubism, showing in detail how it emerged in Picasso's work of the years 1906-13, and tracing its roots in 19th-century philosophy and linguistics.
Retratos : 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits The tradition of portraiture in Latin America is astonishingly long and rich. For over 2,000 years, portraits have been used to preserve the memory of the deceased, bolster the social standing of the aristocracy, mark the deeds of the mighty, advance the careers of politicians, record rites of passage, and mock symbols of the status quo. This beautiful and wide-ranging book--the first to explore the tradition of portraiture in Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the present day--features some 200 works from fifteen countries. Retratos (Portraits) presents an engaging variety of works by such well-known figures as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Fernando Botero, and Jos#65533; Campeche as well as stunning examples by anonymous and obscure artists. Distinguished contributors discuss the significance of portraits in ancient Mayan civilizations, in the world of colonial Iberians, in the political struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in a remarkable range of other times and locations. With a wealth of informative details and exquisite color illustrations, Retratos invites readers to appreciate Latin American portraits and their many meanings as never before.
Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America The twentieth-century art of Latin America is art in the western tradition, and its leading figures--Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, Joaquín Torres-García, to name only a few--have achieved international stature. Yet much of the writing about this art has offered either a victimized view of an art tradition dominated by foreign models or a romanticized view of what Latin American art should be. This pathfinding book, by contrast, seeks not to "invent" Latin American art but to look at it from the points of view of its own artists and critics. Drawing on some forty years of studying and teaching Latin American art, Jacqueline Barnitz surveys the major currents and artists of the twentieth century in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil). She progresses chronologically from modernismo and the break with nineteenth-century academic art to some of the trends of the 1980s, setting each movement within its historical and cultural contexts. This grand survey of modern Latin American art will thus be the essential guide to a vibrant art tradition, as well as a vital teaching tool. Lavishly illustrated with color and black-and-white reproductions of major works, it will be useful to artists, collectors, historians, writers, and social scientists, as well as art historians. Jacqueline Barnitz is Professor of Modern Latin American Art at the University of Texas at Austin.
What Would Frida Do? Having doubts about your next step? Ask yourself what artist Frida Kahlo would do in this "beautiful volume . . . sure to inspire" (Boston Globe). NAMED A BEST GIFT BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: Instyle, Oprah Daily, Business Insider, Esquire, Boston Globe, and Redbook Revered as much for her fierce spirit as she is for her art, Frida Kahlo stands today as a feminist symbol of daring creativity. Her paintings have earned her admirers around the world, but perhaps her greatest work of art was her own life. What Would Frida Do? celebrates this icon's signature style, outspoken politics, and boldness in love and art--even in the face of hardship and heartbreak. We see her tumultuous marriage with the famous muralist Diego Rivera and rumored flings with Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker. In this irresistible read, writer Arianna Davis conjures Frida's brave spirit, encouraging women to create fearlessly and stand by their own truths.