ARTES

En lienzos rebosantes de luz, color y velocidad, los futuristas crearon uno de los testimonios más vívidos del giro tecnológico del siglo xx. Este libro presenta las figuras clave, influencias y controversias de un movimiento, que defendía el progreso y glorificaba la guerra y, al mismo tiempo, despreciaba la feminidad y socavaba la élite de la academia.

Today, the works of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) are among the most well known and celebrated in the world. In Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and many paintings and drawings beyond, we recognize an artist uniquely dexterous in the portrayal of mood and place through paint, pencil, charcoal, or chalk. Yet as he was deploying the lurid colors, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms that would subsequently make his name, van Gogh battled not only the disinterest of his contemporary audience but also devastating bouts of mental illness. His episodes of depression and anxiety would eventually claim his life, when, in 1890, he committed suicide shortly after his 37th birthday. This richly illustrated introduction follows Vincent van Gogh’s story from his earliest pictures of peasants and rural workers, through his bright Parisian period, to his final, feverish burst of creative energy in the South of France during the last two and a half years of his life.

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most famous by Rothko. Throughout, Abstract Expressionists strove to convey emotions and ideas through the making of marks, through forms, textures, shades, and the particular quality of brushstrokes. The movement favored large-scale canvases, and embraced the role of accident or chance. With featured works from 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book introduces the movement which shifted the center of art gravity from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden moment of American art.

In the latter half of the 19th century, in the verdant countryside near Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), busily plied his brush to landscapes and still lifes that would become anchors of modern art. With compact, intense dabs of paint and bold new approaches to light and space, he mediated the way from Impressionism to the defining movements of the early 20th century and became, in the words of both Matisse and Picasso, “father of us all.” This fresh artist introduction selects key works from Cézanne’s oeuvre to understand his development, innovation, and crucial influence on modern art. From compositions of fruits and pears to scenes of outdoor bathers, we trace his experimentation with color, perspective, and texture to evoke “a harmony parallel to Nature,” as well as the very process of seeing and recording. Along the way, we discover Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players, his layering of warm and cool hues to build up form and surface, and the geometric rigor of his landscapes from the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence, as bright with the light of southern France as they are bold with a radical new rendering of dimensions and depth.