Beauty and Art

Beauty and Art
Author: Elizabeth Prettejohn
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2005-05-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0191516511

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cézanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

Awaking Beauty

Awaking Beauty
Author: Ioan Szasz
Publisher: Weldon Owen
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781681882710

Graphic but mystical, vibrant yet enigmatic, the work of American artist Eyvind Earle is a treasure trove of subtle and shimmering contradictions. From fanciful backgrounds for Disney classics such as Sleeping Beauty to bold experiments in multimedia art, from ambitious commercial animations to lush and otherworldly oil landscapes, Earle's oeuvre never fails to please the eye and engage the imagination. And here, collected in Awaking Beauty—the official catalog for the 2017 Walt Disney Family Museum exhibition of the same name—is a definitive exploration of his life's full work. Born in New York City in 1916, Earle showed early talent, hosting his first solo exhibition at the age of fourteen. After traveling in Mexico and Europe as a teenager, he bicycled across the United States, painting watercolors to pay his way. In the late 1930s, he began designing Christmas cards—which have sold more than 300 million copies over the years—while continuing to exhibit his fine art. Earle's transformative moment, however, came in 1951, when he was hired at The Walt Disney Studios as a background painter. Again, he proved a quick study, lending his talents to the Academy Award-winning short Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, beloved full-length feature Sleeping Beauty, and many other time-honored Disney animated films. After his tenure at Disney ended in 1958, Earle turned his attention to commercial animation and advertising, then returned ot fine art full-time in 1966. Here, in the last three decades of his life, Earle created an immense and impressively varied body of work. He became an expert at the silkscreen-printing process known as serigraphy, a painstaking art form that could require up to 200 individual screens. He also created dozens of graphic and arresting scratchboards—engravings carved into boards primed with white clay and black ink—for his autobiography, Horizon Bound on a Bicycle. In addition to his multimedia experiments, Earle painted dazzling oil works of the natural world, capturing the rolling hills, lacy and voluminous trees, and crashing blue waves of California in a nearly transcendental light. A moving and lyrical writer, he often accompanied his mesmerizing landscapes with equally meditative and intriguing poems. After a long and esteemed career, Earle passed away in 2000 in Carmel-y-the-Sea, California, leaving behind a formidable legacy in animation and fine art. Today, his work is in the permanent collections of several prominent museums (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), while his memory continues to inspire new generations of aspiring creatives around the globe.

Philosophies of Art & Beauty

Philosophies of Art & Beauty
Author: Albert Hofstadter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 730
Release: 2009-02-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226348113

This anthology is remarkable not only for the selections themselves, among which the Schelling and the Heidegger essays were translated especially for this volume, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism.

Line of Beauty

Line of Beauty
Author: Richard Pini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-05-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9781933865874

The term "line of beauty" describes, in one sense, a certain way of arranging lines and shapes in a drawing or painting to suggest motion, dynamic balance and grace. But in a deeper sense it can also speak to the visionary spirit that drives the creation of a piece of artwork. Whatever that spirit is, Wendy Pini demonstrates that she has had it from the moment she was delivered into this world. Given up for adoption at birth, she has been on a quest ever since for those things most of us take for granted--family, tribe and community. The search has taught her about love and loss and, above all, the power that comes from hearts and minds united in a single dream. Taking inspiration from diverse sources both Western and Eastern--animation, comics, mythology, classic illustration and more--Wendy has developed a unique blend of stylistic opposites, seamlessly mingling the light and airy qualities of Japanese manga with the weighty power of American superhero comics. Whether engaged in her ongoing fantasy saga Elfquest or interpreting other writers' words for a magazine cover, she brings both the inner and outer "line of beauty" to her work. Every composition embraces the energy of the search and the peace of reaching the goal. This book provides a comprehensive look at rare material from Wendy's two Beauty and the Beast graphic novels, her Galaxy and If magazine covers and interior art, and preproduction art from the animated The Lord of the Rings film. It highlights ambitious projects such as Masque of the Red Death and Law and Chaos, includes exquisite art from the Land of Myth series of prints, and much more. The highest quality of reproduction is made possible through direct access to the original art or the best original source material, which has been made available from the Pini archives.

Painful Beauty

Painful Beauty
Author: Megan A. Smetzer
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0295748958

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women’s resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S’eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks. Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

Brain, Beauty, and Art

Brain, Beauty, and Art
Author: Anjan Chatterjee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-11-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019751362X

Frameworks -- Beauty -- Art -- Music -- Dance -- Architecture.

All the Beauty in the World

All the Beauty in the World
Author: Patrick Bringley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2023-02-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982163321

A best book of the year from New York Public Library, NPR, the Financial Times, Book Riot, and The Sunday Times (London). An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamourous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and your delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All the Beauty in the World is an “empathic” (The New York Times Book Review), “moving” (NPR), “consoling, and beautiful” (The Guardian) portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

Culture Care

Culture Care
Author: Makoto Fujimura
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2017-01-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830891110

We all have a responsibility to care for culture. Artist Makoto Fujimura issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we feed our culture's soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. This is a book for artists and all "creative catalysts" who understand how much the culture we all share affects human thriving today and shapes the generations to come.

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages
Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300093049

In this authoritative, lively book, the celebrated Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco presents a learned summary of medieval aesthetic ideas. Juxtaposing theology and science, poetry and mysticism, Eco explores the relationship that existed between the aesthetic theories and the artistic experience and practice of medieval culture. "[A] delightful study. . . . [Eco's] remarkably lucid and readable essay is full of contemporary relevance and informed by the energies of a man in love with his subject." --Robert Taylor, Boston Globe "The book lays out so many exciting ideas and interesting facts that readers will find it gripping." --Washington Post Book World "A lively introduction to the subject." --Michael Camille, The Burlington Magazine "If you want to become acquainted with medieval aesthetics, you will not find a more scrupulously researched, better written (or better translated), intelligent and illuminating introduction than Eco's short volume." --D. C. Barrett, Art Monthly