Мистецтво

Rockwell

Since his work is categorized as illustration and was most famously featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, fine art critics were slow to acknowledge the importance of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) as true artist, though his work was enormously popular during his lifetime and has endured as a crucial element in America's perception of itself in the 20th century.

Rococo

The dramatic style of the 18th century

Redon

Exploring the mysteries of the subconscious
The grandfather of surrealism

"My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined." —Redon

Realism

Art history's most important movements and genres

Art imitates life in the work of the realists. Through painting, photography, and sculpture, 20th century realists invoke reality in works that capture what Freud called "the uncanny"—the inexplicable strangeness of something which seems at once real and not real.

Featured artists include:

Raphael

Classic grace and human grandeur

Pre-Raphaelites

"Genuine ideas to express"

Sometimes considered the first avant-garde art movement, the Pre-Raphaelites rejected their era's dominant artistic theories for what they saw as a more spiritual, naturalistic and intensely personal approach. Fascinated by the romantic aspects of medieval culture and the vivid, jewel-like colors of Quattrocento art, the movement abhored the Classical poses and composition of Raphael and those influenced by him—hence the group's name—and the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Poussin

The classicist

French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) spent most of his working life in Rome turning out works that fused the best features of Renaissance painting with influences of antiquity. Poussin was highly prolific and was considered by his contemporaries to be the greatest living painter, a man whose work embodied the ideal of French classical art. Poussin himself stressed logic and clarity in his work, formulating doctrines with the aim of intellectualizing art; in the latter, he succeeded in leaving an influence in art that lasted centuries.

Portraits

The likeness through the ages

Beginning in the 14th century and working its way through the ages up to the current day, this book examines the portrait via the most beloved and important examples in history.

Featured artists include:

Munch

Fear, desperation, and death - Painting as an act of self-liberation

For Edvard Munch (1863-1944), painting was an act of self-liberation. His treatments of fear, desperation, and death still exert a powerful visual and psychological effect on modern viewers. Of all Munch's paintings, "The Scream" (1893), representing a figure tortured by horror, is the most well-known-and certainly one of the most expressive.

Mucha

The creator of Art Nouveau's greatest beauties