Collections, Catalogs and Exhibitions

by Chris Wadsworth , Language: English

When Chris Wadsworth, and husband Michael, upped sticks in the South and moved north to the Lake District she had no inkling she was about to begin a new life as the owner of an art gallery. The small town of Cockermouth was hardly at the cutting edge of contemporary art – as the well-meaning locals were at pains to point out. ‘You’ve got to have views,’ they told her. ‘That’s what people here want!’ Chris had other ideas. And they didn’t include views. Instead she set out to find artists – famous, infamous, lost and unknown – whose work would eventually make her gallery in little-known Cockermouth not just a local but an international success.

by Rosie Cox , Wellcome Collection , Language: English

Dirt – obsessively avoided, often misunderstood, but paradoxically also an indicator of ‘civilisation’ (through production of waste), and a near-magical source of renewable life and medical discovery. History is rich with progressive victories over dirt, from the aqueducts and sewers of the Roman Empire to Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s triumphant ‘Main Drainage of London’ in the mid-nineteenth century, which still functions today. Yet our relationship with dirt is complex and ambivalent. Dirt is waste, excrement, rubbish – but what then is soil? Is cleanliness next to godliness – or sterility? And in a throwaway society, does the battle against dirt depend on an exploited and half-seen underclass of cleaners? Published to coincide with a major new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London in March 2011, and lavishly illustrated with images from the Wellcome’s archives, this provocative book features specially commissioned essays and a short graphic novel section on the significance and implications of dirt from the microbial level through to the environmental.

by Marlia Mundell Mango , Carol E Snow , Terry Drayman Weisser , Md. Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore , Language: English

Exhibition catalog early Byzantine silver, held from April 18 to August 17, 1986 in Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, USA. The book has scientific comments and well illustrated. 307 black and white illustrations.

by Terry J Reedy , Chandra L Reedy , Language: English

This technical report reviews the use of statistics in art conservation research. Our aim is to examine how statistical analyses have been handled in published conservation research studies and to suggest alternative approaches. All components of data analysis—including experimental design, data organization, and statistical techniques—are evaluated.

by Brian Allen , Yale Center for British Art , Kenwood (London Iveagh Bequest , Language: English

by Paola Antonelli , N.Y. Museum of Modern Art (New York , Language: English

Showcasing selected works from The Museum of Modern Art’s superlative architecture and design collection, Objects of Design features a wide variety of industrial and domestic artifacts by great designers of the modern period, from early masters such as Hector Guimard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Josef Hoffmann to contemporary practitioners including Droog Design, Ettore Sottsas, Gaetano Pesce, Hella Jongerius and others. Some of the objects represent turn-of-the-century designs of the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement; others are Bauhaus and de Stijl explorations; still others show Charles and Ray Eames and other American designers of the second half of the twentieth century; representations of the Italian design revolutions; and contemporary manifestations of familiar genres using radical new materials and techniques of manufacture.

by Marco Bussagli , Language: Italian

Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972), usually referred to as M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.

by Bruce Altshuler , Language: English

Collecting the New is the first book on the questions and challenges that museums face in acquiring and preserving contemporary art. Because such art has not yet withstood the test of time, it defies the traditional understanding of the art museum as an institution that collects and displays works of long-established aesthetic and historical value. By acquiring such art, museums gamble on the future. In addition, new technologies and alternative conceptions of the artwork have created special problems of conservation, while social, political, and aesthetic changes have generated new categories of works to be collected.F

by Vivian Endicott Barnett , Language: English

by James David Draper , N.Y. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York , Language: English

The engraving of hardstones is a time-honored practice that goes back several millennia. The Greeks refined the art, and they introduced in about the fifth century b.c. what we now call cameos: precious and semiprecious stones carved in projected relief. As fanciful curiosities and as miraculous unions of art and nature, cameos have been prized and collected since ancient times. This book presents a selection of more than one hundred magnificently carved gems from the unparalleled collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

by Keith Christiansen , Andrea Mantegna , Language: English

Few artists have managed to imprint their personality so indelibly on posterity as Andrea Mantegna (1430/31-1506). Before he reached the age of twenty, Mantegna was already being praised for his alto ingegno (exalted genius), and he became the court artist for the Gonzaga family in Mantua before he was thirty.

by Amalia K Amaki , Language: English

Lavishly illustrated with over one hundred color photographs, this book provides an important resource for the study of the works included in the Jones collection, the artists who created them, as well as the social and historical contexts that engendered them. The volume brings together ten essays, which examine four issues in American art: portraiture and realism in relation to abstract expressionism, the implications of color, the role of narrative, and the concept of multiple originals. Each essay makes the intentional effort to de-race African American art—not to strip the work of its idiomatic cultural footing, but rather to situate it within the larger picture of the nation’s history and cultural traditions.

by Francesco Spampinato , Language: English

The past twenty years have seen a new generation of artists working together in small groups and large collectives to explore new avenues of art, design, performance, and commerce. In Come Together, author and visual artist Francesco Spampinato assembles an international roster of forty of today’s most exciting and influential collectives, from design studios like Project Projects and political performance artists The Yes Men to flash mob provocateurs Improv Everywhere and the multimedia artists Assume Vivid Astro Focus.

by Carrie Rebora Barratt , Language: English

Emanuel Leutze’s life-size Washington Crossing the Delaware commemorates the critical moment in the American Revolution when George Washington led a surprise attack against troops supporting the British forces in Trenton. When Leutze created the painting in 1850, after he had returned from America to his native Germany, he was hoping to rally support for the revolutionary movements then sweeping Europe. He sent the work to New York in 1851, and within four months 50,000 people had paid to see it.

by Bettina Ann Bergmann , Bettina Bergmann , Language: English

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in a.d. 79, burying much of the region around the Bay of Naples in lava, one of the extraordinary Roman villas thereby preserved was that of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale. Its discovery in 1899 revealed breathtaking wall paintings that were dispersed in 1903, with major portions acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cleaning and reinstallation of these masterpieces has occasioned the creation of a virtual model that for the first time has allowed the authors to situate the surviving frescoes from the villa in their original relation to each other.