Search results for ""author pepe karmel""

A major new survey that offers fresh insights on Pablo Picasso's artworks, written by a leading authority on the master. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. This important new monograph, released to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death, presents Picasso's unparalleled achievements in all media: painting, sculpture, drawing and prints. Art historian and curator Pepe Karmel offers fresh analysis of this great master for a 21st-century audience, considering Picasso's work through the lens of art rather than biography. He demonstrates how Picasso's style, evolving over the course of seven decades, introduced visual languages and narratives that transformed modern art. Arranged chronologically by themes and movements, Looking at Picasso is profusely illustrated with renowned paintings, such as the provocative Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and his monumental Guernica, protesting the horror of war; these are accompanied by numerous lesser-known works, including Picasso's daring sculptures and his animated reinterpretation of Velazquez's 17th-century masterpiece Las Meninas. Numerous exhibitions planned for 2023 will bring Picasso to the forefront. This engaging book will appeal to museum-goers curious to learn more about Picasso's career and anyone interested in modern art.

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Taking a radically new approach to the history of abstract painting, Pepe Karmel applies a scholarly yet fresh vision to reconsider the history of abstraction from a global perspective and to demonstrate that abstraction is embedded in the real world. Moving beyond the orthodox canonical terrain of abstract art, he surveys artists from across the globe, examining their work from the point of view of content rather than form. Previous writers have approached the history of abstraction as a series of movements solving a series of formal problems. In contrast, Karmel focuses on the subject matter of abstract art, showing how artists have used abstract imagery to express social, cultural and spiritual experience. An introductory discussion of the work of the early modern pioneers of abstraction opens up into a completely new approach to abstract art based around five inclusive themes – the body, the landscape, the cosmos, architecture, and the repertory of man-made signs and patterns – each of which has its own chapter. Starting from a figurative example, Karmel works outwards to develop a series of narratives that go far beyond the established figures and movements traditionally associated with abstract art. Each narrative is complemented by a number of ‘featured’ abstract works, which provide an in-depth illustration of the breadth of Karmel’s distinctive vision. A wide-ranging examination of topics – from embryos to the surface of skin, from vortexes to waves, planets to star charts, towers to windows – is interwoven with detailed analysis of works by established figures like Joan Miró and Jackson Pollock alongside pieces by lesser-known artists such as Wu Guanzhong, Hilma af Klint and Odili Donald Odita.

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Thirty short poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy, of Dufy, that celebrate mammals, birds, fish, insects, and the mythical poet and prophet Orpheus—filled with surprising images, wit, formal mastery, and wry irony.First published in 1911, and embellished with the graphically sophisticated woodcuts, this collection presents a voice that ranges from the colloquial to the impassioned, a brisk combination of lyric imagery and bawdy humor.Apollinaire was an early and influential champion of Cubism, the friend of Braque, Picasso, Dufy, and Rousseau, and a seminal figure in the revolutionary art style known as “Surrealism,” a term that he coined. This a rare treat for lovers of French literature, art, and culture.

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In The New Society for Universal Harmony, Lenore Malen uses pseudo-documentary photos, video and audio transcriptions, “testimonials,” case histories, and arcane imagery to archive the functioning of her own reinvention of the utopian society established in Paris in 1793 by the followers of Franz Anton Mesmer known as La société de l'harmonie universelle. Malen's New Society comes out of her long-term installation project and live performances of case histories and treatments performed at the fabricated Society imagined in Athol Springs, New York. The book expands the scope of the project to include original fiction and essays by “fellow Harmonites” Jonathan Ames, Geoffrey O'Brien. Pepe Karmel, Nancy Princenthal, Irving Sandler, Susan Canning, Barbara Tannenbaum, Jim Long, Mark Thompson, and others, plus a first-person account of Malen's discovery and two-year involvement with the Society. The “Treatments” offered at the New Society and documented in the book have been adapted from Mesmer's original proscriptions; adding to the book's authority, Malen adopts personas including scientific corroborators, curious journalists and people whose lives have been forever changed by the Society. This work is often light-hearted and humorous, but by Malen's deft and thorough adherence to the actuality of her conceit she turns serious attention to a visible shift in U.S. cultural and political society towards blind discipleship and the seemingly overwhelming need to believe and to belong. The New Society examines our own culture's yearning for the perfect cure; what the Harmonites undergo and report is darkly funny and frequently impossible gesturing at the illusive search for spiritual peace and universal harmony, a search made more desperate in the social, political and ecological climate we live in.

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