You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
René Magritte offers a rethinking of Magritte's art from a position informed by contemporary developments in art theory. The book employs a wide range of literary and philosophical/cultural theoretical frameworks to analyze Magritte's art. It offers close readings of specific images, paying attention to neglected aspects of Magritte's work, discussing the significance of cabinets of curiosities and encyclopedias, trompe l'oeil, framing and forgeries. It addresses a range of intertextual relations between Magritte's work and that of other Surrealist artists and the art-historical tradition. This highly readable text explores how Magritte's art challenges conventional notions of originality, canonicity and coherence, revealing his work as being shaped by co-operations and co-options. It demonstrates that uncertainty, incoherence and negation lie at the core of Magritte's oeuvre.
None
Here's a series of quick, savvy, entertaining books on artists and pop culture at a popular price. It's for readers who want easy access to information and who are turned off by art-world jargon.With cutting-edge tone and text, these innovative, richly illustrated, compact books (6 x 6 gift size) are targeted at busy people who've heard of these much-discussed artists -- and who know that many people, for some reason, think these artists are important -- but honestly don't get what the big fuss is all about.Abrams produces fine illustrated books with such major art institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre.
The first book-length material study of the works of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. René Magritte (1898–1967) is the most famous Belgian artist of the twentieth century and a celebrated representative of the Surrealist movement. Much has been written about his practices, artistic community, and significance within the history of modernism, but little has been documented regarding his process. This volume examines fifty oil paintings made by Magritte between 1921 and 1967, now held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. This technical study of his works using noninvasive scientific imaging and chemical analysis reveals the artist’s painting materials, his habit of overpainting previous compositions, and the origins and mechanisms of surface and pigment degradation. Of interest to conservators, scientists, curators, and enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, this book expands our understanding of Magritte the artist and provides new and useful findings that will inform strategies for the future care of his works.
For René Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception—what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation—as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte’s painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.
The artist's most unforgettable images come together in an exquisite study of his life and work. This comprehensive and provocative monograph traces the influences on Magritte's art while 400 illustrations show the full range of his work. Not only the well-known paintings but also lesser-known murals, photographs, sculptures, and commercial works are represented. 400 illustrations, 110 in full-color.
None
Available for the first time in an English translation, this selection of René Magritte’s writings gives non-Francophone readers the chance to encounter the many incarnations of the renowned Belgian painter—the artist, the man, the aspiring noirist, the fire-breathing theorist—in his own words. Through whimsical personal letters, biting apologia, appreciations of fellow artists, pugnacious interviews, farcical film scripts, prose poems, manifestos, and much more, a new Magritte emerges: part Surrealist, part literalist, part celebrity, part rascal.While this book is sure to appeal to admirers of Magritte’s art and those who are curious about his personal life, there is also much to delight readers interested in the history and theory of art, philosophy and politics, as well as lovers of creativity and the inner workings of a probing, inquisitive mind unrestricted by genre, medium, or fashion.
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The first significant biography of the artist' Michael Prodger, The Times' 'Best art books of 2021' 'Exemplary ... a scintillating read' Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph 'For those who love Magritte and those who do not, Danchev's biography will come as a revelation' Literary Review René Magritte's surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have all become inescapably part of our times. But these groundbreaking subversions all came from a middle-class Belgian gent, who kept a modest house in a Brussels suburb and whose first one-man show sold absolutely nothing. Through a deep examination of Magritte's friendships and his artistic development, Alex Danchev explores the path of an highly unconventional artist who posed profound questions about the relationship between image and reality, challenged the very nature of authenticity and whose influence can be seen in the work of everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.