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Luis Meléndez (1715-1780) is today recognized as the premier still-life painter in eighteenth-century Spain, indeed one of the greatest in all of Europe. He is widely heralded for his virtuoso paintings of everyday objects rendered with exacting detail, marvelous effects of color and light, and subtle variations in texture. Featuring paintings from collections worldwide, this lavishly illustrated book showcases thirty-one still lifes by Meléndez, among them several previously unpublished works. Individual painting entries incorporate fascinating technical images along with close-up reproductions. Essays provide an overview of the artist's life and work, a discussion of period objects depicted in Meléndez's still lifes, and an explanation of technical discoveries. The book as a whole illuminates both the art history and technique behind an ingenious body of work. -- From publisher's description.
In this, the only up-to-date critical work on still life painting in any language, Norman Bryson analyzes the origins, history and logic of still life, one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Cubism. The third essay tackles the controversial field of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. Bryson concludes in the final essay that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women. In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson is at his most brilliant. These superbly written essays will stimulate us to look at the entire tradition of still life with new and critical eyes.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.
A heart-wrenching, yet enlightening collection of children's drawings forged in the fires of war. Of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Franco's tyranny in the relative security of Republican-controlled eastern Spain, more than 200,000 were children. The Republic responded to this crisis by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies), often in country estates and mansions that had been abandoned by fascist sympathizers. In these colonies, the young refugees -- many of them orphaned or sent by their parents to safety -- received schooling and medical care, kept each other company, and produced thousands of drawings that serve as a moving, collective testimony of the experience of being a child in wartime. Companion to a major traveling exhibition, They Still Draw Pictures collects and comments on a cross-section of the children's art produced in the colonias infantiles. Born of the trauma of exile and separation, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies and preserve the children's clear memories of life before the war and hope for life after it. They are supplemented by a smaller selection of drawings from later wars. "Once I drew like Rafael, " Picasso said, "but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child." Deceptively transparent, these drawings speak with a poignant immediacy of war's consequences for its youngest victims.
The artistic life of the Spanish court in the 1620s, once depicted as a drab and featureless backdrop against which to depict the genius of Velazquez, was actually one of the most creative and dynamic periods of foment of the entire seventeenth century. This masterful examination of the life and work of Juan van der Hamen y Leon (1596 - 1631) serves as a powerful lens for viewing the 1620s from a novel perspective, one that opens new vistas and invites further investigation. Van der Hamen is well known to lovers of Golden Age painting in Spain as one of the most famous and prolific still-life painters of the seventeenth century. He was much more than that. In this beautiful book William Jordan examines the artist's entire output of still lifes, but he also has a larger aim: to study for the first time the complete Van der Hamen, the painter esteemed by his peers above all for his versatility - for his portraits, allegories, landscapes, flower paintings and large-scale religious works executed for churches and convents in the environs of Madrid and Toledo. Van der Hamen's star was very bright when his Sevillian rival was just finding his way at the court of the young King Philip IV. When that fire was unexpectedly extinguished at the age of thirty-five, some of his contemporaries, such as the playwright Juan Perez de Montalvan, lamented the passing of 'the greatest Spaniard of his art who ever lived'. Long dismissed as literary hyperbole, this lofty assessment, even if biased by friendship and bereavement, is made understandable by newly discovered works in all these genres, many of them published here for the first time. The product of forty years of research, this study is underpinned by copious archival documentation and probing analysis of contemporary sources. Recent restoration has also transformed many paintings long familiar only in a compromised state, making a true assessment of their quality possible for the first time. The Van der Hamen who emerges is a surprising one, who finally takes his proper place among the masters of Spanish art.
A dazzling combination of comics and essays sheds light on the rich but often overlooked contributions of Spanish immigrants to the political, cultural, and scientific history of the US.