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32+ oeuvres 1,349 utilisateurs 22 critiques

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Martin Gayford is the co-editor of The Grove Book of Art Writing. Currently the chief art critic for Bloomberg Europe

Comprend les noms: Gayford Martin

Œuvres de Martin Gayford

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (2011) — Auteur — 119 exemplaires
Michelangelo: His Epic Life (2013) 97 exemplaires
Spring cannot be cancelled (2021) 96 exemplaires
Lucian Freud (2007) 32 exemplaires
The Penguin Book of Art Writing (1998) — Directeur de publication — 25 exemplaires
Constable Portraits (2009) 22 exemplaires
The Many Faces of Jonathan Yeo (2013) 14 exemplaires

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Discussing the visual arts successfully in words is often held to be an impossible task. In fact it is merely difficult. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, many writers of all kinds have taken up the challenge -- not only art critics but novelists, poets, gossips, artists, and essayists. In The Grove Book of Art Writing, Martin Gayford and Karen Wright have collected the best and most lively attempts to pin it down, in a single-volume cornucopia of writing on art. From Vasari and Freud on why Mona Lisa smiles, to Adolf Hitler on the degeneracy of modernism, to Picasso on how to measure the depiction of the female body, art historians, art critics, artists, as well as the aforementioned weigh in on what makes art so wonderful, frustrating, what makes it art. From the deadly serious to the deeply witty, from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Grove Book of Art Writing is an eloquent compendium of insight into the diverse ways the visual arts can be seen and thought about.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
petervanbeveren | 1 autre critique | Mar 18, 2024 |
This is one of those books where you have to look quite closely at the title: It's not a history of visual art, it's a history of pictures. In other words, Hockney and Gayford are discussing the history of human depictions of the real world on flat surfaces. They look at the interaction between imaginative reproduction — artists putting lines and colours on paper — and technical reproduction where we use optical devices to project images of the real world either temporarily onto a wall or a screen or more permanently onto a photographic film or a digital sensor.

Hockney, of course, has a long-standing bee in his bonnet about the way artists have used optical devices to assist them in composing pictures. So there's a lot about how every important artist from the renaissance onwards has been using a camera obscura to trace forms or at least to establish the composition of their work. It's perhaps controversial if you're an art historian, but if you don’t have a vested interest, it does seem to make perfect sense. Why wouldn't you use a tool if it's available and makes your work easier?

Of course, they emphasise that there's still always an important creative element in choosing the composition and lighting of what you want in your picture and then choosing how you want to transfer it from the projection to the permanent record.

Hockney points out that trained artists have often also turned out to be very good at taking photographs, whilst people who have no sense of visual art are unlikely to be good at taking photographs, except in a technical sense.

The book also covers moving images and digital creation of pictures — Hockney is the great advocate of iPad art, of course — but it’s just a bit too old to cover the rapidly developing topic of AI-created images. I’m sure there will be a chapter on that if they ever update the book. It would be interesting to know what Hockney thinks about computers producing images of penguins on surfboards or inadequately-clothed Asian girls in post-apocalyptic cityscapes.

It's interesting how this book is set up very explicitly as a dialogue with alternate passages written by Hockney and Gayford. Hockney writes, of course, from the practical viewpoint of a practising artist and also from his own aesthetic insight, whilst Gayford sticks more to filling us in on the history of art, explaining the background and context of the things that were going on around the artists at the time. It's a very good collaboration and it works surprisingly smoothly. I didn't find it at all distracting really.

The book is very richly illustrated. It includes practically every picture mentioned in the text, even the very over-familiar ones. In the paperback it's not always the most beautiful, glossy reproduction, but they're all perfectly adequate. The book is quite pretty to look at, although a bit chunky to be a coffee table book.

If you're going to read just one book on the history of visual images, this is probably a bit too random and discursive: you would probably want to start with someone like Gombrich. But this is also a very nice one, and a lively, entertaining read.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
thorold | 2 autres critiques | Feb 23, 2024 |
Discussing the visual arts successfully in words is often held to be an impossible task. In fact it is merely difficult. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, many writers of all kinds have taken up the challenge -- not only art critics but novelists, poets, gossips, artists, and essayists. In The Grove Book of Art Writing, Martin Gayford and Karen Wright have collected the best and most lively attempts to pin it down, in a single-volume cornucopia of writing on art. From Vasari and Freud on why Mona Lisa smiles, to Adolf Hitler on the degeneracy of modernism, to Picasso on how to measure the depiction of the female body, art historians, art critics, artists, as well as the aforementioned weigh in on what makes art so wonderful, frustrating, what makes it art. From the deadly serious to the deeply witty, from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Grove Book of Art Writing is an eloquent compendium of insight into the diverse ways the visual arts can be seen and thought about.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
petervanbeveren | 1 autre critique | Feb 18, 2024 |
Дэвид Хокни, популярный современный художник, и Мартин Гейфорд, художественный критик, историк искусства и автор биографий Ван Гога, Констебля и Микеланджело, ведут увлекательный диалог о месте и истории изображений в жизни людей. Именно изображений, потому что беседа, начинаясь с глубин веков, органично вплетает все больше и больше визуальных средств их воспроизведения, самыми узнаваемыми из которых, безусловно, по сей день являются картины. Однако и фотография, и кинематограф оказали заметное влияние на то, как мы воспринимаем изображения сейчас, и на то, как пишутся картины, а потому разговор идет и о них. Отдельная нить обсуждения — технологии: импрессионизма не было бы без изобретения тюбиков для краски, которые позволили писать на пленэре, а камера-обскура совершила подлинный переворот в живописи, хотя многие великие художники стеснялись признаваться в ее использовании. Хокни и Гейфорд, демонстрируя энциклопедические знания, распознают тайные приемы мэтров и даже находят у них ляпы. Впрочем, делается это без злого умысла, их интересует вопрос правдивого изображения мира. Ведь «если одни картины более правдивы, чем другие, они все равно не говорят всей правды, ибо это невозможно».… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
Den85 | 2 autres critiques | Jan 3, 2024 |

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Œuvres
32
Aussi par
2
Membres
1,349
Popularité
#19,068
Évaluation
4.1
Critiques
22
ISBN
89
Langues
9

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