Word: arte
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Giorgio Vasari was the Boswell of the 16th century art world. He was also its Sammy Glick. As a painter and architect he outhustled many of his betters for commissions in the courts of Florence, Rome, Naples and Bologna. Vasari had an inflated opinion of his talent as a painter, so it is something of an irony that he is remembered chiefly for his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, an informal, even gossipy collection of biographical studies of the great and near great of Italian art. This boxed three-volume re-edition, translated by Gaston...
...surplus of ivory coming out of the Congo prompted the Belgian government to offer the material free to sculptors. Many accepted, and the ivory statuette soon stood tall in the art deco movement. Isadora Duncan by Alberto Savinio (Franco Maria Ricci; 184 pages; $125) shows just how exquisite some of these miniature sculptures became. All works pictured here were inspired, in one way or another, by the blithe spirit of American Dancer Isadora Duncan. Artists like Demeter Chiparus and Friederich Preiss, whose names are familiar today only to collectors, shaped ivory as if it were butter; the dancing figures they...
Written by the British art critic and historian Ian Dunlop, Degas (Harper & Row; 240 pages; $37.50) is by far the best introduction to the life and work of the painter of boulevards and ballet dancers now in print. A student of Ingres's and the great contemporary of Manet, Flaubert Sand the Goncourt brothers, Degas was one of those ocular witnesses without whom the cultural life of France in the 19th century cannot be understood; and no writer has done a better job of placing this tetchy, formidable genius, with his astonishing powers of observation iand his bitter tongue...
Drawing may be defined as the "art of representing the colored mass of objects or recording one's inner visions on a thin flat surface by means of lines which do not exist in nature." That, at least, is the explanation offered in Drawing by Genevieve Monnier and Bernice Rose (Rizzoli; 278 pages; $75), and it seems as good as any. The 365 illustrations (100 of them in color) span virtually all of drawing's long history. The text offers not only an informative historical survey but also a technical guide to the various kinds of materials that...
...books show why Gail Levin's Edward Hopper as Illustrator (Norton/ The Whitney Museum of American Art; 288 pages; $24.95) brings together the dramatic paintings and drawings Hopper executed for the covers of such publications as Tavern Topics and Hotel Management, as well as the illustrations he did for books and catalogues. Levin's companion volume, Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints (Norton/The Whitney Museum; unpaginated; $15.95), reproduces more than 100 of the artist's etchings and dry points...