Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Plant Studies of the Renaissance by Fritz Koreny (New York Graphic Society; 278 pages; $75), compares such renowned works of botanical and zoological observation as Hare and The Large Piece of Turf with their imitations. The result is a scholarly view of authentication problems in 16th century German art and a wondrous glimpse into the beginnings of scientific representation...
They had faces then, but they also had posters. And Reel Art: Great Posters from the Golden Age of the Silver Screen by Stephen Rebello and Richard Allen (Abbeville; 342 pages; $75) displays them in both black and white and glorious Technicolor, along with a witty history of this peculiar art form. Charles Laughton's grasping hand reaches for a half-clad Maureen O'Hara in a teaser for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); Gary Cooper clutches a gun and Madeleine Carroll clutches him in an ad for The General Died at Dawn (1936); William Powell and Hedy Lamarr...
Because they could be inexpensively reproduced, Japanese wood-block prints, or ukiyo-e, made art available to the masses. Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers (George Braziller; 192 pages; $75) presents 91 surviving color prints from a 19th century master of the form. Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) was enormously successful with subjects more commonly portrayed in wood blocks: landscapes and scenes of urban night life. The prints of birds and flowers collected here harked back to an older Chinese tradition and became popular as well. The formula -- literally an arrangement of birds and plants -- only sounds narrow. Hiroshige's inspired variations...
...probably best remembered for the photographs he took of his friends, including Joyce, Hemingway and Picasso. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (Abbeville; 348 pages; $55) reproduces these pictures, of course, but much else as well. Ray flourished in Paris during the 1920s and '30s as a painter and a maker of often whimsical objects, such as a flatiron with a row of tacks attached. Photography was almost an afterthought, a means of recording his sometimes perishable constructions. But Ray's camera also captured an era -- when art belonged to Dada -- that this book scrupulously assembles and preserves...
...into plastics, was the advice given to ambitious young men after World War II. The New Yorker editor Robert A. Gottlieb and Manhattan art dealer Frank Maresca eventually did. A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag, 1949-59 (Knopf; 117 pages; $35) is a campy offering of selected photographs of the authors' unusual collections of period pocketbooks. Articles that once seemed the height of kitschy fashion in New York City and Miami Beach now glow, isolated by smart lighting and technically perfect camera work, like the artifacts of a vanished civilization...