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Oh, To Be a Painter! by Virginia Woolf
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
The twentieth volume in the renowned ekphrasis series, this collection of Virginia Woolf's writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author. Despite wide interest in Woolf's writings, and in the artists and art critics in her Bloomsbury circle, there is no acces ...Show more
On Contemporary Art by Cesar Aira
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist C sar Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts. On Aira's dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question--from repr ...Show more
Paul Gauguin: Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter by Donatien Grau
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis
"Criticism is our censorship...." So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) wrote "Racontars de Rapin" only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his ...Show more
Photography and Belief by David Levi Strauss
Category: Photography | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that "seeing is believing."Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smartphones, and the internet, asking important questions abo ...Show more
Pissing Figures by Jean Claude Lebensztejn
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis
Lebensztejn is one of France's best - kept secrets. A world - class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a sma ll but dedicated group of cognoscenti. First introducing the M ...Show more
Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists by John Ashbery
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the "playlists" here offer representative samplings of music from these same years, ...Show more
Strange Impressions by Romaine Brooks; Lauren O'Neill-Butler (Introduction by)
Category: Art Instructional | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubin ...Show more
Summoning Pearl Harbor by Alexander Nemerov
Category: Art | Series: Ekphrasis
Summoning Pearl Harbor is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past? In this highly original meditation on ...Show more
The Cathedral Is Dying by Auguste Rodin; Rachel Corbett (Contribution by); Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler (Translator)
Category: Architecture | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
Master sculptor Auguste Rodin's illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame. In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor's book Cathedrals of France, first publis ...Show more
The Critic As Artist by Oscar Wilde
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Subtitled Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything, the ...Show more
The Psychology of an Art Writer by Vernon Lee; Dylan Kenny (Foreword by)
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
Vernon Lee--a pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856-1935)--is the most important female aesthetician to come out of 19th-century England. Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee never gained the recognition she so clearly deserved for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philo ...Show more
The Salon Of 1846 by Charles Baudelaire
Category: Art Instructional | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
In his introduction to Charles Baudelaire's Salon of 1846, the renowned art historian Michael Fried presents a new take on the French poet and critic's ideas on art, criticism, romanticism, and the paintings of Delacroix.Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most da ...Show more