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Adds a new dimension
Shadows of Reality discusses the 4th dimension in math and art. Robbin is very thorough both in his analysis and his historical explorations. I enjoyed the book a great deal.

A wonderful introduction to the projective approach in math and art
An innovative thinker and a gifted artist, Tony Robbin filters the world of mathematics through the nuances of human vision, creating masterful representations of higher dimensions.His new book stands as a testament to his meticulous scholarship of the history of projective geometry, in mathematics, physics and art.It is a thoroughly enjoyable account of how the notion of finding shadows of the fourth dimension emerged in the 19th century, permeated modern art in the 20th, and now represents one of the frontiers of computer graphics in the 21st.Along the way, Robbin shows how projective geometry could provide the key to a quantum description of gravity.A must read, for the curious anecdotes, cutting-edge science, impressive array of references, colorful art, and insight into how we can perceive the seemingly imperceptible. ... Read more

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Pioneered by Picasso and Braque, Cubism was the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. Heavily influenced by the stark power of African and Native American art and sculpture, it deconstructed conventions of viewpoint and perspective, revolutionizing painting and western art in general. With its flattened, geometric shapes, overlapping, simplified forms and fragmented spatial planes, Cubism was one of the most influential movements in 20th-century art.



Featured artists: Pablo Picasso, Edmond Fortier, Paul Cézanne, George Braque, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Henri Laurens, Salvador Dalí, Brassaï, Robert Delaunay, Raymond Duchamp-Villon ... Read more

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quick guide to cubism
This book is a great reference guide to the Cubist art movement.It contains information about many artists that influenced cubism, most of which I never even knew about.I love the artist quotes and all of the colorful images and examples of cubism. I definitely recommend it to anyone who is an art enthusiast, or just a fan of cubism. ... Read more

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This book transforms our understanding of Cubism, showing in unprecedented detail how it emerged in Picasso’s work of the years 1906–13, and tracing its roots in nineteenth-century philosophy and linguistics. Linking well-known paintings and sculptures to the hitherto-ignored drawings that accompanied them, Pepe Karmel demonstrates how Picasso’s quest to depict the human body with greater solidity led, paradoxically, to its fragmentation; and how Picasso used the archaic model of stage space to free himself from conventional perspective, replacing the open window of Renaissance painting with a new projective space. In other chapters, Karmel discusses the empiricist philosophy championed by Hippolyte Taine, which encouraged the breakdown of painting into its abstract elements, and laid the groundwork for an art of mental association rather than naturalistic figuration. Similarly, contemporary philology provided the model for a visual language employing both metaphoric and metonymic (but not arbitrary) signs. Combining intellectual history with close visual reading, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism opens new perspectives on the most influential movement in twentieth-century art. ... Read more

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Fantastic Book�Even if you are not in the art world!
I picked Karmel's book up yesterday and found that I could not put it down.I am neither an artist, nor an art historian, but I found Karmel's explanation and analysis of Picasso's cubism both accessible and fascinating.I would highly recommend it not just for art buffs, but for anyone who is at all interested in Picasso's work.Setting aside the craft of Karmel's words, the book itself happens to be a work of art in its own right.It is beautifully bound with fantastic images....This is the first book that I have felt the need to write a review of on amazon.Let me assure you that there is a reason...

Fantastic Book�Even if you are not in the art world!
I picked up Karmel's book yesterday and found that I could not put it down.I am neither an artist, nor an art historian, but I found Karmel's explanation and analysis of Picasso's cubism both accessible and fascinating.I would highly recommend it not just for art buffs, but for anyone who is at all interested in Picasso's work.Setting aside the craft of Karmel's words, the book itself happens to be a work of art in its own right.It is beautifully bound with fantastic images....This is the first book that I have felt the need to write a review of on amazon.Let me assure you that there is a reason... ... Read more

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A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takes a close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historically focused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-World War I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts. The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century.Together, the essays show that although there were many points of intersection--historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological--between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them. Most often the connections between cubist painting and modern architecture were construed analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film, poetry, and photomontage. Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of Le Cobusiers work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture. Cubisms significance for architecture also remained two-dimensional--a method of representing modern spatial experience through the ordering impulses of art.Copublished with the Canadian Centre for Architecture/Centre Canadien d'Architecture ... Read more

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The book presents a survey of art from the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors begin by exploring how aspects of the primitive were invoked by rural artists' colonies formed in France and Germany at the end of the 19th century and by the work of the Fauves and the German Expressionists a few years later. The book then develops an analysis of Cubist works based on semiotic theory, considering the social and cultural values encoded in such signifying systems, and investigating the relationship between representation and ideology. The final chapter considers some problems of interpretation and evolution posed by specific examples of abstract art ranging from Malevich to Mondrian. ... Read more

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Often considered to be the seminal art movement of the twentieth century, Cubism initiated a pictorial revolution through its radical approach to image making, invention of the new media of collage and sculptural assemblage, and evolution toward pure abstraction. Scholarly yet accessible, Cubism and Culture reveals these profound formal innovations as integrally related to changes in French society. The authors first examine the movement's origins in primitivism and its engagement with issues of race and colonialism, and then consider the Cubists' responses to anti-Enlightenment philosophies, the relation of Cubist art to the "classical," the role played by gender conceptually and within particular careers and practices, collage and its interplay with cultural themes, and the impact of anarchism, nationalism, and pacifism on Cubism's cultural politics. This comprehensive and fresh examination of Cubism in its wider context—social, cultural, political, scientific, and philosophical—covers the full range of art and artists from the movement's advent in 1908. 182 illustrations, 54 in color.

Among the artists included: Alexander Archipenko
• Maria Blanchard
• Georges Braque
• Robert Delaunay
• Sonia Delaunay
• André Derain
• Marcel Duchamp
• Raymond Duchamp-Villon
• Albert Gleizes
• Juan Gris
• Alice Halicka
• Roger de La Fresnaye
• Marie Laurencin
• Henri Laurens
• Henri Le Fauconnier
• Fernand Léger
• Jacques Lipchitz
• Louis Marcoussis
• Frans Masereel
• Jean Metzinger
• Francis Picabia
• Pablo Picasso ... Read more

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cubism by john golding
it has good, factual information that is easy to read. i liked the style of the book. i did not care for the use of the word 'negro' when referring to african sculpture. other than that the book is well written. ... Read more

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A Sum of Destructions was named a CHOICE Magazine 2003 Outstanding Academic Title of the Year, was a Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which "honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art,"and won the Eleanor Tufts Award of The American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies, "for a distinguished publication on the arts of Iberia."

In this groundbreaking book, Natasha Staller closely examines for the first time the complex and intricate dialogue between Picasso and the multiple cultures of his early life. Staller argues that to a degree never before imagined Picasso's revolutionary Cubism was saturated with his past--inspired in part by competing and colliding images, myths, and ideas from a series of cultural legacies. She tracks Picasso on his odyssey through cultures: from Málaga, where he spent his first ten years, to La Coruña, Barcelona, and finally to Paris, where he moved as a young man. Picasso's most fundamental attitudes, she contends, all were formed in Málaga. Yet Cubism could not have been invented had he not moved to Paris. Each culture became a prism through which he viewed the next; in each case he actively transformed what he found.

Staller boldly illuminates what Cubism's radical attributes meant in historical and culturally specific terms. With vivid detail, she analyzes an unprecedented range of new, often archival, materials--from coded messages señoritas sent with fans to ritual re-enactments of holy wars, from enchanted characters of fairy tales to superstitions, bullfighting treatises, provincial art-school manuals, three-minute films, and Picasso's childhood works saved by his parents from the time he was nine.

A Sum of Destructions offers a new appreciation of Picasso's extraordinary ability to recast his cultural past as he grappled with his avant-garde present--to create stunningly original images, the most historically decisive of his life. Staller reinterprets major works from Demoiselles to Suze, and beyond, along the way transforming our understanding of both Picasso and his Cubist art. ... Read more

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Except......
The fact that Picasso was an ANARCHIST, and a pacifist is completely missed.
Considering Picasso claimed Barcelona (an anarchist stronghold) as his home town, and he was the founding editor of a strongly outspoken anarchist and separatist journal when he was barely out of his teens, this is a pretty big miss.

For a good resource that does cover Picasso's obvious Kropotkinesque anarchism, try Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914

Illuminating
The organization of this book is striking. Although it starts with Picasso's childhood in Malaga and ends a few years after his arrival in Paris, it's anything but a chronological biography of Picasso's early years. The theme of each chapter is some class of cultural artifacts or fads -- mainly from popular culture -- that influenced Picasso in the years through his Cubist period. As a result, the narrative skips around while also having a general sense of forward motion: very appropriately, a Cubist sense of time.

The range of things described is incredibly broad. It includes popular religious objects, newspaper ads, academic history painting, fads for Esperanto and similar artifical languages, "the language of parasols" (which Spanish ladies learned from color trading cards enclosed in packages of chocolates), and numerous sorts of tchotchkes. I especially enjoyed looking at some of Picasso's guitar sculptures in the light of the paper cut-and-fold-up models that were popular when he was a child.

All of this cultural material is fascinating. Still, I wasn't always convinced of strong connections between some items and Picasso's paintings, especially in the first couple of chapters. It seemed to me that there might be alternative explanations for some features of his paintings, or at least that the case presented was occasionally a bit sketchy.

Nonetheless, the last several chapters are a great tour de force. Among the highlights are analyses of some of Picasso's collages. The bits of newspaper that Picasso used, and where he chose to snip them, weren't at all chosen at random. What's especially interesting is that some of them were chosen because of the stories or ads adjacent to, or on the reverse of, the cuttings he used, even though these aren't visible in the artwork.

The scholarship necessary to track down all these connections is mind-boggling. It's easy to understand why this book was more than 20 years in the making. The writing style, though isn't at all academic --and at times is quite earthy in ways I'm sure Picasso would have approved.

I was also impressed by the book's compassionate treatment (appropriately and unavoidably mixed with some bathos) of Picasso's father, a failed academic painter whose specialty was realistic paintings of pigeons. Most of all, the book is a great confirmation of Picasso's fundamentally comic sensibility. That makes the book a pleasure to read all the way through.

The most enlightening book on Picasso yet written
As impossible as it seems to say something new about Picasso, Staller manages not only that, but to summon up the entire ethos that surrounded and created him. An astonishing and beautiful book.

A triumph of fascinating and readable scholarship -
Dr. Staller combined resolute scholarship with poetic exposition.She produced an astonishing enlargement of Picasso's "world of veils and fragments."

Amazing book
A marvelous book that is equally beautiful and well-written. ... Read more

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BACK IN PRINT“A recognized classic of art historical literature.” —Artweek“Worth its weight in gold to serious art students.” —Pittsburgh Press“Brilliant and lucid.” —St. Louis Globe Democrat

This reissue brings back into print a timeless classic on one of the most important movements in Modern art. Art historian Robert Rosenblum brilliantly clarifies the language of Cubism and offers a penetrating analysis of its role in the creation of the major pictorial and sculptural styles of our time. The colorplates include both well-known Cubist masterpieces and works marking the transition to other viewpoints in contemporary art. ... Read more

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Cubism, perhaps the seminal art movement of the twentieth century, is also one of the most complex. It was the product of the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914. France, during this period, was torn by intercity class and international tensions, caught between excitement over the experience of modernity and anxiety about its consequences. Analyzing paintings by Picasso, Braque, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and their associates, David Cottington describes how the artistic avant-garde, and Cubism within it, were formed by that turbulent and complex moment. ... Read more

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Featuring more than 80 international and Australian artists, this examination of cubism shows the impact of this revolutionary and transformative movement on Australian painting from the early 20th century to the present day. With rigorous historical research and analysis as well as stunning reproductions of key works, this consideration traces cubism from its first manifestations through its influence on contemporary art. Showcased artists include Sam Atyeo, Alexander Archipenko, Dorrit Black, George Braque, Grace Crowley, Juan Gris, Adrian Lawlor, Fernand Léger, Roy de Maistre, Pablo Picasso, and Margaret Preston.

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Square people...Melting clocks...What does it all mean? The Art Revolutions series addresses these questions - and many more in an in-depth look at the major art movements of the twentieth century and the artists within them. Each book is illustrated with brilliant reproductions of the modern masterpieces discussed in the text. All titles include a glossary, index, listing of where to see the original works of art and a further reading list, including other books on the subject and the internet. ... Read more