Overwhelmingly, visitors agree that The Frick Collection in New York City is one of their favorite museums in the world. The elegant Fifth Avenue mansion, built in 1914 for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clay Frick, houses a unique assemblage of some of the choicest art to be found anywhere. In this book, Charles Ryskamp - the Director of The Frick Collection - introduces the reader to the world of Henry Clay Frick, to the evolution of his collection, as well as to the historical and aesthetic framework within which The Frick Collection attained its eminence. Then, in separate sections devoted to paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts, written by the curatorial staff, the pages of Art in The Frick Collection offer vibrant reproductions of the famous works, with information on every piece illustrated and magnificent views of the richly furnished room where they are installed. As Sir John Pope-Hennessy has observed: "In The Frick Collection, alone of the great museums of the world, paintings and sculpture of comparable quality are shown side by side". Paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Memling, Velazquez, Constable, and Renoir hang next to some of the finest of Renaissance bronzes, marble portrait busts by such sculptors as Verrocchio and Houdon, and eighteenth-century terracotta figures. Furniture of wood and marble, gilt bronze and porcelain - including pieces made for Marie-Antoinette - match these in importance. Readers will enjoy browsing through this selection of the treasures to be seen in the house built by Mr. Frick, offered here in the most extensive one-volume survey to be published on the renowned Collection.
William Eggleston's Guide by John Szarkowski, ISBN 0870703781
William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown...
William Eggleston's Guide by John Szarkowski, ISBN 0870703781
Furneture > William Eggleston's Guide by John Szarkowski, ISBN 0870703781
The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice, ISBN 0385318901
Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in "The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home.
Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium...
The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice, ISBN 0385318901
Furneture > The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice, ISBN 0385318901