art modern

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright blue dust jacket, 344 pages. Santayana's Life of Reason, published in five books from 1905 to 1906, ranks as one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Acknowledging the natural material bases of human life, Santayana traces the development of the human capacity for appreciating and cultivating the ideal. It is a capacity he exhibits as he articulates a continuity running through animal impulse, practical intelligence, and ideal harmony in reason, society, art, religion, and science. The work is an exquisitely rendered vision of human life lived sanely.In this first book of the work, Santayana provides an account of how the human animal develops instinct, passion, and chaotic experience into rationality and ideal life. Inspired by Aristotle's De Anima, Darwin's evolutionary theory, and William James's The Principles of Psychology, Santayana contends that the requirements of action in a hazardous and uncertain environment are the sources of the development of mind. More specifically, instinct and imagination are crucial to the emergence of reason from chaos. Separating himself from the typical thought of the time by his recognition of the imagination, Santayana in this volume offers extensive critiques of various philosophies of mind, including those of Kant and the British empiricists. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 242 pages. Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines. Lightly worn copy, clean, solid binding.

Hardcover. NY, Philomel Books, 2nd pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY BARRON on front fly leaf and also SIGNED on the tiele page. Blending Arthurian legend and modern oceanography, this lively tale boasts finely developed characters as well as fast-moving adventure. The author achieves a solid balance of mythology, environmental issues, and scientific research procedures. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Humanities Press, Revised Ed., 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, A Historical and Critical Essay. Analyzes the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton to establish the reasons for the triumph of the modern scientific perspective. Hardcover, blue cloth with bright gilt lettering on spine, 343 pages. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st pbk., 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 304 pages. Profusely illustrated in b&w. Piranesi has a powerful appeal for our time. His brilliance as a graphic artist, his transformation of the European vision of Classical antiquity, and his themes of fantasy have been the focus of considerable study in recent years. But though these aspects are important for an appreciation of Piranesi's visual significance, they have tended to obscure other factors essential for a complete understanding of his unique achievement. In this copiously illustrated study, John Wilton-Ely - one of the world's foremost authorities on Piranesi - offers a full reappraisal of the complex personality of an astonishingly versatile artist. His book covers every aspect of Piranesi's life and work, emphasizing especially his importance as a pioneer of Roman archaeology, the high quality of his technical illustrations, and his role in the great Graeco-Roman debate of the 1760s. The author brings to life the Enlightenment world of the artist's ideas - fundamentally bound up with the birth of Neo-Classicism - and the search for an appropriately modern form of expression; and he shows the practical and influential form taken by these ideas in Piranesi's architectural projects, his designs for furniture and decorative schemes and his imaginative restoration of antiquities. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Dutton, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 190 pages. Yellow cover boards, no dust jacket. Black & white cartoons selected by the editors of the Saturday Evening Post.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 532 pages. In a preface written for this paperback edition, Professor Hay examines some of the changes in Renaissance scholarship since the first publication of this volume in 1957. Successive chapters examine the social and economic structure of a continent about to establish trade and colonies in the New World, the intellectual and artistic movements which made up the Renaissance, the position of the Church on the eve of the Reformation, the political inheritance of the Middle Ages, with its rising nation states, and the growth of the Ottoman Empire. Clean copy.

Softcover. Wellington NZ, Polynesian Society, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 170 pages. Originally published in 1978 as a series of articles in The Journal of the Polynesian Society. Wrappers rubbed, internally very good, clean.

Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 280 pages. This American art history book explores the early cultural development of the movement in Chicago, pulling from previously unpublished primary sources. 20 color reproductions along with black and white photographs and sketches and a timeline in the back. First study of Modernism in Chicago, examining the struggle between the "old guard's" ideals of traditional 19th century art versus an "avant garde" of painters, illustrators, photographers, and sculptors. Focuses on the cultural context in which art evolved. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with white lettering on spine. 276 pages. Between 1868 and 1897 Henry James wrote a number of short essays and reviews of artists and art collections; these essays were published in magazines such as "Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's Weekly" and in newspapers such as the "New York Tribune". They included James' comments on Ruskin, Turner, Whistler, Sargent, and the Impressionists, among many others. Thirty of these essays were collected and first published in a modern edition in 1956, accompanied by John Sweeney's introduction which sketched James' interests in the visual arts over a period of years, focusing on the ways in which painting and painters entered his work as subjects. Susan Griffin's new foreword places James' observations in a contemporary context. Some of the novelist's judgements will seem wrong to today's readers: he was very critical of the Impressionists, for example, but all of these essays bear the stamp of James' critical intelligence, and they tell us a great deal about his development as a writer during those years. Bight, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, John Wiley & Sons , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 170 pages, color illustrations. n The Passionate Collector: Eighty Years in the World of Art, you'll follow this fascinating financial figure and great patron of the arts from the streets of 1920s Paris to the museums of New York as he develops the eye of a connoisseur and begins to collect great contemporary art.Vivid detail puts you in the center of the action as Neuberger collects the brilliant artists of his time-Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, Edward Hopper; works with legendary art dealers Paul Rosenberg, Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Leo Castelli; and befriends avid collectors, including the incomparable Duncan Phillips. You'll follow Neuberger as he strives to further the cause of contemporary American artists by exhibiting, lending, and donating from his growing collection, and becoming an activist for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. You'll also see how the Neuberger Museum of Art was created at the urging of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and how it continues to fascinate art enthusiasts today. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Monacelli Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages. Debate and banter between the irascible Philip Johnson and the equally articulate and opinionated Robert A. M. Stern generates a provocative combination of astute commentary and personal observation on the state of architecture in the twentieth century. Philip Johnson's multifaceted career as an architect, curator, and collector extended from the early 1920s to his death in 2005. Captivated by the work of the European modernists Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, Johnson assembled the seminal exhibition "Modern Architecture--International Exhibition" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Among his most notable achievements are the famous Glass House in Connecticut, designed for his own use, and the Seagram Building in New York, in association with Mies van der Rohe.Recognized as the dean of American architecture, Johnson had a profound influence on the next generation of architects, including Robert A. M. Stern. Stern has conducted a series of ten interviews with Johnson, each covering a decade of his life, that provide an illuminating assessment of a significant period of American architecture. No dj issued.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 156 pages. A guide to the mediums visual language through works by such early masters as Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Strand and Weston. It contains 172 illustrations that reveal the range of the photograph from the early days of the mediums development to the mid-1960s.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 156 pages. Based on a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and originally published in 1966, the book has long been out of print. It is now available again to a new generation of photographers and lovers of photography in this duotone printing that closely follows the original. Szarkowski's compact text eloquently complements skillfully selected and sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the entire history and range of the medium. Celebrated works by such masters as Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Steichen, Strand, and Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Bulfinch Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 224 pages. Essays by leading authorities on the artist's work accompany a stunning collection of nearly two hundred photographs by modernist American photographer Charles Sheeler, offering a landmark retrospective of of the work of the influential master of twentieth-century photography. Sheeler visited Europe in 1929 and an important part of this trip was to photograph Chartres Cathedral, he called it "...one of the outstanding experiences of a lifetime". The book includes thirteen beautiful shots of the Cathedral and they look remarkably like his photos of the Ford Motor Rouge River blast furnaces and other exterior bits of the industrial plant which he took in 1927. After 1929 Sheeler concentrated on his paintings. The photos in the book for this period: 1929 to 1939, include house interiors and several for his Power series. One of these, the wheels of a Hudson steam loco was the basis of his famous super realist 1939 painting 'Rolling Power'. The images in the book are taken from Lane Collection, of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, who own the Sheeler photographic estate and the book was originally published in conjunction with exhibitions in 2003/4. The 190 photos are printed as tritones with a 250 screen. Clean, bright copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Boston, MFA Publications, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 295 pages in color. In the decades around 1900, a postcard craze swept the world, and billions of cards were bought, mailed and pasted into albums. Many famous artists turned to the new medium, but one of the great pleasures and enigmas of postcards is how some of the most beautiful and interesting examples were made by artists whose names we barely know. Drawing on the riches of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection (probably the finest and most comprehensive collection of its type), this gorgeous book traces the historical and cultural themes--enthralling, exciting, and sometimes disturbing--of the modern age. The first general publication on the postcard as an artistic medium since the mid-1970s, The Postcard Age is organized thematically, with chapters devoted to urban life, the changing role of women, sports, celebrity, new technologies, the stylish collectors' cards of Art Nouveau and World War I. The result is at once a vivid picture of the concerns and pastimes of the turn of the century and a sampler from the Lauder's vast archives. Still in publisher's shrink wrap.

Softcover. Boston, Shambhala, 1st, 1981, Softcover, 160 pages. The Power of Limits was inspired by those simple discoveries of harmony. The author went on to investigate and measure hundreds of patterns--ancient and modern, minute and vast. His discovery, vividly illustrated here, is that certain proportions occur over and over again in all these forms. Patterns are also repeated in how things grow and are made--by the dynamic union of opposites--as demonstrated by the spirals that move in opposite directions in the growth of a plant.

Softcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 408 pages. Makes accessible to modern readers the 17th-century rhetorics of Thomas Hob-bes (1588-1677) and Bernard Lamy (1640-1715) Hobbes' A Briefe of the Art of Rhet-orique, the first English translation of Aristotle's rhetoric, reflects Hobbes' sense of rhetoric as a central instrument of self-defense in an increasingly frac-tious Commonwealth. In its approach to rhetoric, which Hobbes defines as "that Faculty by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer," the Briefe looks forward to Hobbes' great political works De Cive and Leviathan. Published anonymously in France as De l'art de parler, Lamy's rhetoric was translated immediately into English as The Art of Speaking. Lamy's long associa-tion with the Port Royalists made his works especially attractive to English readers because Port Royalists were en-gaged in a vicious quarrel with the Jesuits during the last half of the 17th century. Name at top of front cover and front fly leaf.

Softcover. NY, DC Comics, 1st thus, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, One of the most popular and critically acclaimed graphic novels of all time and illustrated by an exemplary selection of the medium's most gifted artists, Sandman weaves a spellbinding tapestry that fuses modern myth with the timeless narratives of history and folklore. Here, in the domain of the Endless, epic stories unfold stories that transcend the boundaries of life and death. With stunning visuals crafted by a handpicked cadre of the industry's most talented artists, including Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, and Kelley Jones, with spectacular guest art by Chris Bachalo, Colleen Doran, Charles Vess, and Michael Zulli. Volume 1 spans 'The Sandman' issues #1-20 and collects the pivotal story arcs 'Preludes and Nocturnes,' 'The Doll's House,' and 'Dream Country.' It also includes the historic 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' the first comic book ever to receive the prestigious World Fantasy Award. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 120 pages illustrated in color. Since the first report of cave art (at Altamira in 1879), attempts have been made to explain the purpose of the mysterious drawings. Art for art's sake; totemism; hunting, destructive, or fertility magic; and modern structuralist theories have all been proposed. Clottes and Lewis-Williams propose a new theory emphasizing the shamanic aspects of Paleolithic cave paintings. After an unavoidably technical chapter providing the basics of shamanism, the authors examine Paleolithic paintings from across France and Spain, noting the use of animal figures, composite figures combining both human and animal characteristics, and geometric designs that are all common elements of shamanism. The bulk of the book is both fascinating and thought-provoking, and while it is not likely to be the last word on the subject, it is an important contribution to the field. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 227 pages. Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st US, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 522 pages, b&w illustrations. By the end of World War I, Britain had become a laboratory for modernity. Intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists-among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells-sought a vision for a rapidly changing world. Coloring their innovative ideas and concepts, from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, was a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilization. In The Twilight Years, award-winning historian Richard Overy examines the paradox of this period and argues that the coming of World War II was almost welcomed by Britain's leading thinkers, who saw it as an extraordinary test for the survival of civilization- and a way of resolving their contradictory fears and hopes about the future. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art , 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Volume Two Only. First Edition. Photographs by Eugene Atget. Essay and notes to the plates by Maria Morris Hambourg. Appendixes include Berenice Abbott's typewritten copy of Andre Calmette's handwritten letter to her (late 1928). Maroon cloth with debossed title blind-stamped on cover and in gilt on spine, with dust jacket. 192 pp. with 116 plates and 84 black and white reference illustrations. Printed by The Meriden Gravure Company from halftone negatives made by Richard Benson. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Volume Three Only. First Edition. 188 pages, 120 plates. Fore-edge of dust jacket has chipping, edgewear. Otherwise a clean, VG copy.