Giacometti's Dog


Book Description

Celebratory or eligiac, these poems record the author’s “two-headed journey” to root herself - geographically and emotionally - in the world. Becker’s poems are from remote and familiar outposts: the watery evanescence of Venice contrasts with the desert of the American Southwest; we lean with her over the rim of a canyon or stand back to study a Giacometti sculpture. From such settings arise poems on the death of a sibling, the consoling power of painting and sculpture; others celebrate the erotic and the capacity of the female body for pleasure and pain.




Giacometti's Dog


Book Description




A Giacometti Portrait


Book Description

When we look at a painting hanging on an art gallery wall, we see only what the artist has chosen to disclose--the finished work of art. What remains mysterious is the process of creation itself--the making of the work of art. Everyone who has looked at paintings has wondered about this, and numerous efforts have been made to discover and depict the creative method of important artists. A Giacometti Portrait is a picture of one of the century's greatest artists at work. James Lord sat for eighteen days while his friend Alberto Giamcometti did his portrait in oil. The artist painted, and the model recorded the sittings and took photographs of the work in its various stages. What emerged was an illumination of what it is to be an artist and what it was to be Giacometti--a portrait in prose of the man and his art. A work of great literary distinction, A Giacometti Portrait is, above all, a subtle and important evocation of a great artist.




So Long, See You Tomorrow


Book Description

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.




Transparent Drawing


Book Description

Architect Kurt Ofer has formulated an utterly unique way of drawing, which gives a superior understanding of form. By following the method of "transparent drawing," you ignore an object's opacity and see beyond its surface, allowing you to draw it in a very distinct and holistic way.




Acts of Engagement


Book Description

Addresses the fundamental humanity and necessity of the visual arts : what they are about, why artists are indispensible, and why art and artists matter.







Alberto Giacometti


Book Description

"Space does not exist," the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) wrote in 1949. "It has to be created... Every sculpture made on the assumption that space exists is wrong, there is only the illusion of space." This fascinating statement serves as a conceptual underpinning for Hatje Cantz's new appraisal of the artist's mature work. Giacometti's emaciated sculptures have long been seen as symbols of a newly anxious, frail humanity. But more recently, attention has come to focus on the relevance of his work for contemporary considerations of space and time. Alberto Giacometti: The Origin of Space supplies a comprehensive overview of the later works of this lastingly influential artist, presenting 200 color images of sculptures, paintings and drawings.




The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs


Book Description

The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs is the only book to take readers behind the scenes of the beloved auteur’s newest stop-motion animated film. †‹Through the course of several in-depth interviews with film critic Lauren Wilford, writer and director Wes Anderson shares the story behind Isle of Dogs’s conception and production, and Anderson and his collaborators reveal entertaining anecdotes about the making of the film, their sources of inspiration, the ins and outs of stop-motion animation, and many other insights into their moviemaking process. Previously unpublished behind-the-scenes photographs, concept artwork, and hand-written notes and storyboards accompany the text. The book also features an introduction by critics and collaborators Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, and a foreword by critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The fourth volume of the New York Times bestselling Wes Anderson Collection, Isle of Dogs stays true to the series with its rich design and colorful illustrations, capturing Anderson’s signature aesthetic vision and bringing the series's definitive study of Anderson's filmography up to date. Isle of Dogs tells the story of Atari Kobayashi, 12-year-old ward to corrupt Mayor Kobayashi. When, by Executive Decree, all the canine pets of Megasaki City are exiled to a vast garbage-dump called Trash Island, Atari sets off alone in a miniature Junior-Turbo Prop and flies across the river in search of his bodyguard-dog, Spots. There, with the assistance of a pack of newly-found mongrel friends, he begins an epic journey that will decide the fate and future of the entire Prefecture. The film features the voices of Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Kunichi Nomura, Akira Takayama, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, F. Murray Abraham, Tilda Swinton, Akira Ito, Yoko Ono, Mari Natsuko, Harvey Keitel, Courtney B. Vance, Ken Watanabe, Scarlett Johnasson, Fisher Stevens, Nijiro Murakami, and Liev Schreiber.




Landscape with Dog


Book Description

“Let’s just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze.” Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is made up of countless such moments: transformations of the everyday, encounters between the known and the unknowable. Contemporary Athens wavers before us; the outlines of a sketch darken and blur; the face of a friend is at once beloved and strange. In Ersi Sotiropoulos’s prose, the slightest event, the slightest change in the quality of the light, can alter everything. Karen Emmerich brings perfectly into English the precise, vibrant movement of Sotiropoulos’s language, the mastery that has made her one of Greece’s most acclaimed writers. These stories will be praised for their flashes of beauty and their crackles of dark humor, but what makes them so memorable is something else, impossible to pin down, something like the gaze of the skull. At once familiar and troubling, compelling and unapproachable, Sotiropoulos’s stories give us a new way of seeing.