Ornament as Art


Book Description

The Drutt Collection , encompassing 800 jewellery objects and drawings by more than 170 world-famous artists from 1963 to the present, documents the profound changes that have taken place since the 1960s in the way jewellery is perceived. At that time artists broke with the conventional jewellery tradition to view their works in the broader context of overall movements in painting, sculpture and architecture. By then what counted was artistic intention rather than the market value of the materials used. This publication shows the collection as a whole, with each piece illustrated, and a selection of over 200 objects presented in large-scale illustrations and extensively analysed by Cindi Strauss, curator of contemporary applied arts and design at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In addition, the author demonstrates the linkage of contemporary jewellery and modern art in an essay on the subject. Further, a detailed chronological history of contemporary jewellery and artist biographies provide invaluable information. Helen Williams Drutt founded the celebrated Helen Drutt Gallery in Philadelphia, which specialised in contemporary jewellery and ceramics. She lectures worldwide, has received several awards and is the author of numerous publications. She is indeed an important mediatrix of culture. Artists include: Gijs Bakker, Manfred Bischoff, Claus Bury, Peter Chang, Arline Fisch, William Harper, Yasuki Hiramatsu, Hermann Jünger, Otto Künzli, Stanley Lechtzin, Fritz Maierhofer, Bruno Martinazzi, Breon O'Casey, Pavel Opocenský, Albert Paley, Wendy Ramshaw, Marjorie Schick, Bernhard Schobinger, Olaf Skoogfors, Peter Skubic, Robert Smit, Emmy van Leersum, Tone Vigeland, David Watkins Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA, from 23 September 2007 to 21 January 2008, travelling to Washington D.C., and Tacoma, WA. Also available: Gijs Bakker and Jewelry ISBN 9783897902237 £35.00 Elegant Fantasy: The Jewelry of Arline Fisch ISBN 9783925369018 £35.00 Fritz Maierhofer: Jewellery and More! ISBN 9783897902459 45.00 Bruno Martinazzi: Jewellery and Myth ISBN 9783897902602 £25.00 Bernhard Schobinger: Jewels Now! ISBN 9783897901834 £45.00 Peter Skubic: Between ISBN 9783897901568 £45.00 Tone Vigeland: Jewellery + Sculpture ISBN 9783897901858 £45.00




Treasury of Art Nouveau Design & Ornament


Book Description

577 authentic Art Nouveau designs ranging in size from full-page illustrations to borders, headpieces, tailpieces, and initials. Designs include florals, landscapes, and figures, from artists such as Klimt, Bradley, Auriol, and Larcombe.




Grasset's Art Nouveau Floral Ornament CD-ROM and Book


Book Description

Reproduced from a rare portfolio, these lush floral images were compiled by a pioneer of Art Nouveau. These 466 color images feature vibrant, naturalistic motifs, stylized borders, panels, and medallions by Verneuil and other masters.




Ornament and Order


Book Description

Over the last forty years, graffiti and street-art have become a global phenomenon within the visual arts. Whilst they have increasingly been taken seriously by the art establishment (or perhaps the art market), their academic and popular examination still remains within old debates which argue over whether these acts are vandalism or art, and which examine the role of graffiti in gang culture and in terms of visual pollution. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study working with some of the world’s most influential Independent Public Artists, this book takes a completely new approach. Placing these illicit aesthetic practices within a broader historical, political, and aesthetic context, it argues that they are in fact both intrinsically ornamental (working within a classic architectonic framework), as well as innately ordered (within a highly ritualized, performative structure). Rather than disharmonic, destructive forms, rather than ones solely working within the dynamics of the market, these insurgent images are seen to reface rather than deface the city, operating within a modality of contemporary civic ritual. The book is divided into two main sections, Ornament and Order. Ornament focuses upon the physical artifacts themselves, the various meanings these public artists ascribe to their images as well as the tensions and communicative schemata emerging out of their material form. Using two very different understandings of political action, it places these illicit icons within the wider theoretical debate over the public sphere that they materially re-present. Order is focused more closely on the ephemeral trace of these spatial acts, the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production. Exploring thematics such as carnival and play, risk and creativity, it tracks how the very residue of this cultural production structures and shapes the socio-ethico guidelines of these artists’ lifeworlds.




Ornament and European Modernism


Book Description

These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.




Art Deco Design and Ornament


Book Description

Here is an astounding collection of images where the highly stylized Art Deco form is evident in every draping vine, languid curve, bulging muscle, and geometric figure. Crisp photos feature friezes, sculptures, architecture, vases, furniture, plaques, and much more. Reprinted from a rare, early-20th-century edition. 349 black-and-white illustrations.




Full-color Picture Sourcebook of Historic Ornament


Book Description

Classic sourcebook of spectacular design collages, all royalty-free, featuring over 1,500 decorative elements and motifs from major cultures in world history through the 19th century.




Ornament


Book Description

This text is a wide-ranging consideration of the cultural and symbolic significance of ornament, its rejection by modernism and its subsequent reinvention. Trilling explains how ornament works, why it has to be explained and why it matters.




Frame Work


Book Description

Frame Work explores how framing devices in the art of Renaissance Italy respond, and appeal, to viewers in their social, religious, and political context.




The Grammar of Ornament


Book Description