This book was put together for the exhibition we viewed with K on our delightful visit to DC back in May. PJ knows I'm a sucker for art gallery books if I see an exhibition I particularly like, so she bought this for me. Nice.And I think it's one of the best of this genre I've seen. It's of course pretty large; lots of reproductions of works from the exhibition (as one would expect) that I look at regularly; the kicker is that the three authors do such an interesting job of putting the artists in context, explaining what they're doing, the evolution of the movement, etc.
Back to my current focus (idea cribbed from some article-writer) on the importance of the Bible and Shakespeare to so much of Western art, literature, etc. The Pre-Raphaelites certainly loved the subject matter from those sources.
I know no way to capsulize what these artists were all about, but I do love the bright colors, the predominating subject matters, the sense that they were pushing for something "new" - not unusual for artists, but here in a manner somehow more interesting to me.
This is a great book to own, I will (continue to) page through it regularly.
No comments:
Post a Comment