Product Description

This magnificant, bestselling reference book finally leaves its old look to join the modern Penguin subject dictionary series. Why exactly did Van Gogh cut off his ear? Was Warhol an original or just a copyist? The answers to all this and more are found in The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, the essential guide to over 700 years of creative endeavour. Each entry features extensive cross-referencing and listings of galleries where the artist’s work can be seen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33419 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Financial Times
'Excellent ... indispensable and delightful'

The Times Literary Supplement
'A vast amount of information intelligently presented, carefully detailed, abreast of current thought and scholarship and easy to read'

From the Back Cover
Some Sample Entries:

'Post-Impressionism is a rather vague term applied to the movement which developed in reaction against both Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism and had as its chief aim either a return to a more formal conception of art or a new stress on the importance of the subject. The most important figures covered by the term are van Gogh, Gaugin and Cezanne. It was given currency in England by the exhibition arranged by Roger Fry in the winter of 1910-11, called 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists', which caused much heart-burning in London art circles and led to the formation of the London Group. Le post impressionisme has now come into use in French as the equivalent term'.

And:

'Blot drawing was the name given by Alexander Cozens to the practice of evolving a composition from teh forms suggested by allowing a few blobs of ink or colour to fall at random on a sheet of paper, if necessary folding the paper to create further blots. The method seems to have been known to Leonardo da Vinci, who advocated the study of stains on a wall, or the shapes in the fire, as a stimulus to the creative imagination. Cozen's advocacy of the method as a means of teaching his numerous pupils led to his being dubbed 'Blotmaster to the Town': at the end of his life he published his system as A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (c.1785). It was reprinted in 1952'.

And:

'Stabile. Sculpture that keeps still. The opposite of mobile'.

Customer Reviews

A dictionary worth swallowing, digesting, and regurgitating.
This book is compact yet detailed. Pick any noteworthy artist and they are guaranteed to be depicted here in more than a passing definition. As a student of art, it has proved invaluable as a resource and is the first port-of-call for any research required. Equally, as a bed-time read, simply by opening a page I can always be sure to learn something new about the world of art.

Useful... occasinally
Very often I have come to use this book and not been able to find what I need, probably best for reasearching more traditional artists etc, but can be very useful to have at hand. Also this, the 7th edition, whs first published in 1997 and I don't think it has been updated since which is probably necessary.