Timothy HymanReseñas

shelved at: 44

Really a beautiful book, with a good selection of details of the paintings. Almost half the illustrations are in color This book explains why I have to get to Siena, where Duccio's painting was so celebrated it was carried through the streets in a procession to the Cathedral. The book also discusses the depiction of the city itself in the religious paintings.

Exhibition Book for the touring art collection called Carnivalesque showing artwork somehow related to the festival of Carnival, the celebration before Lent. Works dating from the late medieval times to the 20th century. The emphasis is on the grotesque.

Excellent biography and illustrations of this not awfully well-known french painter of the first half of the last century. His life had just enough of bathos, compulsions, tragedy (his paramour, Renee, killed herself after he decided he couldn't leave his wife, Marthe, for her) and talent to place him amongst the ranks of tragic artists. But then, all art is tragedy in the sense it tells us what we lack. If people had no lack of creativity, meaning and beauty in their lives, art museums worldwide would fail, falling like a row of dominoes; now, in our age, we are mere spectators, epigoni, if you like, who must line up at museums where the dried flowers of the meaning and beauty of our human tribe, expressed uniquely by Art, are sequestered.

BR/A/S 007