Art: Behind the Scenes: One Hundred Old and Modern Masters, In and Out of Their Studios

By Joan B. Altabe

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883573068
• ISBN13: 9781883573065
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Windstorm Creative
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written work!

It's always a challenge to write about art, particular when exploring the grand masters across history. People have their own perceptions of good, bad, moving, and amazing - this is an area of high subjectivity. With that said, Ms. Altabe met this challenge with grace, style, and wit. I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of this book, and was pleasantly surprised to find how outstanding it is. One hundred artists - including those we have all heard of and some lesser-knowns - are explored in this work, including histories, little-known facts about particular works, and descriptions of style. Ms. Altabe's obvious knowledge and passion for the subject lends her work great credibility, all written in an approachable manner. What a delightful read for those that are novices to the art world and lifelong experts!

Quality Survey of Art History for both Beginner and Scholar

Joan B. Altabe, art critic and art teacher, has written that little book about art history we've all been waiting for. In one succinct volume, Altabe manages to cover Western art from the 14th to the 20th Century in a manner that is immediately accessible to all readers yet with enough added information that scholars of art history will find some enlightenment also! No simple feat, this, as those who have consistently tried to digest the sociopolitical timeline with concomitant visual artists of each era. What Altabe has produced is a key to the door of understanding how art of the Now came to be, and in the process she has painted in words some dazzlingly fine images! The book is divided into chapters designated as follows: 1 - 14th, 15th Century: Renaissance - "Rather than heavenly harmony, the earthly variety became the lesson of the day....[artists] paid attention to the way people looked and felt." (da Vinci, Ucello, Fra Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo) 2 - 16th Century: Mannerism - "Mannerists wanted their art to stand for the human condition of struggle and conflict, not perfect perspective and ideal proportions." (Botticelli, Corregio, Pontormo, Romano) 3 - 17th Century: Baroque - "Baroque artists piled on the emotion, heightening it, and making it more melodramatic. They took stagy lighting and theatrical gestures to the extreme." (Carravaggio, Rubens, Ribera, Velasquez, Rembrandt) 4 - 18th Century: Rococo - "Artists...weary of the Baroque style and its heavy, histrionic dramas, sought a less weighty look...fun and frivolity al fresco." (Watteau, Tiepolo, Hogarth, Chardin) 5 - 18th Century: Neo-Classicism - "...the end of frivolity and a return to order, simplicity, even austerity" ...accompanying the age of revolution. (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, David, Ingres) 6 - 19th Century: Impressionism - "artists...sought to liberate the French art by getting out of their studios and painting in the great outdoors...vivid strokes of color side by side...made Impressionist works appear more alive." (Pissarro, Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir) 7 - 19th Century: Post-Impressionism - "imitation of nature is not the aim of painting...an artist's job is [not] to copy nature, but rather to evoke it, and make one feel it." (Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat, Matisse) 8 - 19th - 20th Centuries; Expressionism - The unseen world and the way artists feel about what they see is Expressionism's disinguishing characteristic." (Klimt, Munch, Nolde, Schiele, Kokoscha, Kahlo, Bacon) 9 - 20th Century: Surrealism - "freed images from their ususal association by placing the disparate side-by-side...flouting of logic created by a new reality." (Rousseau, Ernst, de Chirico, Chagall, Magritte, Dali) 10 - 20th Century: Abstract Art - "aims to reflect that part of life beyond the observable, but which is no less real: the underworld of feeling." (Kandinsky, Hofmann, Rothko, Malevich) Altabe's method is to briefly describe an era, then gives e