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Legible-Visible explores the relationship between print publications and audiovisual documents, two of the most important media in the social and cultural landscape of our time--and two forms that also define the evolution of contemporary art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In Albino, photojournalist Ana Palacios takes us inside a shelter for people with albinism and reveals what daily life is like for those living with the genetic condition in Tanzania. As Palacios documents, widespread ignorance of the causes of albinism has fed stigmatization, marginalization, persecution, and prejudice within the country. In addition to the social and physical threats that those with albinism face from other Tanzanians, they must also confront the strong possibility of skin cancer--a disease for which effective treatment options can be found in the West, but which in Africa tends to reduce life expectancy for those with albinism to under thirty years. Bearing witness to the efforts of a group of Spanish aid workers to promote health and education in Tanzania, Albino highlights their work on programs to improve patient treatment and training for local doctors. In these subtle, complex, and ultimately optimistic images, Palacios shows the moments of struggle, but also joy, that mark the lives of the residents of the shelter.
This beautifully illustrated book, the catalog for an exhibition on view at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona and coorganized with the Picasso Museum in Paris, explores important affinities between Picasso and Romanesque art. Using two key moments as starting points, Juan José Lahuerta and Emilia Philippot first discuss the summer of 1906, when Picasso stayed in the village of Gòsol in the Catalan Pyrenees, and then turn to 1934, as he visited the Romanesque art collections of what is today the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. Picasso's discovery of the Romanesque nurtured his interest in other "primitive" or ethnographic art, later echoed in such decisive works as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Importantly, while Lahuerta and Philippot avoid any attempt to trace direct Romanesque influences on Picasso--as they note, his work consistently escapes such linear accounts--they do demonstrate that Picasso's interest in the twelfth-century sculpture Virgin from Gósol, his lifelong fascination with the theme of the crucifixion, and his study of the skull all reflect elements that were also of major importance in Romanesque art and architecture. What these shared features allow, Lahuerta and Philippot ultimately argue, is not only a richer understanding of Picasso's work, but also a rediscovering and reinvention of Romanesque art in our contemporary moment, causing the medieval to become refreshingly and paradoxically modern.
When the Corbusian International Modern style, with its contempt for ornament, imposed itself on architecture, figures like Gaudi (1852-1926) were relegated to the sidelines. In this volume, Lahuerta situates Gaudi in his context and vindicates his fin-de-siecle bohemian modernity. Embodied in such powerful images as the equation of the spires of the Sagrada Familia with the flames rising from burning churches during the Tragic Week (1909), the story takes us to the Barcelona of the early twentieth century, when class struggle threatened to topple the prevailing capitalist model. Drawing on valuable first-hand documents collected over several decades, the author shows that Gaudi was not an isolated eccentric but an architect who was keenly aware of the major theories and outstanding works of his time and the creator of revolutionary technical innovations. His analyses of Gaudi's writings reveals a pioneer in the use of industrial processes to produce ornamental details that may seem handmade today. Equally novel was the way that Gaudi made use of his fame as a public figure, a 'media personality', thanks to the cartoons of the architect and his buildings in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Dali, who admired the edible appearance of the Casa Mila, or Picasso, fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batllo attest to the importance of his contribution to culture. This entertaining volume is part of Columns of Smoke, a series of publications in which Professor Lahuerta turns his perceptive eye on the official narrative of modernity and its protagonists and the relationship between architecture, decoration and the print media.
Features overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced-and plausible-conception of the world. This volume includes images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures. It will redefine our concept of modernity.
A monograph on the work of contemporary architect Enric Miralles. Applying the mind of an artist to the work of another creator, it tries to unravel Miralles' creative process, to understand how his ideas were formed, refined, and made into physical objects that survive and thrive in a seemingly unsympathetic world.
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