Selected Recent Art, Music & Film/Theatre Studies Acquistions

• The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art by Tim Blanning – Drawing on examples ranging across the last four centuries, Blanning traces the path of music from its place as servant to its current position of supremacy over all other arts in terms of status, influence, and material rewards. The author intermixes popular and classical music and musicians, jumping back and forth from one era to another, from the concert hall to the iPod, to demonstrate how music has reinforced various social and political agendas...This is not intended to be a history of music; it is a brilliantly written history of the steady growth of the power of music and its performers.--Timothy J. McGee, Library Journal
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials & Techniques in Art by Gerald Ward – Any genuine work of art is born of the interaction between the artist, his or her materials, and the methods used to create the finished product. This hefty volume is “aimed at providing an introduction . . . to the enormous range of materials and methods used to create works of art from ancient times to the 21st century and . . . to the various techniques used to examine and conserve them by conservators and others.” The comprehensive treatment is unusual in a literature generally devoted to single materials or crafts. Considering both fine arts and crafts—without designating crafts as a lesser art form—the alphabetically arranged articles have been abridged from either the Dictionary of Art (1996) or Grove Art Online, with the sections on history and usage either eliminated or severely edited. Thus, although the content is not new, the focus on materials and techniques is sharper. Each article begins with a succinct introductory paragraph that amounts to a definition of the material or technique. Related terms are noted in small capitals, thus providing internal cross-referencing. The body of each article is detailed, clear, and well written. Entries conclude with extensive updated bibliographies of print works, many published within the last 10 years. Well-placed black-and-white illustrations are augmented by a center section containing color plates, alphabetically arranged, of selected artworks demonstrating the use of materials and techniques, from alabaster to wax encaustic. Beginning with a key to abbreviations, the volume closes with an extensive and accurate index.
• Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography by Meryle Secrest – Engrossing story of the Balzac-scaled life of the great architect. Wright (1867-1959) was born in Wisconsin to a Welsh family of radical thinkers and was nurtured to be an architect by his mother, who told him he was destined for greatness. He dropped out of the Univ. of Wisconsin after two semesters to take a draftsman's job at $8.00 a week, and soon was working for the master architect Louis Sullivan (inventor of the skyscraper). Within a year, Wright had become chief designer at Adler and Sullivan and also had married the first of his three wives. In the next 30 years, he was to abandon his wife and six children (and his phenomenally successful practice), calling marriage a "barnyard institution. I am a wild bird''; marry a morphine-addicted heiress and follower of Mary Baker Eddy who was killed by an axe-stroke to the brain by an insane servant; marry a Serbian beauty 30 years his junior who was an instructor for G.I. Gurdjieff; build his beloved house Taliesen (East) three times-- it twice burned to the ground; time and again ingeniously raise prodigious sums of money and spend them in profligate excess; revive his career with the building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo--the only major structure to remain undamaged in the largest earthquake of the century in 1923 in Japan; and go on to greater triumphs, culminating with the Guggenheim Museum in 1956. Secrest, who had access to the newly opened archives at Wright's Memorial Foundation, does a superb job in telling the human side of Wright's story. And without allowing it to overmaster her narrative, she provides clear architectural background to explicate Wright's designs, stature, and influence. Definitive. -- Kirkus Reviews
• Salvador Dalí, 1904-1989 by Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret – Picasso called Dalí "an outboard motor that’s always running." Dalí thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics — and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This lively monograph presents the infamous Surrealist in full color and in his own words. His provocative imagery is all here, from the soft watches to the notorious burning giraffe. A friend of the artist for over thirty years, privy to the reality behind Dalí’s public image, author Robert Descharnes is uniquely qualified to analyze Dalí — both the man and the myth.
• What It Is by Lynda Barry – How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry's first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: "The ordinary is extraordinary."--From publisher description.
• American Cinema [videorecording] – An analysis of the American motion picture industry that combines rare archival film, key scenes from immortal movies, interviews with leading filmmakers and commentary from noted film scholars and critics.
• The Oxford Project by Stephen G. Bloom and Peter Feldstein – "What a marvelous way to get at 'who we are' as people. This powerful, confessional book draws its strength from the truth that so-called ordinary people, not those with bold-faced names, are actually the heroes of our American drama." -- Ken Burns, Emmy award-winning director of The Civil War