Dada: The Revolt of Art / by Marc Dachy

Nothing in the art community previously could prepare people for Dada, a movement beginning in Zurich in 1916. A meld of abstract art and avant-garde, Dadaists were the edgiest of the full-fledged anti-establishment artists, breaking all the rules, keeping none of the past traditions alive, rebelling against any type of "isms" and broadening the scope of what art could be. This new generation of visionaries were certainly not aiming to please the critics. 20 years later Adolf Hitler used Dada to point out what high art was not, using an exhibition of Dada pieces in sort-of derisive motif. So what was it exactly? The movement can best be described as "direct relationship between an artist and his art--as opposed to the art that until then had been imposed by social constraints." Figures like Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, Sophie Tauber and Marcel Duchamp essentially reconfigured artwork that removed the medium. Dada wasn't purely painting; it wasn't sculpture. And while you could call many of the pieces a collage, an amalgamation, it wasn't purely dimensional, necessarily, in any respect. Even as it maintained its integrity by conceptually representing an artist's inception of ideas, it did so by remaining void of popular styles. Dachy's little book, part of a larger series of humanities publications, is filled with Dada creations as well as the story behind it. Best of all, it manages to concentrate the material inside a very manageable, easy-to-get-through volume of artistic concepts. (709.04 DACHY)

Cubism / by David Cottington

Avant-Garde artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque may not have intended to spearhead a revolutionary style of art in Montmartre, France circa 1907, but that’s precisely what happened. Between 1907 -1914 Pablo Picasso along with George Braque were among the first to work in the new style of Cubism, one of the most influential, innovative styles of the early 20th century. It was Picasso’s paintings which first began portray hard angular forms using luscious colors like blue, strident yellow, black and white. For all who viewed these sharp-edged images on the canvas--heads and nudes mostly, in the brightest colors: yellow, red, blue and black--it represented a drastic departure from contemporary and conventional European artwork. It was something different, sure, but it was also something outside the conventional realm of the European aesthetic. This was because cubism, its non-fluid qualities and slanted brushwork, garishly attributed its methodology and ideology to more "primitive", non-archetypal artwork, in a sense merging the primitive with the abstract.

But the object of cubism wasn't merely to portray elemental forms within a geometric motif. These “new” paintings clearly characterized the representational as well as the structural, trying to reproduce the formal beauty of things. The objective of "cubism" was to represent the position of objects in space: the artist arranges images from a clearly defined background and works toward the front, envisioning an abstract, multi-dimensional piece. Other interpretations speculated that the style never meant to have anything to do with shapes or forms; nor was it a set of rigorously defined guidelines associated with geometry or rigid contours. Rather it was a style which invariably gave a fourth dimension to images. In any case, it was the beginning of a new wave of intellectual art in the twentieth century. Author and art scholar Cottington does a good job of providing the reader with a solid understanding of this unique style of artwork within the historical context it was associated with. (709.04 COTTINGT)

Adventures in Art: Newer Crime & Mystery Fiction Involving Art and Antiques

The Good Thief’s Guide To Paris: A Mystery / by Chris Ewan

Charlie Howard leads quite the double life: he’s a crime writer who’s also a professional burglar. One evening following a Paris book signing, a drunken Charlie spills his secret to a fan and, with some encouragement, agrees to show him the tools of his other trade by breaking into what he thinks is the man’s apartment. But it isn’t. The apartment actually belongs to someone possessing a seemingly useless painting which Charlie’s new acquaintance wants to get his hands on. (MYS EWAN)

The Bellini Card: A Novel / by Jason Goodwin

In Istanbul in 1840, Yashim is a Turkish eunuch who works behind the scenes at the behest of the Sultan investigating any mischief that might arise within the diplomatic community. Recently Yashim and his Polish emissary friend Stanislaw Palewski have accepted an assignment to look into a missing 15th century portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror done by Giovanni Bellini. The painting, a prized relic of the Sultan’s court, is thought to be in Venice which is where Yashim and Stanislaw must travel to find it. (MYS GOODWIN)

Among Thieves / by David Hosp

Attorney Scott Finn thinks he’s just helping to acquit his client Devon Malley of involvement with a recent clothing store burglary. But when some of Malley’s cronies begin turning up dead, things start to look a little fishy until Finn learns that Malley was involved in an infamous art heist from twenty years ago in which over $300 million worth of paintings were stolen and never recovered. Now the hunt for a killer also becomes a search for the missing artwork. (MYS HOSP)

Our Lady of Immaculate Deception / by Nancy Martin
Meet Roxy Abruzzo, a Pittsburgh local who’s as sassy as she is savvy about art and antiques. The owner of Bada Bling Architectural Salvage, Roxy soon finds herself in quite the predicament when she steals a pricy sculpture from one of the city’s wealthiest residents, the recently murdered Julius Hyde. Though she has a perfectly good reason for the heist, her little escapade sets off a slew of mayhem as Roxy must outwit the police, the estate of the late Mr. Hyde and even members of her own family to escape prosecution. (MYS MARTIN)

Painted Ladies / by Robert B. Parker

Boston Private Investigator Spenser has seen a lot of strange cases, but nothing remotely similar to his current assignment: to provide security during a private ransom exchange at local art museum for a stolen painting. Having been hired by art professor Dr. Ashton Prince, Spenser suspects something’s amiss as soon as he meets the cagey old scholar and knows something’s up when the exchange mysteriously falls through and the painting remains stolen. (MYS PARKER)

Murder In The Abstract / by Susan Shea

An art preservationist and chief fund-raiser for the Devor Museum in San Francisco, Danielle “Dani” O’Rourke is hosting a gala one evening when a young artist falls to his death from Dani’s office window. With no other leads to go on, the police have fingered Dani as a chief suspect and without a solid alibi, having been indisposed at the time of the fall, Dani must find the real culprit before it’s too late. (MYS SHEA)

The Same River Twice / by Ted Mooney

What do a Parisian fashion designer, an American independent filmmaker and the Russian Mafia have in common? They’re all after a particularly pricey collection of smuggled Russian folk art. It’s a high-stakes game which turns deadly before it’s all through in this caper set in the early 1990’s just after the fall of the Soviet Union. (FIC MOONEY)

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Painting Novels

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I, Mona Lisa / by Jeanne Kalogridis
In this empassioned novel of Renaissance Italy, author Kalogridis examines the woman behind that mysterious smile depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—Lisa di Antonio Gherardini. Her life and the eventful, often bloody, circumstances surrounding the commission and painting of her portrait are vividly described in this fascinating book.
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Girl with a Pearl Earring / by Tracy Chevalier
A young girl becomes the friend and muse to renowned 17th century Dutch Painter Johannes Vermeer after she’s hired on as a servant at his Amsterdam home. Chevalier’s fictional story behind the famous painting is as charming as the portrait itself.
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In the Company of the of the Courtesan / by Sarah Dunant
Amid the sacking of Rome in 1527, a young Courtesan, Fiametta Bianchini, escapes the city and heads to Venice in the company of her escort Bucino Teodoldo, a dwarf. This story and its heroine were inspired by Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”, which is featured on the cover.
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Luncheon at the Boating Party / by Susan Vreeland
In her latest fictional rendition chronicling the events surrounding a famous painting, Vreeland tracks artist August Renoir as he labors under the Paris sun on his impressionist masterpiece, “Luncheon of the Boating Party”. Accompanying the often unpleasant heat is the stress of trying to get just the right people in just the right light, not to mention the unwanted attention of critical onlookers and a host of other distractions.

Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton

Sarah Thornton has a degree in cultural sociology, and this book is an exploration of the art culture, based on observations and interviews over a period of five years. She has written for the New Yorker magazine and art publications such as Artforum, and we get the full benefit of her insider’s point of view. Thornton shows us an art auction in New York City, a graduate school art class in southern California, an art show in Basel, Switzerland, a Venice Biennale, and spends time on the premises of an art magazine in New York City and of an artist’s workplaces in Japan. We also get acquainted with the contenders for the 2006 Turner Prize, awarded each year by the Tate National Gallery of Great Britain. The book covers a lot of ground, and appears to be a good representation of what was going on just a few years ago, when the art boom was at its height. We meet collectors who are interested in art, but perhaps more interested in making money by trading in art objects. All of the controversy surrounding this “invasion” of art by the marketplace is aired, and the book offers an interesting note by its choice of artist to visit, Takashi Murakami. This artist included a boutique of his company’s wares as part of an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Murakami, in a sense, has solved the problem of art expression versus profit by allowing the popular culture to affect what he creates. Speaking in his (not quite fluent) English, he says: “I change my direction or continue in same direction by seeing people’s reaction.”