Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In this highly original and innovative study of Nicolas Poussin one of seventeenth-century Europe’s greatest artists Oskar B?tschmann presents a series of connected essays that offer new ways of interpreting the work and ideas of this brilliant and complex figure. Countering the views of Poussin’s work put forward over the years which represent his pictures as merely ideas (whether those of Poussin or his contemporaries) translated into art the author instead sets out to consider Poussin’s methods of working as a sequence of dialectical processes. In looking afresh at his drawings models and paintings B?tschmann discerns a fundamental group of issues that relate to Poussin’s use of light and shadow in drawing colour and light in painting his understanding of the meanings bequeathed by the past via its remembered actions or surviving artefacts and through self-portraiture the artist’s self-conscious expressions of presence in absence. Following Poussin’s own distinction between prospect and aspect B?tschmann shows that a new perspective on this artist can be learnt from a close reading of his works. This superbly illustrated book is a polemical challenge in a field of art-historical research that has often lost its way in insoluble disputes and erudite details. (SP)