Highlighting masterworks from a diverse global art collection, this volume commemorates the Denver Art Museum's renovated campus. Established in 1893, the museum features around 70,000 works that span cultures from the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, reflecting artistic heritage from ancient times to the present. It also showcases regional artists and offers educational opportunities for the community, all within architecturally significant buildings designed by Daniel Libeskind and Gio Ponti.
Hailed the "Prince of the Impressionists", Claude Monet (1840-1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working "en plein air" with rapid, impetuous brush strokes, he interrogated the play of light on the hues, patterns, and contours and the way in which these visual impressions fall upon the eye. Monet's interest in this space "between the motif and the artist" encompassed too the ephemeral nature of each image we see. In his beloved water lily series, as well as in paintings of poplars, grain stacks, and the Rouen cathedral, he returned to the same motif in different seasons, different weather conditions, and at different times of the day, to explore the constant mutability of our visual environment. This book offers the essential introduction to an artist whose works simultaneously reflected upon the purpose of a picture and the passage of time, and in so doing transformed irrevocably the story of art.
Each of Mona Hatoum's works can be read as a formula for human existence, expressed in a penetrating visual language that is both complex and puzzling. As the artist herself points out, iOneis first experience of a work of art is physical. I appreciate works that have sensual as well as intellectual impact. Meanings, connotations, and associations begin to emerge only after the initial physical experience, when the imagination, the intellect, and the psyche are ignited by what one has seen.i The daughter of Palestinian parents, Hatoum has long been regarded in Great Britain and the U.S. as one of the most important artists of her generation. Born in Lebanon in 1952 and a resident of London since 1975, her sensitivity to themes of power and identity has been heightened by a life lived outside her homeland. Many of her objects, video pieces, and installations deal with aspects of institutionalized violence and the vulnerability of the individual; her central point of reference is the body, in many cases her own. This is the first book to document the full breadth of Mona Hatoum's oeuvre, up to and including her most recent projects.
