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Title: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
ISBN: 1851454225
Author:
Russell Ash
Bernard Higton
Publicate Date: 1989
Publish: 1989
List Price: Not Available
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest Used Price: $13.00
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1: But is it art?
I confess to very mixed feelings about this collection, and about Alma-Tadema's work as a whole. The more positive of those feelings admire his mastery of process and draftsmanship, and his elegant composition in the medium of human figure. His early career emphasized the classics and the myths of Rome and Greece. Later work evokes Parrish's emotional abstractions.
The down-sides are many, though. His models all display a languor that makes me want to check the dose on their muscle relaxants. His scenes tend towards the Roman baths, where it's OK to see hot babes get nekkid. Apparently, he was quite popular among the Vicotrian nouveau riche who wanted the kind of smut you could hang on the wall and show the neighbors. And, oddly, his popularity died just when he did, at least the first time it died.
Then, mid-twentieth-century, Alan Funt rediscovered Alma-Tadema, collected his work, popularized it, and created a market for it. Yes, that Alan Funt, the guy who created the 1950s "Candid Camera" rage. Some cynical voice in the corner of my mind insists that this was Funt's greatest joke ever, turning a 19th-century dealer in parlor-room porrn into a figure of artistic importance.
Truth is, I don't much care. The images are warm and romantic, with the kind of blatant sensuality that both titillates and scolds you for your nasty thoughts, then offers plenty more on which to build more of those nasty thoughts. Warm, drippy, and iffy about the wardrobe, they're wonderful images. Art? I dunno. I like them anyway.
//wiredweird
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2: Awash in Victorian Romance and Classicism!
The Victorian painters are enjoying a posthumous comeback and one of the more famous of these elegant painters was Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema. Exceedingly popular in his time, the modern, reductionist movements of the post-Freud 20th Century brushed his work under the rug - except for those collectors and lovers of the human figure who refused to allow the body to be cubed, flattened, distorted, and abstracted.
Now with the return of the appreciation of the human form Alma Tadema's paintings are enjoying a resurgence of popularity. Russell Ash certainly gives us reason to see why in this lavishly illustrated, beautiful book filled to overflowing with complete paintings and fragments or details of perfect ladies languishing in flora and classical vistas. Paintings that once were labeled as 'corny' are now being appreciated as suggestions of what made the Victorian Era unique.
Ash writes well and thoughtfully minimizes written word space for the flow of the pictorial value of the book. This is simply a lovely volume honoring a misunderstood and in the past under appreciated artist. Grady Harp, August 05
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3: Fantastic Full Page Reproductions!
This book is filled with full page reproductions of Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema's paintings. It also has an interesting bio with pictures of his home, studio, and himself. I've been looking everywhere for a great book on Alma Tadema and I believe this is the one. Besides reading about a painter's life, I think it is very important that we see color reproductions of the painter's work, and this book does it very well. I hate books with 4x4 black and white images of an artist's paintings, its useless. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book for lovers of Victorian art and Alma Tadema. I recently went to the Getty Museum and saw Alma Tadema's "Spring" and it looks exactly how it appears in the book. The full page color plates are exact reproductions of his paintings, unlike the newer book on Alma Tadema published by Phaidon whose reproductions have been altered and all appear saturated with blue hues. Anyways....GET THIS BOOK IF YOU CAN ONLY GET ONE BOOK ON ALMA TADEMA BECAUSE IT IS THE BEST!
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4: Lovely Art - Spendid Work
If you love Victorian painting of scenes of antiquity (Greece/Rome) then check out this beautiful book. A short bio on the artist is very interesting and the full sized plates are reproduced in excellent detail and glorious color. No "dup-ey" reproductions here! An added bonus: Each plate comes with a descriptive page which
describes the painting and what it depicts - a major plus. Heartily recommended to fans of the genre...or anyone else who loves beautiful artwork masterfully portrayed.
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5: Alma-Tadema,an artist
So that you willunderstand my perspective, I am a professor and a painter mostly of large scale, representational figures, so I buy anything to do with artists who specialize in the figure. In Russel Ash's book, the reproductions were large and fairly clearly reproduced. I enjoy the art of the late 19th and early twentieth century and the detailed realism of Tadema's female figures was, though academic in development, fun to see. Of that era I prefer Waterhouse and others, whose sense of color and less passive work is more powerful and deep, but if you like figure paintings especially of "Victorians in toga's" as one critic of his day describes Alma-Tadema's work, then you will love the large format reproductions. The book is lavishly adorned with semi-nude, sleepy-eyed, languid, supple, neo-classical women and a few men, all painted in the always safe, pastellish colors of the time. The women are engaged in mostly pastoral time passing non-events. "The Roses of Heliogabllus", with it's profusion of rose petals was easily the most colorfully of the reproductions, and a large composition of "Joseph Overseer..." as the most powerful of his offerings. The bio of Alma-Tadema was interesting enough to make me want to know more. If you are an art lover, a collector of large format books of painters, even the 19th cnetury academic styles, this is a good one for you
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