Art
Book Reviews
cont.,
This is a lovely book to leaf through even if you've never been to Brooklyn, NY. Brooklyn Storefronts is right up my alley (I've done photo series of shopfronts and watercolours as well). I love old, creative storefronts and so many of them are disappearing. This is a combo of old treasures and some new places. The history of each is researched by David Dodge with accompanying watercolours by Joel Holland.
Lotte Laserstein was a prolific artist. She was born in Berlin but because of her Jewish heritage she left she had her burgeoning and well respected career in Germany smashed beginning in 1935. After exhibiting in Sweden her plight was recognized by the museum directors who sent her an invitation to return in 1937 and she was able to get most of her artwork out of Germany. Mostly this work has been exhibited and written about but the Moderna Museet exhibition and this book, Lotte Laserstein: A Divided Life, look at her whole career - mainly as a portraitist but also with some striking landscapes over her 50 year career.
Arne Jacobsen is a well-known architect from Denmark known around the world yet he is even more well-known, in some respects for his furniture and industrial design - basically Designing Denmark and beyond as this exhibition book points out. Jacobsen was a painter in his youth and continued to keep sketchbooks over his career often painting in watercolour. The first page I opened was a beautiful watercolour spread over two pages for Jacobsen's Industriens Hus design. In the 1940s he put his studies of nature to use and collaborated with his future wife to design textiles and wallpapers. The designs are fantastic.
Photographer Christoph Irrgang was inspired by the Impressionists' works in the Barberini Museum and wondered what the places that the artists painted would look like now 150 years on. Impressionist Places: Revealed in Paintings and Photographs is the result of this journey. The paintings appear alongside the photos with text about the locations themselves then and now and how they affected the paintings. Surprisingly many look very like they did when the artist painted the scene en plein air.
