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Understanding Art: Portraits, Personalities, and Ideas
Understanding Art Portraits Personalities and Ideas Author:Luise C. Kainz, Olive L. Riley People have always been the favorite subject of artists - how they look, what they represent, or how the artist feels about them. The time and place in which the artist lives, the materials at his disposal, the sorts of people he makes paintings and sculptures of - all these help to determine what kind of art he makes out of what he sees and how... more » he thinks. Although his interpretation of a subject is very much his own, every artist is also the child of his particular culture and civilization. In certain periods, paintings and sculptures of people may attempt to show what a particular person looks like, while in our own time the artist is more often interested in his own reactions to his model. In other periods, the artist may give an ideal beauty to his pictures of individuals, and in yet others he may be interested in showing only stylized, impersonal types. But, primarily, we must look at each work for its own artistic qualities, aware that often the artist is more concerned with his own creation than with merely representing what he sees. By understanding why artists at different times show people in different ways, we learn a great deal about art, about the past - and about ourselves and our own world.
74 illustrations, including 57 in full color« less