Overview
These bright, compact hardcovers introduce young readers and their parents to six visual building blocks—Lines, Shapes, Colors, People, Places and Stories—via an assortment of the great masterpieces of twentieth century art. Author Philip Yenawine, the longtime Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art, is currently co-director of Visual Understanding in Education, a developmentally based education research organization. He has also been affiliated with education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In Shapes Yenawine asks questions like, "Can you find buildings? And roofs?" while looking at a Picasso study. Other Shapes artists include Seurat, Gauguin, Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, Klee, Smith and Dali. Colors looks at Monet, de Kooning, Kandinsky, Albers, Stella and Johns, among others. Places includes 21 artworks by artists such as Hopper, Munch, Klimt, and Bonnard, while People highlights works by Balthus, Degas, Freud, Cezanne, Neel and Rivera. Lines features 16 works by van Gogh, Matisse, Pollock, Morandi, O'Keeffe and others. And Stories includes Chagall, Wyeth, Lichtenstein, Dubuffet, Shahn, Moore and Magritte. Each volume comes with an illustrated summary of artworks.Isolates the artistic element of story, what is happening in a painting, and discusses how story contributes to a work of art through several examples from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Synopsis
These bright, compact hardcovers introduce young readers and their parents to six visual building blocks—Lines, Shapes, Colors, People, Places and Stories—via an assortment of the great masterpieces of twentieth century art. Author Philip Yenawine, the longtime Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art, is currently co-director of Visual Understanding in Education, a developmentally based education research organization. He has also been affiliated with education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In Shapes Yenawine asks questions like, "Can you find buildings? And roofs?" while looking at a Picasso study. Other Shapes artists include Seurat, Gauguin, Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, Klee, Smith and Dali. Colors looks at Monet, de Kooning, Kandinsky, Albers, Stella and Johns, among others. Places includes 21 artworks by artists such as Hopper, Munch, Klimt, and Bonnard, while People highlights works by Balthus, Degas, Freud, Cezanne, Neel and Rivera. Lines features 16 works by van Gogh, Matisse, Pollock, Morandi, O'Keeffe and others. And Stories includes Chagall, Wyeth, Lichtenstein, Dubuffet, Shahn, Moore and Magritte. Each volume comes with an illustrated summary of artworks.
Publishers Weekly
In these four volumes the author, director of education at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, offers an imagination-sparking tour of paintings from the museum's collection. In Lines , he helps readers see this essential painterly element in its many guises: broad brush strokes, wiggly finger paintings, even the spaces between colors. Stories promotes interpretation of such legendary practitioners as Rousseau, Dali and Chagall. Shapes encourages perception of nonrepresentational forms; in a Cezanne still life, for instance, are geometric forms underlying both objects and composition. Colors explores hues--vibrant or dusky, serene or disquieting--and the responses they can engender in a viewer. A brief note on each painting appears in the back of each book. (Unfortunately, the red-and-black format of these indices reduces readability.) These works will enrich a trip to the museum for teachers, parents and children. Ages 7-10. (Apr.)