Anche oggi le mie deambulazioni virtuali hanno portato buoni frutti, anzi direi ricchi!
Il sito http://www.openculture.com mette a disposizione oltre 100 cataloghi del MET e 65 del Guggenheim di NY scaricabili gratuitamente in formato pdf. Non potete immaginare la gioia, sembravo una bambina appena entrata in un negozio di cioccolata.
La frenetica gioia mi ha fatto già scaricare quasi il 50% dei cataloghi.
Prima di scrivervi stavo sfogliando “Degas: the artist’s mind” di Theodore Reff (scarica), meraviglioso. Si può leggere nel sito:
“More than any other artist in the Impressionist group, Degas was fascinated by ideas and consciously based his work on them. “What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters,” he once confessed, “of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament I know nothing.” Yet his work has been understood very inadequately from that point of view. Publications on him, once dominated by memoirs inspired by his remarkable personality, are now concerned with cataloguing and studying limited aspects of his complex art. Its intellectual power and originality, which were evident to contemporary writers like Duranty and Valery, have not been studied sufficiently by more recent critics. It is this side of Degas’s art—as seen in his ingenious pictorial strategies and technical innovations, his use of motifs like the window, the mirror, and the picture within the picture, his invention of striking, psychologically compelling compositions, and his creation of a sculptural idiom at once formal and vernacular—that is the subject of these essays. Inevitably, given the range of his intellectual interests, the essays are also concerned with his contacts with leading novelists and poets of his time and his efforts to illustrate or draw inspiration from their works. Throughout, the author makes use of an important, largely unpublished source, the material in Degas’s notebooks, on which he has recently published a complete catalogue.” (Source: http://www.metmuseum.org)
Altri titoli messi a disposizione del MET:
- Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain
- American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915
- American Art Posters of the 1890s in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Degas: The Artist’s Mind
- Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library
- Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- The Art of Illumination
- Vermeer and the Delft School
- Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting
Anche il Guggenheim non è da meno:
Cliccando QUI potete visualizzare i cataloghi disponibili.
Uno dei cataloghi che ho sfogliato è Abstract Expressionists Imagists.
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Avete gradito? Buona lettura!