Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-7 of 7 | | « PREV | | |
 Fine Art professional point of view March 21, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book helps me in my work big time. I'm free freelance artist and right now I'm working on my next big project in Art Nouveau style and I can not imagine my work without this book.
Sit down before you open this one January 14, 2006
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
Dover Publications is the friend of anyone with nearly any sort of interest (and not much money). If you're interested in the ways and means of New Art, get this one.
M. Verneuil clearly would have liked the Dover editors. LIke them, he had his wide-ranging interests, in his case in botany, Japanese design, and decorative arts (to judge by his booklist).
This book is a feast that shifts back and forth from stylization and abstraction on one hand to close observation of natural plant forms on the other. One two-page spread (plates 62 & 63) in particular juxtaposes both this reduction into pattern and the accuracy of his eye.
These are the crown imperial and the German iris from Verneuil's Etude de la plante. Side views of each plant give you the random visual complexity of the original -- almost scruffy leaves, in the crown imperial's case. Both set forth the visually overwhelming detail of the blossoms. But, at the bottom of both plates are plan views of a blossom, simple, regular and compelling as a Japanese mon.
If the rest of Verneuil's plant book is this good, I'm hoping Dover reprints the whole thing one day.
When Verneuil moves to greater depths (or is it heights?) of abstraction, the results are often stunning. Don't miss plate 27, an overall pattern of maidenhair fern in shades of orange, or plate 28, a tiled pattern of wild iris in rippling water.
It's interesting to compare the sunflowers in plate 79, apparently a detail from a running line of tiles, with the one in plate 59 from Etude de la plante. The latter captures the petals in wild abandon, the leaves in their rough, almost papery reality. The former flattens and regularizes each leaf, and views the flowers head-on, giving us a literal sunburst of shape and color in complex but regular pattern.
Throughout, M. Verneuil brings a solid color sense, now playing with shades of neighboring hues, now with contrasting hues. Each one seems absolutely right.
You can't open this book to any page without feeling that the mind and eye that originated it were pretty special. It's more than likely that some of this impression is due to the care of Carol Belanger Grafton, who selected and arranged the plates -- many of the two-page spreads seem to delight in comparing, or mirroring, or contrasting Verneuil's designs.
If you like art nouveau, you'll want this book.
|
