'Vanity Fair Portraits' traces the cultural history of the 20th century and its leading personalities in the pages of a magazine that helped usher in the modern age and which has itself become a benchmark of modern achievement.
A few years ago, Simon Morley and David Friend began performing their repertoire of "dick tricks" in Melbourne, Australia. Hitting England's shores to overwhelming critical acclaim at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival, their show has also played in Montreal and Toronto, and is on its way to Broadway.
The definitive book of its kind, Vanity Fair's Hollywood is an incomparable collection of classic photographs, essays and caricatures depicting a century of Hollywood power, glamour, myth and mystery - directly from the pages of Vanity Fair, from 1914 to today. The brightest stars in Hollywood's firmament have been assembled in one volume: Garbo and Swanson, Gable and Grant, Tracy and Hepburn, Fairbanks and Pickford, Taylor and Burton - along with today's cinematic giants: Cruise and Kidman, Nicholson and Streep, De Niro and DiCaprio, Hanks and Roberts, and scores more. Vanity Fair's photographers - among them Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen and Bruce Weber - have helped to define modern portraiture. Likewise, Vanity Fair's stable of Hollywood writers in this volume includes luminaries of the past (P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker and D.H. Lawrence) and of the present (Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Amy Fine). Here, then, is a century's worth of stars and moguls, parties and scandals, power and glamour, through the unrivalled lens and the inimitable prose of Vanity Fair.
How do you pull together all the elements of a painting into a unified, artistic whole? This book presents a new approach--especially suited to beginners--to the process of creative pictorial composition. Adapting the creative pictorial composition. Adapting the same integrative process by which advanced students are trained, the author shows how to structure all the component parts of a picture into a series of rhythmic and harmonious relationships. Each chapter consists of three 1. A discussion of a particular compositional problem. 2. A series of corresponding projects in creative composition for the reader to do. 3. A variety of case histories analyzing how old and contemporary masters -- such as Braque, Beughel, Cezanne, Copley, Daumier, Delacroix, Dubuffet, El Greco, Gainsborough, Goya, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Rembrandt, Seurat, Velazquez, and Wyeth, among others--handled the problem. By following this three-part format, the reader is encouraged to learn by solving the problems that the masters worked out in their compositions. Under the expert guidance of the author, the reader learns how to see two-dimensional shape relationships, light and dark value relationships, and color relationships. He is then introduced to negative space, "crowded" space, vertical vs. horizontal composition, "empty" space, as well as how to express mood with texture and line. Finally, the author introduces the illusion of three dimensions. David Friend, for many years a practicing painter and art instructor, and author of The Creative Way to Pain, once again shows that even the beginner can develop the critical visual awareness and artistic insight that will enable him to create artwork he can be proud of. 192 pages, 8 1/4 x 11, 160 black-and-white illustrations, 16 full-color plates, Index.