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Reviews (10)
Sep 07, 2006
Now Real, Now Abstract, Always Incredible
1 of 1 found this helpful You won't find a better Art Nouveau collection than this ones, and you'll find yourself astonished again and again at M. Verneuil's range of vision.
Here and there you see a touch of the stylized Japanese prints and fabrics that served as part inspiration for this turn-of-the-20th-Century view. Characteristically, there are almost no straight lines, except in frames. You'll see stained glass designs of utmost simplicity -- and stencil designs of even grander abstraction. Then, turn a page, and you'll see close observation with only a touch of abstraction.
Take the sunflower, clearly one of M.P.'s favorites. There's a plate from his Etude de la Plante (pl. 59 in this book), and here the flower's petals spread in disarray on a rough stem, framed with varied leaves whose heart shape is only hinted. The flower is cooly studied, left to more or less raw nature.
In Pl. 79, the sunflower is back in a pattern meant for tiles, the flowers still a little wild in the petals, but faced to you, arranged in perfectly concentric circles of center, stamens and petals. The heart-leaves also face you, framing the flowers.
A trio of sunflowers from earth to bloom form a muted pattern in Pl. 89, where the heart-leaves pattern their way upward to the blooms, the center one directly to you, the flanking ones turned, the left one to the left, the right one -- you guessed it -- to the right. Tans (with a touch of dark green), browns and muted yellows replace the vibrant greens, yellow and orange of the previous treatments.
A final abstraction appears in Pl. 151, a pure stencil form in flat colors (olive green, muted yellow, burgundy) against a rich milk chocolate background. Here the petals are large, a perfect array of elongated pentagons around an unlikely deep red center. The leaves here are perfectly shaped. The middle leaf is in fact a kid's valentine heart, veins treated as negative space, the chocolate showing through.
There is no way to walk through a garden, or a display of Art Nouveau, without being reminded of the colors, treatments, and brilliant abstraction into pattern that you find in this book.
And we're indebted to Carol Belanger Grafton for her choice and positioning of plates. Two-page spreads again and again balance similar colors, but show wildly different approaches, as though she wanted you to see all of M. Verneuil's skills.
Everyone will find a key into understanding these presentations from something in their surroundings, something they can use as a touchstone. For me, a former potter, I learned the abstraction of the movement from Pl. 106, a decorative heading, "Ceramique," that shows tongues of flame and Japonesque smoke swirling around red-hot pots.
You don't see flames in a firing at this stage (which appears to be well above dull red-heat) and smoke is only an angry, barely-visible swirl of darker red, instantly gone. But you sense the tongues of heat that Verneuil has represented as flames, and you see the pots come alive with their own heat as the temperatures climb, again not from flame, but from the radiation of the fire transferring itself into the clay and bringing the glazes alive. It becomes clear how pattern, abstraction and analogy develop the truth of the moment... in a graphic that is, on the surface, far from reality.
If you have any interest in Art Nouveau, this book's for you.
Dec 27, 2017
Good price, great fit
While I can't vouch for the efficacy of filtration, this set is a bargain if you want to squeeze more life out of an old Hunter unit. The materials feel good and the honeycomb stiffener looks like an excellent way to both make installation easy and provide an effective way to keep the various filter elements flat and supported in the air flow. The set comes with basic documentation and the pre-assembled filter pack has a sticker that tells you which side should face the incoming air. A pack of extra pre-filters accompanies the kit. All in all, the company has put considerable thought into the product's design and manufacture.
Apr 15, 2008
Major treasure-house in a slim, 46-pp package
1 of 1 found this helpful Part of Dover Publications' Design Library series, this little collection is a selection by Dover editor James Spero of 181 patterns from J. Englehorn, "Flat Ornament: A Pattern book of Designs of Textile, Embroideries, Wall Papers, Inlays &C" Stuttgart, no date [cited as "1890?" in a 1908 New York Public Library bibliography].
The patterns range from floral arabesques to overall patterns, rendered in a pure black and white that appears to capture the original design intent. The latter is often altered or obscured in the original by distortion from printing, changes in the substrate (as in wood warping or cracking), or casual execution by the original artist.
With few exceptions, everything here is grounded in strongly geometric composition in the spirit of the Islamic design that so captivated first Venice, then the rest of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe.
Sources include print (especially border patterns), floor and wall tile, inlaid wood (especially intarsia), fabric, metalworking and more.
Spero's selection - or possibly Engelhorn's original selection - is more timeless than many of the standard ornament books produced in the same era, such as Owen Jones' "Grammar of Ornament" or Lacroix' "Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance." More often than not, the latter focus on patterns with a strongly Victorian character, with plenty of romantic elements, overblown intricacy and anything-goes-if-it-looks-old eclecticism.
The patterns in this book do include highly intricate confections that would have delighted a Victorian, but the majority are balanced and elegant - even restrained and 'modern' at times - and you feel as though they convey the spirit of the original clearly, with minimal cultural distortion. (In this respect, you can judge this book by its cover: the design sense, strong pattern, and direct statement you see there is mirrored throughout the book).
There is one significant drawback. Engelhorn apparently was lax (or maybe just laconic) about sources. "Sixteenth century textile designs" doesn't convey much. Where were they from? Early or late (since so much transpired in Europe in the 1500s)? From a Renaissance powerhouse or a backwater? That said, sometimes you get the venue, but you wish for more.
Bottom line, this is a good general reference for a broad variety of pattern ornament, and is almost always a bargain on the used-book market.