Abraham Marie Hammacher Knihy

The fantastic, hallucinatory, obsessive in art; 330 reproductions, 80 color.

A. M. Hammacher, former director of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands and an authority on twentieth-century art, examines Magritte's interest in language in relation to images and his literary influences, especially his fascination with the themes of Edgard Allan Poe. He describes Magritte's methods of working, and carefully elucidates forty works, reproduced in colour, seeking to introduce the reader to the artist's ideas and obsessions without depriving these pictorial riddles and haunting scenes of their mysterious qualities.

Born in Yorkshire in 1903, Barbara Hepworth was determined to become a sculptor despite the misgivings of her parents and the common attitude at the time that a woman studying sculpture was not to be taken seriously. She was part of the generation of British artists that included Henry Moore (with whom she studied in Leeds) and Ben Nicholson (whom she married), and her sculpture explored the forms of life -- especially human life -- as well as those of mathematics.From the beginning, her work displayed a monumental power, and after World War II it received far wider recognition and acclaim. Hepworth later experimented in new substances such as sheet metal, wire, and bronze, but her work always maintained its nobility, subtlety, and flawless rendering of surface. She died in 1975, after a long illness that did not prevent her from completing the work many consider to be her masterpiece: The Family of Man.

A collection of paintings by the Belgian painter is accompanied by a description of his life and analyses of his artistic style.