Odyssey by Homer
The colorful, painterly, uplifting, and often joyous works of Henri Matisse are critical in the history of modern art. Throughout his many years as a painter, the celebrated artist kept returning to one particular subject--the windowed interior. Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View explores in depth, for the first time, the full significance of the window in Matisse's thinking about interior and exterior space. Matisse studied and rearranged his rooms constantly; when he lived in hotels and small apartments his living quarters usually doubled as his studio. In a continuous engagement with these spaces he produced not only singular masterpieces but also developed a theme as rich as the traditional landscape or portrait. In each new phase of his art and with every change of residence, Matisse reinvented the theme of the window. Distinguished art historian Shirley Neilsen Blum analyzes more than fifty paintings, starting with the early Studio Under the Eves (1903), a traditional darkened room with a small brilliant window, through Harmony in Red (1908), with its startling use of color, pattern, and line, to the more abstract work created during World War I such as The Piano Lesson (1916). After the war Matisse moved to Nice. Tall French windows that open upon a balcony and overlook the Mediterranean define many of the paintings from these years. By the late 1940s the window is so bound to the structure of the flattened space that it is barely differentiated from a painting or piece of tapestry hanging on the wall. The luxuriously illustrated volume culminates in one of Matisse's greatest and most original works--the Chapel of the Rosary (1947-51) at Vence--where, instead of imitating light and color in paint, he manipulated actual light through the colored glass of the windows. This insightful volume reveals not only the key role of the windowed interior in Matisse's oeuvre but also presents an overview of the artist's remarkable and varied career, and shows how his work paved the way for some of the most radical abstract painting of the twentieth century.
Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives. He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer - the Iliad and the Odyssey - are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.
In the Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. The Odyssey is the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. His adventures are many and memorable before he gets back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope. We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. In fact 'Homer' may not be a real name but a kind of nickname meaning perhaps 'the hostage' or 'the blind one'. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time.
Robert Fagles (1933-2008) was Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was the recipient of the 1997 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His translations include Sophocles's Three Theban Plays, Aeschylus's Oresteia (nominated for a National Book Award), Homer's Iliad (winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by The Academy of American Poets), Homer's Odyssey, and Virgil's Aeneid. Bernard Knox (1914-2010) was Director Emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. He taught at Yale University for many years. Among his numerous honors are awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His works include The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time and Essays Ancient and Modern (awarded the 1989 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award).| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780060125318 |
| ISBN 10 | 0060125314 |
| Title | Odyssey |
| Author | Homer |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers Inc |
| Year published | 1967-03-01 |
| Number of pages | 374 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |