Product Description

Dubbed the "poet of Prague," Josef Sudek was one of the most important and celebrated of Czech photographers. Sudek produced his best work during his middle-aged years, having grown up and out of the rules of Modernism and into a style of his own. Whereas his photographs from the 1930s are mainly a reflection of the external world, by the 1940s he was returning to himself, finding his own unique creative path. It was during this period that he made his most famous photograph, a view of the world seen through his studio window, the window ledge doubling as a stage for still life objects--a setup which he repeated to great effect. Not even the pressures of WWII and the difficult postwar years, including the demands of socialist realism in the arts, interrupted the continuity of his oeuvre. Edited by Anna Farova. Paperback, 6 x 7 in./154 pgs / 0 color 0 BW80 duotone 0 ~ Item D20076

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #398380 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Released on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: Czech, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 154 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Little-known in the West, Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896-1976), who lost an arm in WW I, endured from 1938 onwards the hardships of Nazi and Soviet occupations, but persisted in his art, producing an intensely personal and emotional body of work. That work is classified in this luxurious monograph into three major categories: Prague city panoramas; architectural and street studies comparable to Eugene Atget's Paris portfolios; and evocative "mood" compositions--views of an ancient Greek coin, a Gothic church, an Art Nouveau window, bare winter branches, chestnuts in bloom. In a preface, Kirschner, photography curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, recalls how Sudek created from limited settings a "Magic Garden" of photographs--and, in contrast to most of his work, at times embraced surrealism: his often startling use of a glass eye as a prop was a favored device.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In an embarrassment of riches, books on Josef Sudek keep appearing, each one more attractive than the last. Time was when few knew the poetic black-and-white landscapes and still lifes of this Czech master, but since Bullaty's Sudek (1978) and Josef Sudek: Poet of Prague (1990), his images have become reasonably familiar. In this volume--certainly the biggest, most lavish of the lot--Kirschner adds biographical knowledge about the elusive "poet of Prague" and gives us several new images, making his effort a must for Sudek devotees, although perhaps less urgent for collections including one of the earlier works. Still, every art collection needs at least one book on this melancholy photographer who, rather like Joseph Cornell, creator of tiny, boxed environments, was an isolated, unique artist and, also like Cornell, one of the century's great visionaries. Gretchen Garner

Language Notes
Text: German