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| Painting People: Figure Painting Today | 
 enlarge | Authors: Lucian Freud, John Currin, Rachel Whiteread
Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
Category: Book
Buy New: $234.91
Avg. Customer Rating:  (12 reviews)
Sales Rank: 475572
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 10.9 x 9.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 1933045388
Dewey Decimal Number: 708
EAN: 9781933045382
ASIN: 1933045388
Publication Date: September 15, 2006
Release Date: September 15, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 More images of work next time September 12, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Where is David Humphrey? Clearly should have been included. A nice sequel could include more artists that deal with Figurative abstraction such as Humphrey, Amy Sillman and many others.
Also, not enough text, and could have had more images
 I demanded my money back July 17, 2007
16 out of 23 found this review helpful
This book is paired with an Odd Nerdrum book, in one of those "Better Together" promos that Amazon does. I'm not sure who decided these two books belong together. Some Amazon executive looked at the Nerdrum book, and said "here's a serious traditional realist. Let's pair his book up with a collection of cartoons."
And cartoons they are. I expected a collection of figurative works to include at least some serious works. Freud is in the collection, but beyond that, there's a load of stuff you'd see in a SoHo gallery where hype out-ranks skills. I have gone through the book three times, and have not seen a single artist I'd want to know more about.
Yes, I get modern art. I know what they're trying to do, blah blah blah, but the book was misrepresented by pairing it with a book by a realist, and further misrepresented by placing a semi-realist painting on the cover. That painting, by the way, isn't even in the book, nor does the dust jacket credit the artist. It's not representative of the book at large (I know. I know. I judged the book by the cover).
A book of figure painting would rightly include Steven Assael, Jeremy Lipking, Robert Liberace and other young greats. What it did include were over-hyped artists who can rightly be called modern artists, but not figurative painters.
I couldn't think of a single reason to keep this book, and for the first time in nearly ten years as an Amazon customer, I asked for a refund. Amazon has a very easy refund procedure, and if you've bought this book, I recommend you use it.
For those who are looking for a serious collection of figurative work, try "Strokes of Genius". I haven't seen it, but I've heard very good things about it.
Strokes of Genius: The Best of Drawing
 Good start could be better June 11, 2007
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
In one sense I really like this book. It has oodles of high quality images of very contemporary artists work, and lets be honest, it's hard to find good images of contemporary artists work a lot of the time. I also liked the text that prefaced each section of the book, it was well written and interesting. However, many of the artists featurerd I felt were a little sub par- that is to say, I've seen better contemporary figure painters. Some are great; Freud, Saville, Yuskagvich, Currins, but many were just not up to the level of some of the great painters featured. Plus, the text about each individual artist was very brief. Over all, i'm glad I have it, but I feel it could be a better overview of figurative painting today.
Figure painting is back June 2, 2007
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book is a good survey of contemporary figure painting. After an introduction explaining the author's aim, namely to present those artists who paint the human figure with the idea of engaging wider themes than the mere painting of a portrait (such as implicit criticism of the violence of our society in Furnas's paintings, or the intimacy of the human being in Peyton's portraits), the author divides her book into five chapters in order to study what these wider themes are:
The figure unravelled
The urban condition
Other worlds
Folk tales
The past deconstructed.
Lavish illustrations of works by Lucian Freud, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin, Barnaby Furnas, Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, Marcel Dzama, to name but a few, are accompanied by a short text describing either the technique or the objective, or both, of each of the artists mentioned.
More an introduction than an in-depth study, this book makes for good reading and gives a fair overview of the state of contemporary figure painting, whatever your opinion is on the selected artists, of whom one may wonder if they will all stand the test of time...
Very, Very Dissapointed May 29, 2007
31 out of 53 found this review helpful
I was very disappointed with this book. The cover painting by Currin led me to buy it, hoping to see more of this type of interesting portrait work. Unfortunately, the book is filled with Modernistic art portraits, if you can call them that, and seems to focus on grotesque, distorted, weird, and overall just plain ugly paintings. Sure, the paintings are of people, but that's about as far as I could consider this art to be portraits. Sorry, I used the word "art" to refer to these paintings. My mistake. Anyway, if you like Modern Art, and are looking for some truly offensive paintings, this may be your cup of tea. The cover portrait by Currin isn't even shown in the book, although two other interesting paintings by Currin are.
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