Art Philosophy: Image Text: Image Text

Author: Danna
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: The author of this book, Fu Lei, is a renowned Chinese literary translator and art critic. Throughout his life, he has translated a vast amount of works, with his translations characterized by their vividness. His writing is fluent, rich in language, and adept at using color variations. With a translation career spanning thirty-seven years and translating over thirteen or fourteen works, his major translations include the long masterpiece Jean-Christophe by Roman Rolland, the biography Beethoven's Life, Danna's Philosophy of Art, Balzac's Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet, among others. In recent years, his posthumous works, such as Twenty Lectures on Famous Art Works and Letters from Fu Lei, have also been deeply loved by readers. Over one million words of his writings have been collected in The Collected Works of Fu Lei. Mr. Fu Lei was an open-minded and resilient individual. In the early days of the Cultural Revolution, he was severely impacted and, on the early morning of September 3, 1966, he and his wife, Lady Zhu Meifu, took their own lives in a tragic and heroic manner, leaving behind a life full of sorrow. The book is interspersed with over five hundred famous paintings from various periods. It is a masterpiece on art, history, and human culture, adopting not the form of a typical textbook but offering profound and in-depth insights into the main trends of artistic development. Danna advocated for the study of knowledge to "start from facts, not from ideologies; to seek patterns rather than deliver lessons, and to prove those patterns." He believed that the nature and appearance of both material and spiritual civilizations depend on three major factors: race, environment, and era. Based on this principle, he elaborates on the art schools of Italy, the Netherlands, and ancient Greece. The final section, "Ideal in Art," presents Danna's aesthetics. The entire book is not only meticulously structured and lucid but also filled with passion, vivid imagery, and rich colors, completely free of the dry and dullness often found in theoretical writings.