Dada & Surrealism A&I (Art and Ideas)

BAWARE!! SEE UPDATE BELOW! Based on the other reviews of how nice the image quality is, I am wondering if maybe the version I bought is a forgery. There is more than one listing of this item on Amazon - the version I bought being almost half the price of the other. I don't have other Phaidon books to compare this one to, but mine looks like the entire thing was printed from scanned copies of the pages using a low quality inkjet printer. The binding and the cover material seems legit, but the interior pages are extremely low quality. You can see printer lines and compression artifacts around the text. Has anyone else seen this? Is this typical for Phaidon or do I have something else here?UPDATE: I DO HAVE OTHER PHAIDON BOOKS AND NONE OF THEM LOOK LIKE THIS! ALL THE BOOKS I HAVE PUBLISHED BY PHAIDON ARE VERY HIGH QUALITY - THIS VERSION SOLD ON AMAZON IS A CHEAP KNOCK-OFF!!

I give it a 3 stars because of the pictures, there were some I was not able to find in other books about DadaGood things about this book:*Includes good pictures, most of them are one page size, okay for illustration and hard to see listed somewhere else.*Good introduction for someone that is just looking for a general overview of Dada movement.*Nice binding, I purchased as used and the book was in good condition. It is really heavy for taking it with you on the road.Bad things:*Extremely exhaustive exposition of names and dates, it is more of a historical review than a book related to art and the Dada relevance.*Heavy reading, the book is really long and at moments it was hard to keep the interest to continue reading, specially because it serves as a nice introduction but if you already know about the main artists and the Dada movement it gets boring.*Too much information on Surrealism, there could be a separate volume devoted to that. I wanted Dada, but ended up with 4 chapters or more (I did not finish the book) dedicated to Surrealism material.

While its 6" by 9" format necessarily limits the sizes of the illustrations, Gale's choices of which illustrations to include are excellent, ranging from the requisite Picabias, Ernsts, and Dalis to works by lesser-known (and sometimes non-European) artists like Remedios Varo. The author has thoroughly researched his subject, and the text is both authoritative and insightful.

None

Gale provides the better part of what is required to get a sense of the Dada movement. Other books on the subject provide a more concise and readable narrative of the subject, but Gale's book is full of illustrations that offer a good feel for the works created in the various Dada cities and periods. Not definitive, but close enough.

Yes, the art pictured in this book is fantastic. It shows some works that are nearly impossible to find in any other publication. However, the writing is simply horrible. The author's style is one of simple name-dropping without substance. If you are interested in reading a long-winded who's who list of artists, composers, choreographers, cinematographers, authors, and scenesters active in the early 20th century, this book is for you. If, however, you want to know more than names, read something else. ...but, again, the illustrations ARE great.

Ths Mattew Gale book is full of information specially aimed for the beguiner.Ilustrations are high quality and are 100% related to the textThe cross refference between text and images is adecuate and easy to follow.The final presentation of the volume is excelent

i ordered this for a summer class, and it arrived very quickly. The service was great, with updated and all, and the book is wonderfully informative with many historical references