THE THRONES OF EARTH AND HEAVEN

by Roloff Beny ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Roloff Beny, Canadian painter and photographer, reflects through the eye of his camera, the unchanging impulse in man to build in stone monuments of ageless devotion. In a trip to the Nile Valley, the Adriatic, Aege, Ioni, Mediterranean, and the Barbary Coast, he uses his camera with much of that free play a poet or painter allows to the imagination, selecting, emphasizing, synthesizing. Speaking in the language of texture, light, and dark, Beny, a meticulous technician brings to his work that added ingredient of a highly individualized verve. Though this collection of pictures is devoid of living subjects, it is his accomplishment to have arrived at a new dimension of vitality -- the motion of still form, the sound of silence, the potential force of the enduring. Accompanying each section of the book are brief commentaries by distinguished men and women of the arts -- Freya Stark, Jean Coctesu, Bernard Berenson, Rose Macaulay, and Stephen Spender find rapport with the photographer based on a heightened capacity for perception and interpretation. An elaborately produced book, the various textures and colors of the paper, the excellent typography, and the superlative photographs render this a unique gift book, but one which will primarily be welcomed by readers of an intensely aesthetic, and to some extent, avant garde direction.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harry Abrams

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1958

Categories: NONFICTION