Customer Reviews

A Is for Artist: A Getty Museum Alphabet

5 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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The illustrations in this book are beyond wonderful.(Duh) Because, of course , they are reproductions of masterpieces. The alphabet letters are huge and displayed on a large negative space.Is also fun for the child to "find" the thing being represented by the letter. Very educational and a joy not to always have to look at the simplistic primary color illustrations in many of the childrens books. My 2yr. old grandchild loves this book and I purchased 3 others for my other granchildren of various ages. It is humorous ,elegant and charming. The"grape", "skull" and "umbrella" are favorites!!!

As you would imagine, this is a lovely book. The paper is nice, the colorwork is great. And it is a sweet way to introduce (or reinforce) the beauty and diversity of the alphabet. The endpages show an upper- and lowercase alphabet and each letter pair is associated with a word. Aa with Artist, Bb with Bumblebee, etc. Once inside, you'll find facing 8-inch square pages for each letter -- on one side beautiful large letters ("U is for umbrella") and on the other a full-page color plate of a detail from one of the Museum's artworks (an umbrella from Degas's 'Waiting'). Small print on the text page gives you the artist's name, nationality and lifespan, and the work's title and date. The book ends with small representations of the entire works from which details were taken. The three features -- letter pairs with word, word with painting detail, and letter with full picture -- complement each other in a way that also makes this a book ripe for play. This is the kind of resource I would like to see more of from this country's artistic community -- educational, thoughtful and fun. Thanks, Getty!

Several of the paintings in this book show naked men and women. It's a great idea, but I am shocked that they could not find more appropriate paintings for use in a children's book.