The story of the artist's life is told here with the help of virtually his entire correspondence, the journals of his travels, and, to supply the facts about his youthful years, the journals kept by his father.

    In his own time, Kilmt (1862-1918) was a highly successful painter, draftsman, muralist, and graphic artist; in the intervening years, iconic works such as The Kiss have been elevated to nothing less than cult status. Klimt's unfading popularity attests to the appeal of not only his aesthetic sensibilities but also that of the recurrent universal themes in his work: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death. He once wrote, "I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me...ought to look carefully at my pictures." With this overview of Klimt's work, readers will delight in taking up that challenge.About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

    It presents a comprehensive selection of Mapplethorpe's nudes, portraits, self-portraits, floral still lifes and other works, including his best known and most controversial images. Mapplethorpe's choices were both innovative and bold, and his work has continued to resonate since his early death in 1989. His cutting-edge use of homoerotic and other challenging themes has become embedded in our culture, with pervasive echoes not only in the work of other artists but in mainstream advertising as well.

    Starting on the streets of New York with simple fly-posters, she has gone on to disseminate her truisms, slogans, memorials and poems through a variety of media. They are enunciated by an unstable register of personae, be it ad-man, stand-up comedian, torturer, victim or evangelist. The sites for her work range from T-shirts and golf balls to dazzling electronic signboards at baseball stadiums.Her work uses language to investigate the nature of ideologies as conscious and unconscious formations about identity and experience. Her complex and poetic texts can be shocking, humorous and intriguing in content. At the same time she draws on Minimalism's use of industrial materials and deploys scale, movement and light to create art of great formal power and beauty.In the Survey, art critic and academic David Joselit surveys Holzer's changing oeuvre, from the first appearance of the streetwise Truisms in the late 1970 to her large-scale installations in museums worldwide. Joan Simon, curator of Holzer's first solo US museum exhibition, discusses with the artist her use of language and its relationship to visual form. In the Focus, Slovenian cultural theorist and philosopher Renata Salecl takes an in-depth look at Holzer's Lustmord series, which was precipitated by the events in the former Yugoslavia and boldly addresses the atrocities committed in war. For the Artist's Choice, the artist's fragmented, unexpected language is mirrored in Samuel Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said, which the artist has chosen alongside extracts from Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. A text by the artist on her literary influences accompanies a selection of her signature texts in the Artist's Writings section.

    Simultaneous.

    Comes with a palette of six artist-quality watercolors and a brush. Most importantly, this book also comes with the artwork, technique tips and encouragement of renowned illustrator Thacher Hurd.Comes With: A set of watercolors, a brush Have fun

    Since the 1960s, his work has had an enormous and continuing influence, not only on art, but on culture at large. His unforgettable paintings—poetic and often puzzling—have become part of our popular imagery.  This magisterial volume by David Sylvester, the foremost expert on Magritte’s work--out of print for more than a decade--is available again to celebrate the opening of the new Magritte Museum in Brussels. Brought up to date by the museum's director, Michel Draguet, the book offers 40 chapters of critical insights and clues to Magritte's puzzles, and over 500 lush full-color illustrations, making it an uparalleled source for understanding and appreciating an enormously popular and remarkably creative artist.

    Now, after nearly fifteen years of effort, the restoration is finally complete. This unique volume-the first to document the project-is the result of an unparalleled international photographic campaign. For the first time, the restored Chapel is shown in its entirety, from the Creation to the Last Judgment. Glorious, full-color photographs-250 in all-portray the frescoes both before and after their restoration, providing an unforgettable view of the meticulous work that many believe restored the frescoes to their original High Renaissance splendor.Originally created in the late 1400s, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are the best-known of all the Vatican masterpieces. As early as 1502, however, tourists began noting the damage wrought by smoke and crumbling walls. By 1980 the need for conservation appeared to be dire. The restoration team had to contend with centuries of decay-structural fractures in the walls and ceilings, soot and dust accumulation, and rainwater seepage that left white patches on every surface. Artisans in previous centuries had made attempts at conservation, but often did more harm than good; the frescoes were found to be coated with many layers of "protective" glue that had yellowed and darkened with age.Though many art historians opposed the restoration, believing that Michelangelo was a somber artist who worked in dark and muted colors, the endeavor presents frescoes that are gloriously vivid, setting the chapel aglow with their brilliance. In addition, they provide new insights about Michelangelo's brushstroke techniques, and add more information to a centuries-old debate over how he worked with the wet plaster surface of the frescoes.Written with Gianluigi Colalucci, the technical overseer of the restoration, the text provides an intimate understanding of this masterpiece of Renaissance art. It explains the various forensic studies carried out in the course of the project, the pragmatic concerns of the restoration, and the many problems of historical approach that were confronted. This volume, including remarkable new pictures of the Chapel frescoes, belongs in the libraries of every art historian and student of the Italian Renaissance.

    

    Here, in dialogue with Volker Harlan, the deeper motivations and insights underlying social sculpture, Beuys's expanded conception of art, are illuminated.

    Each fiction has a terse analytical agenda, surgically dissecting the mundane, forcing quotidian life off the canvas, out of the museum dioramas and into our laps.

    A critical essay accompanied by illustrations explores Dali's virtuosic visual language and the extraordinary range of imagery embodied in his prolific oeuvre in the fields of painting, sculpture, graphics, and book illustration.

    Yet even now the art and life of this controversial and extremely influential German artist remain impenetrably intertwined - even more so perhaps because Beuys, like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, precisely orchestrated his public image, building a personal myth that has the power to bind together his entire oeuvre. Thinking Is Form breaks through the mass of obscure writing about Joseph Beuys to introduce this legendary artist in a simple and clear manner, through his utterly individual drawings. The subject of a major touring exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Beuys's drawings are used here as the springboard for discussions of his life, art, and ideas. Some employ such unconventional mediums as hare's blood or margarine, or use the backs of envelopes or commercial stationery. Some incorporate photographs, pressed flowers, and other organic materials, emphasizing their function as a reservoir of ideas for Beuys's sculpture, actions (performance art), and other enterprises. His achievement is viewed in the broader context of European art, and his graphic works are considered chronologically as his formative medium, in relation to his work as a whole, and as autobiographical narrative. This is the first time that the disciplines of curator and connoisseur have been rigorously applied to the selection and presentation of a truly representative segment of Beuys's work. Beuys, following the strategy articulated by Duchamp, made his own life his masterwork, and his drawings formed the drafts for that work. Now that the work is complete, it is through the drawings that we can begin to grasp as a whole the accomplishment of a man who declared "Everyone is an artist."

    Providing both authorized biography and artistic analysis, this book draws on previously unpublished correspondence to describe the emergence of the American artist Fairfield Porter as a figurative painter in the post-war decades of Abstract Expressionism who struggled to achieve recognition.

    The albums were prototypes for books that were never published.