Worldly and ambitious, she has never envied her less attractive sister, the spirited but naive Beatrice, until, by a quirk of fate, Beatrice is betrothed to the future Duke of Milan. Although he is more than twice their age, openly lives with his mistress, and is reputedly trying to eliminate the current duke by nefarious means, Ludovico Sforza is Isabella's match in intellect and passion for all things of beauty. Only he would allow her to fulfill her destiny: to reign over one of the world's most powerful and enlightened realms and be immortalized in oil by the genius Leonardo da Vinci.Though Isabella weds the Marquis of Mantua, a man she has loved since childhood, Beatrice's fortunes rise effortlessly through her marriage to Ludovico. The two sisters compete for supremacy in the illustrious courts of Europe, and Isabella vows that she will not rest until she wrestles back her true fate and plays temptress to the sensuous Ludovico and muse to the great Leonardo. But when Ludovico's grand plan to control Europe begins to crumble, immortality through art becomes a luxury, and the two sisters must choose between familial loyalty and survival in the treacherous political climate.Leonardo's Swans is an evocation of the artist during his years in the glittering court of Milan, re-creating the thrilling moments when he conceived The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. It portrays a genius ahead of his time who can rarely escape the demands of his noble patrons long enough to express his own artistic vision.

    He stood for Modernism but he also embodied tradition. His pictures polarized and divided the art-loving world. The press and general public alike were split over the question: For or against Klimt? This monograph explores Klimt’s oeuvre with particular emphasis upon such contemporary voices. With a complete catalogue of his paintings, including new photographs of the Stoclet Frieze commissioned exclusively for this book, it examines the reactions to Klimt’s work throughout his career. Subjects range from Klimt’s portrayal of women to his adoption of landscape painting. The theory that Klimt was a man of few words who rarely put pen to paper is also dispelled with the inclusion of 179 letters, cards, writings, and other documents from the artist.Contributing authors: Evelyn Benesch, Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Rainald Franz, Anette Freytag, Christoph Grunenberg, Hansjörg Krug, Susanna Partsch, Angelina Pötschner, and Michaela ReichelThe Editor and Author:Tobias G. Natter is an internationally acknowledged expert on art in “Vienna around 1900.” For many years he worked at the Austrian Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, latterly as head curator. He also worked as guest curator at the Tate Liverpool, the Neue Galerie New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Schirn in Frankfurt am Main, and the Jewish Museum in Vienna. From 2006 to 2011, he directed the Vorarlberg Museum in Bregenz, and from 2011 to 2013 was director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. In 2014 he founded Natter Fine Arts, which specializes in assessing works of art and developing exhibition concepts. He is the author of TASCHEN’s Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings; Art for All: The Colour Woodcut in Vienna around 1900; and Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings, 1909–1918.Details:Gustav Klimt: The Complete PaintingsTobias G. NatterHardcover with fold-outs, 29 x 39.5 cm, 676 pagesISBN 978-3-8365-2795-8Edition: EnglishSUZY MENKES:“Surely TASCHEN’s Klimt: The Complete Paintings. Each unfolding page — with its strokeable surface of intense paintwork and its meld of Byzantine imagery and Venetian mosaics — brings to life the exotic eroticism of an exceptional artist.”

    Poems to Read is a welcoming avenue into poetry for readers new to poetry, including high school and college students. It is also meant to be a fresh, valuable collection for readers already devoted to the art. This anthology concentrates on the actual pleasures of reading poems: hearing the poem in your voice, bringing it to other people, musing about it, taking excitement or comfort from it, wandering with it or—as in the Keats letter quoted in the Introduction—having it as a starting post. Many of these 200 poems are accompanied by comments from readers of various ages, regions, and backgrounds who participated in the Favorite Poem Project. Included are poems by John Donne, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, and Louise Glück, to name a few. The editors offer their own comments on some of the poems, which are arranged in thematic chapters.

    For the first time, this deluxe and highly comprehensive book tells the complete story of this deeply personal Henson project, highlighting the unique creative journey and groundbreaking techniques that brought the film to the screen. Drawing from unseen archive interviews with Jim Henson and new interviews with the film’s behind-the-scenes creative team, Dark Crystal: The Ultimate Visual History leaves no stone unturned in chronicling the entire production, from the initial concept based on themes close to Henson’s heart to the ingenious conceptual design, puppet construction, and logistics of the shoot itself. The book also delves into the wider world of Dark Crystal, exploring the creation of comics, novels, and other official projects inspired by the film.  This deluxe coffee-table book contains an in-depth look at the day-to-day production of the film and showcases a huge range of incredible visuals, including candid set photography, previously unseen concept art, storyboards, production notes, and more. The book also features a plethora of amazing removable items, such as script pages, notes and sketches from Henson, and other unique treasures. Definitive, enthralling, and revelatory, Dark Crystal: The Ultimate Visual History is the last word on an enduring modern classic and the book that fans of the film have been waiting for.

    Artists such as Mariko Mori, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Forced Entertainment can now be seen in the context of previous innovators, from the Dadaists to Laurie Anderson.First published in 1979, now extensively updated and expanded, this pioneering book has been supplemented by the definitive account of the current technological, political and aesthetic shifts in performance art.

    A loosely formed autobiography by Andy Warhol, told with his trademark blend of irony and detachmentIn The Philosophy of Andy Warhol—which, with the subtitle "(From A to B and Back Again)," is less a memoir than a collection of riffs and reflections—he talks about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, and success; about New York, America, and his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania; about his good times and bad in New York, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and his life among celebrities.

    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

    Now, she presents a stunning collection of love poems that includes more than twenty new works.From the revolutionary "Seduction" to the tender new poem, "Just a Simple Declaration of Love," from the whimsical "I Wrote a Good Omelet" to the elegiac "All Eyez on U," written for Tupac Shakur, these poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which Nikki Giovanni is beloved and revered.Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems expresses notions of love in ways that are delightfully unexpected. Articulating in sensuous verse what we know only instinctively, Nikki Giovanni once again confirms her place as one of our nations's most distinguished poets and powerful truth-tellers.In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, starting with her explosive early years in the Black Rights Movement, Nikki Giovanni has earned a reputation as one of America's most celebrated and controversial writers. Her mind-speaking work has made her a universal favorite and a number-one best-seller.The love poems-the revolutionary "Seduction," the whimsical "I Wrote a Good Omelet," and the tender "My House" to name just a few-are among the most beloved of all Nikki Giovanni's works. Now, Love Poems brings together these and other favorites with over twenty new poems. Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems will once again confirm Nikki Giovanni's place among the country's most renowned poets and truth tellers.

    Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron. The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered "degenerate” in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine "nature"). The author describes how Adele inspired the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her-simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper. And O'Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic heretic in his time, a genius in ours. She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers' grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele's Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, "The Lady in Gold" and proudly exhibited it in Vienna's Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution. The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine. We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court's decision had profound ramifications in the art world. In this book listeners will find riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, The Lady in Gold-the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.

    He read deeply in the French revolutionary philosophers. From Rousseau he evolved the idea that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters, but that coupled with reason "it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." In Spain he saw a country that had abandoned reason, and he peopled Los Caprichos with the grotesque monsters that result from such an action. Plate after plate shows witches, asses, devils, and other strange creatures, many of which are caricatures of members of the society against which Goya was fighting. The plates were first published in 1799. There are still in existence, however, six extremely rare sets of artist's proofs, considered by most who have managed to see them as infinitely superior to the work actually published. Now, for the first time, this edition reproduces one of these sets of 80 prints, together with the "Prado" manuscript, a commentary on the plates. In addition, this collection contains supplementary material to the Los Caprichos series, inlcuding a never-before-published study for Caprichos 10; three unique proofs of plates probably intended for publication with the others; a preliminary drawing for plate I, a self-portrait of Goya (which appears as the frontispiece to this volume); and a unique proof of "Woman in Prison" which may represent an earlier version of Caprichos 32.

    A comprehensive overview of all of Marvel's greatest heroes and villains furnishes profiles of more than one thousand characters that document their individual superpowers and their careers, in a reference that traces the history of Marvel Comics and encompasses stunning artwork by some of Marvel's greatest artists.

    Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.

    Rowling’s script for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to the screen.  Explore the realm of fantastical creatures that roam the wizarding world and discover the magical cast of characters in pursuit of them.Officially licensed by Warner Bros. Consumer Products, and designed by MinaLima, designers of the graphic props for the Harry Potter films as well as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Case of Beasts delivers an enchanting interactive experience by sharing filmmaking secrets, film photography and artwork, and behind-the-scenes stories from cast and crew. Full of removable, facsimile reproductions of props and paper ephemera from the movie, along with some very special effects, this collectible volume offers a unique look from the talented group who created this movie magic.

    Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary."how to be interesting, line after line."Contents:Charles DickensBoys' WeekliesInside the WhaleDrama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful InnFilm Review: The Great DictatorWells, Hitler and the World StateThe Art of Donald McGillNo, Not OneRudyard KiplingT.S. EliotCan Socialists Be Happy?Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador DaliPropaganda and Demotic SpeechRaffles and Miss BlandishGood Bad BooksThe Prevention of LiteraturePolitics and the English LanguageConfessions of a Book ReviewerPolitics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's TravelsLear, Tolstoy and the FoolWriters and LeviathanReview of The Heart of the Matter by Graham GreeneReflections on Gandhi

    And what's bad about that? In Pictures and Tears, art historian James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry. Drawing upon anecdotes related to individual works of art, he provides a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past, and a meditation on the curious tearlessness with which most people approach art in the present. Deeply personal, Pictures and Tears is a history of emotion and vulnerability, and an inquiry into the nature of art. This book is a rare and invaluable treasure for people who love art. Also includes an 8-page color insert.