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    It is the most famous story about any artist in history. But what really happened on that dark winter night?In Van Gogh's Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals the truth. She takes us on an extraordinary journey from major museums to forgotten archives, vividly reconstructing Van Gogh's world. We meet police inspectors and café patrons, prostitutes and madams, his beloved brother Theo and fellow painter Paul Gauguin.Why did Van Gogh commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious 'Rachel' to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he really remove his entire ear? Murphy answers these important questions with her groundbreaking discoveries, offering a stunning portrait of an artist edging towards madness in his pursuit of excellence.BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKPRIMETIME BBC2 DOCUMENTARY WITH JEREMY PAXMAN

    Longtime skateboard artist Sean Cliver put together this staggering survey of over 1,000 skateboard graphics from the last 30 years, creating an indispensable insiders' history as he did so.Alongside his own history, Sean has assembled a wealth of recollections and stories from prominent artists and skateboarders such as: Andy Howell, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Steve Caballero, and Tony Hawk.The end result is a fascinating historical account of art in the skateboard subculture, as told by those directly involved with shaping its legendary creative face.

    Originally published in Munich in 1912 and edited by Kandinsky and Marc-- the movements's almanac presented their synthesis of international culture to the European avant garde at large. In both the selection of essays and its innovative interplay of word and image, The Blaue Reiter Almanac remains one of our most critically important works of literature on the art theory and culture of the twentieth century. This edition, long unavailable in English and indispensable to any student of Modernism, simulates the original German format, and includes documents, and musical notations, as well as seminal essays by Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Marc and others. Nearly 150 illustrations, from ancient and contemporary sources, capture the wide-ranging interests and passions that inspired Kandinsky's and Marc's programmatic attempt to make Modernism accessible across national and chronological boundaries. Also included is Klaus Lankheit's extensive critical introduction, which places the Blaue Reiter in context for contemporary readers."The almanac remains unique among European writings on art; no other country produced a comparable work capturing the excitement and tension of the years before World War I." (Will Grohmann)

    All are works of art that stand out from the ordinary because of their originality, their ability to convey powerful emotions, their technical brilliance--distinctive qualities that unmistakably touch them with intimations of immortality. Discussions focus on examples from across the millennia, and include-- The Lascaux cave paintings (circa. 15,000 B.C) Italian Renaissance masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Paintings that demonstrate revolutionary use of color by J.M.W. Turner Impressionist masterworks by Monet and Degas The action painting of Jackson Pollock The Pop Art of Andy Warhol, and many other memorable artists and their works The book is filled with color illustrations

    Aligned with the resurgence of feminism in pop culture, Broad Strokes offers an entertaining corrective to that omission. Art historian Bridget Quinn delves into the lives and careers of 15 brilliant female artists in text that's smart, feisty, educational, and an enjoyable read. Replete with beautiful reproductions of the artists' works and contemporary portraits of each artist by renowned illustrator Lisa Congdon, this is art history from 1600 to the present day for the modern art lover, reader, and feminist.

    But Gregor Muir knew them at the start; his unique memoir chronicles the birth of Young British Art. Muir, YBA’s ‘embedded journalist’, happened to be in Shoreditch and Hoxton before Jay Jopling arrived with his White Cube Gallery, when this was still a semi-derelict landscape of grotty pubs and squats. There he witnessed, amid a whirl of drunkenness, scrapes and riotous hedonism, the coming-together of a remarkable array of young artists – Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood, Angus Fairhurst - who went on to produce a fresh, irreverent, often notorious form of art - Hirst’s shark, Sarah Lucas’s two fried eggs and a kebab. By the time of the seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy YBA had changed the art world for ever.

    Because they could be mass produced, ukiyo-e works were often used as designs for fans, New Year's greeting cards, single prints, and book illustrations, and traditionally they depicted city life, entertainment, beautiful women, kabuki actors, and landscapes. The influence of ukiyo-e in Europe and the USA, often referred to as Japonisme, can be seen in everything from impressionist painting to today's manga and anime illustration. This reprint is made from one of the finest complete original set of woodprints belonging to the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo.

    Her method begins with action-filled exercises that demonstrate how to play with paint, following no rules. Subsequent step-by-step projects add planning to the mix, demonstrating how to turn loose washes into light-filled watercolors with textural effects achieved by spraying, sprinkling, pouring, squirting, or stamping paint. Engle's approach, and her results, are dramatic and dynamic; now watercolor artists can create their own exciting paintings with help from How to Make a Watercolor Paint Itself.

    Simply constructed, the book explores 50 key works – from the realist painting of Courbet to a contemporary installation by Yayoi Kusama – and then links them to the most important movements, themes and techniques. Accessible, concise and richly illustrated, the book reveals the connections between different periods, artists and styles, giving readers a thorough understanding and broad enjoyment of modern art.

    Bacon was also a legend in the London demimonde, a man who followed long nights of drinking, gambling, and sexual adventure with intense early morning encounters with the blank canvas.When Michael Peppiatt first met him in 1963, Bacon, then in his early fifties, was at the height of his powers. Over the next thirty years, Peppiatt became a close friend of Bacon's and one of his most perceptive critics, and he has produced a fascinating, disturbing portrait of this agonized modern artist.Bacon (1909–92) was raised in large country houses in rural Ireland by a family whose conventional expectations he rebelled against early on. As a young man he was introduced to the seamy side of life in London and Paris; but only after seeing a Picasso retrospective in 1928 did he become an artist. He sprang into prominence in 1944 with a triptych which shocked the art world with its sheer ferocity, and he soon emerged, with his friend Lucian Freud, as a leader of an informal “School of London,” which favored figurative painting in an age dominated by abstraction.As retrospectives of Bacon's work in Paris, London, and New York made his reputation soar, his nighttime exploits grew wilder and wilder; charming and confident, with a strong sadomasochistic streak, he was drawn to “rough trade” in London clubs and pushed all situations to the edge. At the same time, he was a deeply cultivated and thoughtful artist who was obsessively guarded about the sources of his inspiration.Peppiatt has unlocked many of the enigmas of Bacon's life and work. Bacon talked openly to Peppiatt about his early life, his sexuality, his fantasies, and his ambitions, aware that all was being recorded for publication. At the suggestion that some of his remarks would sound indiscreet, Bacon replied: “The more indiscreet, the more interesting it will be.” Together with many new facts, unpublished documents, and penetrating analyses of key paintings, these conversations have been integrated into what is the most complete and riveting account of one of the greatest artists of our time.

    In a body of work spanning over a half-century, he was variously a draughtsman, a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. This short book is both a biography and a guide to his art. It focuses on the extraordinary works that Henri Matisse made during the last period of his life - the large-scale cut-outs on coloured paper, including his famous Blue Nudes, The Snail and Large Composition with Masks.

    Even his contemporaries found the Dutch painter’s work difficult to decipher—and it still presents riddles to contemporary art historians. Part of the problem in analyzing his shocking and richly allegorical paintings is that virtually nothing is known of the artist himself, apart from his birthplace. There is no record of his life or training, no personal letters, diaries or notebooks, and no contemporary insights into his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Even his date of birth can only be guessed at, and that based on a drawing assumed to be a self-portrait, made shortly before his death in 1516, which supposedly shows the artist in his late sixties. Bosch remains as mysterious as the worlds he painted. Although rooted in the Old Dutch tradition, Bosch developed a highly subjective, richly suggestive formal language. With a mixture of religious humility and satanic wit, he illustrated both the joys of heaven and the cruelly imaginative tortures of hell. In his pictorial world teeming with surrealistic nightmares, the medieval imagination catches fire in a moment of final brilliance before succumbing to humanism and modern rationalism. Though the man himself remains a mystery, this book pulls together the elusive threads of Bosch’s work into a cohesive and comprehensive analysis of his work and methods.

    Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film.The Eames work defined anew, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use of modern materials, notablyplywood and plastics.The Eames Lounge Chair Wood, designed with molded plywood technology, became a defining furniture piece of the twentieth century, while the couple s contribution to theCase Study Housesproject not only made inventive use of industrial materials but also developed anadaptable floor plan of multipurpose spaceswhich would become ahallmark of postwar modern architecture.From the couple s earliest furniture experiments to their seminal short filmPowers of Ten, this book covers all the aspects of the illustrious Eames repertoire and itsrevolutionary impact on middle-class American living. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Architecture Series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans) "

    But what it lacks in years, it makes up for in its range of use. Acrylics appeared on the market for artists in the late 1940s as a quick-drying alternative to oil paint. In its early manifestations, it dried so quickly that more than a few brushes stuck immediately to the canvas!Although acrylic has been around for more than fifty years, incredible advances continue to be made in the research and development of acrylic polymers and pigments. These advancements are attributable not only to the efforts of a few dedicated chemists, but also to the work of an entire community devoted to acrylic. There are a lot of brilliant minds taking these minute molecules very seriously.