20th Century Photography: Museum Ludwig Cologne


Marianne Bieger-Thielemann - 1996
    Cologne's Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum's holdings. This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection's rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the century's most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers' biographical details.

The Art of Robert E. McGinnis


Robert McGinnis - 2014
    McGinnis began his career in 1947 as a cartoonist, and produced his first cover illustrations for 1956 issues of the magazines True Detective and Master Detective. Then in 1958, he painted his first paperback book cover, and from that day forward his work was in demand.   The emergence of the “McGinnis Woman”—long-legged, intelligent, alluring, and enigmatic—established him as the go-to artist for detective novels. His work appeared on Mike Shayne titles and the Perry Mason series, and he produced 100 paintings for the Carter Brown adventures. Yet McGinnis became famous for his work in other genres as well: espionage, romance, historicals, gothics, and Westerns.   McGinnis’s first major magazine assignments were for The Saturday Evening Post, and his work has graced the pages of Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, Guideposts, and others. McGinnis women frequently cropped up in the men’s magazines of the ’60s and ’70s.   His first movie poster was for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with an iconic rendering of Audrey Hepburn. Almost instantly, his poster artwork could be seen everywhere—in theaters, on billboards, in newspapers, and even on soundtrack albums. His work for Hollywood became a who’s-who, with posters for James Bond, The Odd Couple, Woody Allen, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and many more.   Some of his most ambitious works have been his gallery paintings, often depicting stunning American landscapes, vast Western vistas, and of course, beautiful women. The Art of Robert E. McGinnis collection reveals the full scope and beauty of the work of a true American master—one whose legacy continues today.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency


Olivia Laing - 2020
    The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

Art as Experience


John Dewey - 1934
    Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

Editing by Design: For Designers, Art Directors, and Editors--the Classic Guide to Winning Readers


Jan V. White - 1974
    Brimming with hundreds of illustrations, Editing by Design presents proven solutions to such design issues as columns and grids, margins, spacing, captions, covers and color, type, page symmetry, and much more. A must-have resource for designers, writers, and art directors looking to give their work visual flair and a competitive edge!• Explains sophisticated concepts insimple words and pictures • A perfect desk reference for every kind of publishing medium • Vast audience, with equal appeal to designers, writers, publishers, teachers, and students

Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle


Matthew Barney - 2002
    Three essays by Barney experts articulate the series' diverse themes and explore the artist's innovative aesthetic vocabulary; interviews with key collaborators, a composer, costume designer, make-up artist, technicians and actors reveal his working process. A trailblazing essay by Curator of Contemporary Art Nancy Spector charts Barney's work from the 1990s to the present and provides critical insights into the aesthetic vocabulary of his five Cremaster films, while Neville Wakefield's "Cremaster Glossary" illuminates the films' most far-flung references with citations from sources as diverse as Freud's psychoanalytic studies, Mormon law and lore, and hardcore music fanzines. In addition to stills from the five films--including the final episode, Cremaster 3--the book features related sculptures, photographs, drawings and storyboards. For anyone intrigued by the Wagner of contemporary art, this is an atlas to his enticingly hypnotic worlds. Barney himself collaborated on all aspects of this extraordinary publication, including the selection of over 700 images, most of them never before published.

Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet


Stanley Donwood - 2019
    His influential work spans many practices over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installation work to printmaking. Here, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches, and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, each chapter is dedicated to a major work—whether an album cover, promotional piece, or a personal project—and is presented as a step-by-step working case study. Featuring commentary by Thom Yorke and never-before-seen archival material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood’s creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. It is a must-have for fans of the band and anyone interested in graphic design and popular culture.

An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers


Danny Gregory - 2008
    The margins sometimes spill over with hurriedly scrawled shopping lists and phone numbers. The cover may be travel-worn and the pages warped from watercolors. Open the book, and raw creativity seeps from each color and line. The intimacy and freedom on its pages are almost like being inside the artist's mind: You get a direct window into risks, lessons, mistakes, and dreams.The private worlds of these visual journals are exactly what you'll find inside An Illustrated Life. This book offers a sneak peak into the wildly creative imaginations of 50 top illustrators, designers and artists. Included are sketchbook pages from R. Crumb, Chris Ware, James Jean, James Kochalka, and many others. In addition, author Danny Gregory has interviewed each artist and shares their thoughts on living the artistic life through journaling.Watch artists—through words and images—record the world they see and craft the world as they want it to be. The pages of An Illustrated Life are sometimes startling, sometimes endearing, but always inspiring. Whether you're an illustrator, designer, or simply someone searching for inspiration, these pages will open a whole new world to you.

Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers


Leonard Koren - 1994
    Describes the principles of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic associated with Japanese tea ceremonies and based on the belief that true beauty comes from imperfection and incompletion, through text and photographs.

Design as Art


Bruno Munari - 1966
    Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children's books, advertising, cars and chairs - these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.Bruno Munari (1907-1998), born in Milan, was the enfant terrible of Italian art and design for most of the twentieth century, contributing to many fields of both visual (paint, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non-visual arts (literature, poetry). He was twice awarded the Compasso d'Oro design prize for excellence in his field.If you enjoyed Design as Art, you might like John Berger's Ways of Seeing, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'One of the most influential designers of the twentieth century ... Munari has encouraged people to go beyond formal conventions and stereotypes by showing them how to widen their perceptual awareness'International Herald Tribune

Concerning the Spiritual in Art


Wassily Kandinsky - 1947
    Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art.Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings.This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook


Alan Lee - 2005
    These images would prove so powerful and evocative that they would eventually define the look of Peter Jackson's movie trilogy and earn him a coveted Academy Award.The book is filled with more than 150 of his sketches and early conceptual pieces showing how the project progressed from idea to finished art. It also contains a selection of full-page paintings reproduced in full color, together with numerous examples of previously unseen conceptual art produced for the films and many new works drawn specially for this book.The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook provides a fascinating insight into the imagination of the man who painted Tolkien's vision, first on the page and then in three dimensions on the movie screen. It will also be of interest to many of the thousands of people who have bought the illustrated Lord of the Rings as well as to budding artists who want to unlock the secrets of book illustration.

What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell


Will Gompertz - 2012
    Rich with extraordinary tales and anecdotes, What Are You Looking At? entertains as it arms readers with the knowledge to truly understand and enjoy what it is they’re looking at.

M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work


M.C. Escher - 1954
    Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents. From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972. M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception. 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

Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography


T.J. Demos - 2006
    Over the past ten years it has experienced radical changes, in part due to the rise of digital technologies. Photography is now often engaged in by artists who are not just printing in a darkroom, but using the medium as a single aspect of a larger ouvre, as one of several media under exploration. Vitamin Ph focuses on diverse global developments in 'art' photography through the work of 121 contemporary artists, who were nominated by 78 international critics, curators and artists. These selections will be accompanied by a 5000 word introductory text by TJ Demos, aiming to explore ideas relevant to contemporary photography with reference to the works included in the book. In addition, the work of each photographer/artist will be introduced by a short commissioned text of approximately 500 words. Similar in concept, scope and structure to Vitamin P and Vitamin D, Vitamin Ph presents, in A to Z order, artists who have emerged, or in some instances re-emerged, in the last five years using the medium of photography.