This collection presents fifty large-scale artworks from the American master's color field period (1949–1970) alongside essays by Rothko's son, Christopher Rothko, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop. Featuring illuminating details about Rothko's life, influences, and legacy, and brimming with the emotional power and expressive color of his groundbreaking canvases, this essential volume brings the renowned artist's luminous work to light for both longtime Rothko fans and those discovering his work for the very first time. A textured case and large-scale tip-on on the front cover round out this sumptious package.

    Their conversation, one of the most illuminating and insightful looks into MirO's philosophy and creative process, was first published in a limited edition of seventy five copies in 1964. Though long out of print, this bilingual "treasure," in the words of Maria Popova, "remains the most direct and comprehensive record of MirO's ideas on art." This beautiful new edition presents an updated English translation of MirO's invaluable text in an elegant and striking package. In addition to Taillandier's original foreword, a new preface by preeminent MirO scholar Robert Lubar provides wider context and insight. An appendix includes the original French text in its entirety. Joan MirO I Work Like a Gardener brings to life the words and work of one of the most beloved and influential artists of the twentieth century.

    Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cézanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cézanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cézanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art."Rilke makes the feeling and views around great art real, weaving into his letters the indescribable thing that gives us beauty, truth, pleasure."--HELEN FRANKENTHALER, Art & Antiques"[These letters] are themselves extraordinarily peaceful and concentrated, seeping with the sense and recognition of Cézanne's colors, in nature as on canvas, colors which seem a part of Rilke himself, of the words and paper."--JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books

    In Portraits, Berger connects art and history in revolutionary ways, from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to Randa Mdah’s work about contemporary Palestine. In his penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about art history, and artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. A beautifully illustrated walk through many centuries of visual culture from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.

    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)

    Rothko’s other written works have yet to be brought together into a major publication. Writings on Art fills this significant void; it includes some 90 documents—including short essays, letters, statements, and lectures—written by Rothko over the course of his career. The texts are fully annotated, and a chronology of the artist’s life and work is also included. This provocative compilation of both published and unpublished writings from 1934--69 reveals a number of things about Rothko: the importance of writing for an artist who many believed had renounced the written word; the meaning of transmission and transition that he experienced as an art teacher at the Brooklyn Jewish Center Academy; his deep concern for meditation and spirituality; and his private relationships with contemporary artists (including Newman, Motherwell, and Clyfford Still) as well as journalists and curators. As was revealed in Rothko’s The Artist’s Reality, what emerges from this collection is a more detailed picture of a sophisticated, deeply knowledgeable, and philosophical artist who was also a passionate and articulate writer.

    Heinlein was sixty-six, at the height of his literary career; J. Neil Schulman was twenty and hadn't yet started his first novel. Because he was looking for a way to meet his idol, Schulman wangled an assignment from the New York Daily News--at the time the largest circulation newspaper in the U.S.--to interview Heinlein for its Sunday Book Supplement. The resulting taped interview lasted three-and-a-half hours. This turned out to be the longest interview Heinlein ever granted, and the only one in which he talked freely and extensively about his personal philosophy and ideology. "The Robert Heinlein Interview" contains Heinlein you won't find anywhere else--even in Heinlein's own "Expanded Universe." If you wnat to know what Heinlein had to say about UFO's, life after death, epistemology, or libertarianism, this interview is the only source available. Also included in this collection are articles, reviews, and letters that J. Neil Schulman wrote about Heinlein, including the original article written for The Daily News, about which the Heinleins wrote Schulman that it was, "The best article--in style, content, and accuracy--of the many, many written about him over the years." This book is must-reading for any serious student of Heinlein, or any reader seeking to know him better.

    This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper. It includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from the entire range of his oeuvre--including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits--and spans from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star Bjork. It also features a small number of color images, including what must be one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, -Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent- (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer a sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's career.

    Today he is recognized as a highly influential founding father of modern art, who emphasized the use of flat planes and bright, nonnaturalistic color in conjunction with symbolic or primitive subjects. Familiarity with Gauguin the writer is essential for a complete understanding of the artist. The Writings of a Savage collects the very best of his letters, articles, books, and journals, many of which are unavailable elsewhere. In brilliantly lucid discussions of life and art Gauguin paints a triumphant self-portrait of a volcanic artist and the tormented man within.

    Each work is accompanied by a detailed description to enhance the appreciation of the artist's creation.

    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

    After his death, the contents of his studio, including thousands of glass negatives, were sold off for five dollars. For years the fragile negatives sat forgotten and deteriorating in cardboard boxes in an open carport. How did it happen, then, that the most implausible of events took place? That Disfarmer’s haunting portraits were retrieved from oblivion, that today they sell for upwards of $12,000 each at posh New York art galleries; his photographs proclaimed works of art by prestigious critics and journals and exhibited around the world? The story of Disfarmer’s rise to fame is a colorful, improbable, and ultimately fascinating one that involves an unlikely assortment of individuals. Would any of this have happened if a young New York photographer hadn't been so in love with a pretty model that he was willing to give up his career for her; if a preacher’s son from Arkansas hadn't spent 30 years in the Army Corps of Engineers mapping the U.S. from an airplane; if a magazine editor hadn't felt a strange and powerful connection to the work? The cast of characters includes these, plus a restless and wealthy young Chicago aristocrat and even a grandson of FDR. It’s a compelling story which reveals how these diverse people were part of a chain of events whose far-reaching consequences none of them could have foreseen, least of all the strange and reclusive genius of Heber Springs. Until now, the whole story has not been told.

    It seeks to answer a simple question: why is there such a thing as style? The question may be simple but there is no easy answer, and Professor Gombrich's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration of the history and psychology of pictorial representation leads him into countless crucial areas. Gombrich examines, questions and re-evaluates old and new ideas on such matters as the imitation of nature, the function of tradition, the problem of abstraction, the validity of perspective and the interpretation of expression: all of which reveal that pictorial representation is far from being a straightforward matter. First published more than 40 years ago, Art and Illusion has lost none of its vitality and importance. In applying the findings of experimental science to a nuanced understanding of art and in tackling complex ideas and theoretical issues, Gombrich is rigorous.Yet he always retains a sense of wonder at the inexhaustible capacity of the human brain, and at the subtlety of the relationships involved in seeing the world and in making and seeing art. With profound knowledge and his exceptional gift for clear exposition, he advances each argument as an hypothesis to be tested. The problems of representation are forever fundamental to the history of art: Art and Illusion remains an essential text for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of art. For the sixth edition Professor Gombrich has written an entirely new 12-page preface, in which he makes use of the distinction between an image and a sign, so as to clarify his intentions in writing the book in the first place.

    The Devil and Dr. Barnes traces the near-mythical journey of a man who was born into poverty, amassed a fortune through the promotion of a popular medicine, and acquired the premier private collection of works by such masters as Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. Ostentatiously turning his back on the art establishment, Barnes challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of an uninitiated, often resistant and scoffing, American audience. In particular, he championed Matisse, Soutine, and Modigliani when they were obscure or in difficult straits. Analyzing what he saw as the formal relationships underlying all art, linking the old and the new, Barnes applied these principles in a rigorous course of study offered at his Merion foundation. Barnes's own mordant words, culled from the copious printed record, animate the narrative throughout, as do accounts of his associations with notables of the era--Gertrude and Leo Stein, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among them--many of whom he alienated with his appetite for passionate, public feuds. In this rounded portrait, Albert Barnes emerges as a complex, flawed man, who--blessed with an astute eye for greatness--has left us an incomparable treasure, gathered in one place and unforgettable to all who have seen it.

    (Abridged from The Psychology of Art), will be forthcoming.