Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque


Rudolf Wittkower - 1997
    Inventive and skilled, he virtually created the Baroque style. In his religious sculptures he excelled at capturing movement and extreme emotion, uniting figures with their setting to create a single conception of overwhelming intensity that expressed the fervour of Counter-Reformation Rome. Intensity and drama also characterize his portraits and world-famous Roman fountains.

Time


Andy Goldsworthy - 2000
    Goldsworthy, who works with stone, leaves, grass, branches, snow, and other natural materials to create intensely personal artworks, uses time almost as a medium in his art: on a snow-covered Scottish hillside a huge rectangle of compacted snow becomes ever more visible as the surrounding snow melts away; clay walls dry out and crack, revealing previously invisible forms embedded within them; a sculpture of re-formed icicles is made to catch the morning sunshine. In the spectacular color photographs seen here, Goldsworthy celebrates the many ways his art is about, or evokes, the passage of time. Presenting exciting works not seen in previous books, along with revealing excerpts from Goldsworthy's working diaries, this perceptive overview-which includes an extensive illustrated chronology by Terry Friedman-will become the definitive reference on Goldsworthy's art. ANDY GOLDSWORTHY's books include Abrams' Stone, Wood, Arch, Wall, Hand to Earth, and Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature. His work is regularly exhibited in Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. This new book comes in the same year that his first permanent installation in an American museum, at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, has its official unveiling. Goldsworthy lives with his family in Scotland. TERRY FRIEDMAN is an architectural historian who curated the first major retrospective of Goldsworthy's work. "Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work." -Andy Goldsworthy More than 250 photographs in full color, 111/2 x 10"

De Kooning: An American Master


Mark Stevens - 2004
    In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene.Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master.

Portraits: John Berger on Artists


John Berger - 2015
    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.

Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image


Toby Lester - 2011
    Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the grandeur of art, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit, the drawing turns up just about everywhere: in books, on coffee cups, on corporate logos, even on spacecraft. It has, in short, become the world’s most famous cultural icon—and yet almost nobody knows about the epic intellectual journeys that led to its creation. In this modest drawing that would one day paper the world, da Vinci attempted nothing less than to calibrate the harmonies of the universe and understand the central role man played in the cosmos.Journalist and storyteller Toby Lester brings Vitruvian Man to life, resurrecting the ghost of an unknown Leonardo. Populated by a colorful cast of characters, including Brunelleschi of the famous Dome, Da Vinci’s Ghost opens up a surprising window onto the artist and philosopher himself and the tumultuous intellectual and cultural transformations he bridged. With sparkling prose and a rich variety of original illustrations, Lester captures the brief but momentous time in the history of western thought when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, art and science and philosophy converged as one, and all seemed to hold out the promise that a single human mind, if properly harnessed, could grasp the nature of everything.

Chagall


Jacob Baal-Teshuva - 1995
    Page after page of rich reproductions capture his use of intense, glowing colors and the unique world he created full of magic, enchantment and fantasy.

Tell Them I Said No


Martin Herbert - 2017
    A large part of the artist’s role in today’s professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York. Martin Herbert is a writer and critic living in Berlin. He is associate editor of ArtReview and writes for international art journals. Previous books include The Uncertainty Principle (2014) and Mark Wallinger (2011).Design by Fraser Muggeridge studio

Gustav Klimt, 1862–1918: The World in Female Form


Gottfried Fliedl - 1990
    Gustav Klimt's art is thoroughly fin de siècle.It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper-middle-class society — a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt (1862-1918) and his contemporaries found — or hoped to find — in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death, and death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. Particularly his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world "in female form." Author Gottfried Fliedlalso discusses the Secession movement and Klimt's role within this important group of artists.

Drawing Cutting Edge Comics


Christopher Hart - 2001
    The heroes are grittier. The women are sexier. The pages are designed for maximum impact.Heroes have been turned into highly cool antiheroes, such as the famous characters Spawn and War Blade. Cutting-edge comics venture beyond the traditional boundaries to extreme anatomy, extreme costuming, extreme special effects, and extreme methods of storytelling.Drawing Cutting Edge Comics is the first-ever guide that shows readers, step by step, how to draw the radical characters and cutting-edge techniques that are the gold standard for designing extreme comics.Dozens of fantastic, how-to illustrations demonstrate the basics as well as how to create such intense coloring techniques as knockouts and glows. Plus, several leading cutting-edge artists describe how they spin original character designs, many created exclusively for this book.

Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World


Simon Garfield - 2000
    In a "witty, erudite, and entertaining" (Esquire) style, Simon Garfield explains how the experimental mishap that produced an odd shade of purple revolutionized fashion, as well as industrial applications of chemistry research. Occasionally honored in certain colleges and chemistry clubs, Perkin until now has been a forgotten man.

Francis Bacon in Your Blood


Michael Peppiatt - 2015
    Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death thirty years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted. The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos Bacon created around him Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.

Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern


Francine Prose - 2015
    In her time, there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the acknowledged center of the postwar New York art scene, and her museum in Venice, Italy, remains one of the world’s great collections of modern art. Yet as renowned as she was for the art and artists she so tirelessly championed, Guggenheim was equally famous for her unconventional personal life, and for her ironic, playful desire to shock.   Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a singular reading of Guggenheim’s life that will enthrall enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries, to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs, and Prose delivers a colorful portrait of a defiantly uncompromising woman who maintained a powerful upper hand in a male-dominated world. Prose also explores the ways in which Guggenheim’s image was filtered through the lens of insidious antisemitism.

Takashi Murakami


Takashi Murakami - 2007
    Drawing from street culture, high art, and traditional Japanese painting, Murakami takes the contemporary art trend of mixing high and low to an unprecedented level (critics call him the new Warhol), producing original paintings and sculptures as well as mass-produced consumer objects such as toys, books, and most famously, a line of handbags for Louis Vuitton. A committed supporter and spokesperson for Japanese artists and a powerful commentator on postwar culture and society, Murakami has organized influential exhibitions of Japanese art as well as a biannual art fair in Tokyo. Murakami has positioned himself as a new type of artist for the twenty-first century: a hybrid of creator, entrepreneur, and cultural ambassador.In conjunction with the first major retrospective of his work, Murakami traces Murakami’s global impact socially, culturally, and art historically. Essays focus on Murakami’s early works, which were based on a social critique of Japan’s rampant consumerism; the development of his characters; his work with anime, fantasy; otaku culture; and his engagement with global pop culture. Representing output from original works of art to mass-produced multiples, the catalogue also considers the implications of Murakami’s working methods within the tradition of the Western avant-garde.

Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World


Miles J. Unger - 2018
    It was in this glittering capital of the international art world that, after suffering years of poverty and neglect, he emerged as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Fueled by opium and alcohol, inspired by raucous late-night conversations at the Lapin Agile cabaret, Picasso and his friends resolved to shake up the world. For most of these years Picasso lived and worked in a squalid tenement known as the Bateau Lavoir, in the heart of picturesque Montmartre. Here he met his first true love, Fernande Olivier, a muse whom he would transform in his art from Symbolist goddess to Cubist monster. These were years of struggle, often of desperation, but Picasso later looked back on them as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came slowly: first in the avant-garde circles in which he traveled, and later among a small group of daring collectors, including the Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1906, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the groundbreaking painting of Paul Cézanne and the startling inventiveness of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured and defined the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad. Only his colleague George Braque understood what Picasso was trying to do. Over the next few years they teamed up to create Cubism, the most revolutionary and influential movement in twentieth-century art. This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is filled with heartbreak and triumph, despair and delirium, all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.

Dan Eldon: The Art of Life


Jennifer New - 2001
    He left a lifetime of adventures that continue to inspire. Raised in Kenya, he took numerous expeditions across Africa that helped him to understand and love the continent. Through his safaris and benevolent crusades--and with interludes of study and work in the US and London, and trips around the world--he crafted a philosophy of curiosity, creativity, adventure, and charity. Intensely visual, like the life it describes, Dan Eldon: The Art of Life is more than a biography. It is an exploration of one man's will to take in everything life has to offer; an example of a life lived for art, and art experienced as lif