Twombly carefully managed his own image, writing almost nothing about his life and work, and giving only a handful of interviews. Through years of scholarship and archival research, first-person interviews, and a sensitive eye to Twombly's art, Joshua Rivkin--who received a Fulbright grant to pursue this story--separates the myth from the reality to bring to life a more complicated and fascinating Twombly than we've ever known.

    . . . [and] the iconoclastic charm of the artist keeps the pages turning ." -The Washington Post "A definitive life of Francis Bacon. . . . Stevens and Swan are vivid scene setters. . . . Francis Bacon does justice to the contradictions of both the man and the art." -The Boston Globe A decade in the making: the first comprehensive look at the life and art of Francis Bacon, one of the iconic painters of the twentieth century--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master. Francis Bacon created an indelible image of mankind in modern times, and played an outsized role in both twentieth century art and life--from his public emergence with his legendary Triptych 1944 (its images so unrelievedly awful that people fled the gallery), to his death in Madrid in 1992.Bacon was a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual at a time when many others remained closeted, and his exploits were as unforgettable as his images. He moved among the worlds of London's Soho and East End, the literary salons of London and Paris, and the homosexual life of Tangier. Through hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research, the authors probe Bacon's childhood in Ireland (he earned his father's lasting disdain because his asthma prevented him from hunting); his increasingly open homosexuality; his early design career--never before explored in detail; the formation of his vision; his early failure as an artist; his uneasy relationship with American abstract art; and his improbable late emergence onto the international stage as one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In all, Francis Bacon: Revelations gives us a more complete and nuanced--and more international--portrait than ever before of this singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his equally eruptive, extraordinary art. Bacon was not just an influential artist, he helped remake the twentieth-century figure.

    This XXL-format comprehensive survey is the most complete book ever made on the subject of this Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and all-around genius. With huge, full-bleed details of Leonardo's masterworks, this highly original publication allows the reader to inspect the subtlest facets of his brushstrokes. * Part I explores Leonardo's life and work in ten chapters. All of his paintings are interpreted in depth, with The Annunciation and The Last Supper featured on large double-spreads. * Part II comprises a catalogue raisonn? of Leonardo's paintings, which covers all of his surviving and lost painted works and includes texts describing their states of preservation. * Part III contains an extensive catalogue of his drawings (numbering in the thousands, they cannot all be reproduced in one book); 663 are presented, arranged by category (architecture, technical, anatomical, figures, proportion, cartography, etc). This sumptuous TASCHEN offering is the most thorough and beautifully produced Leonardo book ever published, and this special edition offers it for a third of the usual price.

    Through the lens of esteemed writers and critics such as Carlo McCormick, Steven Heller and Roger Gastman, Fairey's work is seen for all its depth and placed in context as art, design, social experiment and "getting over". This massive book pulls no punches and all areas of the enigmatic artist's work, travels and travails are illuminated; from exhibitions, posters, flyers, silkscreens and stickers to high altitude pursuits, citations and police beatings, it's all documented in a museum quality layout and binding. The evidence is in, and it's clear that Shepard Fairey is not one to rest on his laurels, the work must go on. For both long time fans wanting the complete collection and those just curious to know what this OBEY business is all about Supply and Demand is the answer.

    From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.

    Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full–color paintings, as well as dozens of black–and–white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little–known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self–Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.About the Author:Hayden Herrera is an art historian. She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews for such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, Connoisseur, and the New York Times, among others. Her books include Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo; Mary Frank; and Matisse: A Portrait. She is working on a critical biography of Arshile Gorky. She lives in New York City.

    What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief-systems of their age; religious, political and aesthetic.

    From rural Japan to international icon – Yayoi Kusama has spent her remarkable life immersed in her art.Follow her incredible journey in this vivid graphic biography which details her bold departure from Japan as a young artist, her embrace of the buzzing New York art scene in the 1960s, and her eventual return home and rise to twenty-first century super-fame.

    Quickstep, accompanied by his dog Foxtrot, is looking for the future. On the way, they meet up with Coppernickel and his dog Tungsten. Coppernickel says there’s no need to look for the future, as it will arrive anyway. Mr. Quickstep disagrees, for the future he’s after hasn't even been thought of yet. Left behind, Coppernickel worries that he will miss out if he doesn’t follow Mr. Quickstep, so he sets off with Tungsten. Naturally, Coppernickel and Mr. Quickstep bump into each other again, which allows Mr.Quickstep to fling open the door to the future by showing Coppernickel his last, most modern work. What stands out here is how Mr. Quickstep's attempt to find an abstract essence in the very stuff of reality is woven right into the illustrations of this graphically distinguished work, giving children the sense that the future is theirs to create as they see it. Dreams can become reality and in the process we too will be transformed.Wouter van Reek went to art school, which was too easy, so he changed to mathematics, which was too hard, so he changed back to art. After art school, he created an animated cartoon series for TV, introducing Keepvogel (Coppernickel) and Tungsten, a super bird/dog team. Wouter has created numerous animations and books about these famous and beloved Dutch characters.

    Originating in their modern printed form in 16th-century Germany, where books were highly valuable and treasured, bookplates became an art form practiced by artists across Europe and beyond. This book traces the fascinating evolution of bookplate design over time and across national boundaries, showcasing 100 key examples of ex libris art.In the early 1500s, Albrecht Dürer and other German engravers and printmakers began to create highly decorative bookplates, often featuring armorial devices and coats of arms for wealthy individuals and institutions. As the fashion for ornamental bookplates spread, distinctive national styles evolved. Nearly every conceivable design element—from cupids to scientific instruments, portraits, and landscapes—served to decorate personal bookplates. This volume explores the various sources of ex libris inspiration, including designs by C. R. Ashbee, Walter Crane, Aubrey Beardsley, Eric Gill, and Rudyard Kipling, as seen in the books of Frederic Leighton, Calvin Coolidge, and many others. Book lovers and art enthusiasts alike will delight in this treasury of bookplate art and lore.

    Thompson collaborator Ralph Steadman delivers a heaping helping of anti-American vitriol with trademarked bombast, based on his travels throughout the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

    Focusing on a popular art medium that has been around for over 50 years, The New Acrylics illustrates how artists can create lush textures, color, and luster with the modern acrylics readily available in any art supply store. These are nontoxic, environmentally sound, and exist in the most dazzling array of chemical formats—from the most fluid to the highly viscous. Not only do artists paint with acrylics these days, they can create rich metallic effects, or even 3-dimensional sculptures. Traditional technique based books on acrylics cover traditional methods of painting. However, The New Acrylics is geared toward more nonconventional ways in which to manipulate modern-day acrylics, and demonstrates new applications such as glazing, textured effects, soft sculpture effects, or staining, thus reinventing the old way of handling acrylics, and revealing a fabulous new artistic medium. The underlying theme of this dazzling and sophisticated book is to encourage artists to interpret and handle acrylic paints in a vibrant, fresh, and above all, individualistic style.

    This 112-page collection will showcase Cho's past and present illustrations and you will see why he's considered one of the top modern masters of the female form.

    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.

    Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices. Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history. The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day. Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller, filled with unforgettable characters and told at a breakneck pace. But this is most certainly not fiction; Provenance is the meticulously researched and captivating account of one of the greatest cons in the history of art forgery.