The catalogue for the first major American retrospective of the work of Mark Rothko in 20 years--scheduled to open at the National Gallery in May--this richly illustrated book reproduces 100 of Rothko's paintings, prints, and drawings in full color, and features commentaries by many noted art experts.

    Biss doesn’t just love Beethoven more than other music, he loves it more than most things. It’s the lens through which he understands the world, and has been since he can remember. But in Unquiet Biss reveals the full extent to which Beethoven is also a ruthless lens through which he views himself.Biss provides listeners front and center access to his long overdue confrontation with a painful truth: Living with Beethoven has essentially amounted to severing all meaningful ties with himself. As we learn in rich detail, amidst the treasures Beethoven’s music has gifted Biss also lies searing self-doubt and heaps of crippling anxiety. Biss’s raw self-reflection is delivered through pitch-perfect prose, delving deep into the fascinating paradox that the greatest pleasure in his life is also responsible for imprisoning him. Beethoven’s defining personal characteristic, for example—his unwavering self-conviction and weapons-grade callousness—only served to mock Biss’s own perceived shortcomings and vulnerabilities. This captivating combination of wit and wisdom Biss readily shares is only interrupted by something even more extraordinary—his new interpretations of movements from seven of Beethoven's sonatas, including the Pathetique and Tempest, and his groundbreaking, awe-inducing final sonatas.Unquiet both begins and ends with Jonathan Biss staring down the daunting complexity and infinite majesty of Beethoven's last piano sonatas. But between these two points, the singular pianist has traversed a world of healing. An immeasurable weight has been lifted from him—by him. And we have witnessed its dramatic rise. While his journey is a fantastically unique one, if we listen close, we can hear ours too. An endless battle to confront and quiet our greatest pain so that we can embrace something even greater. Take a moment, and heed the sound.

    Since his death at just 51 from pancreatic cancer, this has been the accepted view of a national hero. But how much do we really know of England’s only World Cup-winning skipper? We all know that Bobby Moore was an extraordinary captain and defender, but alongside his legendary feats on the pitch he knew scandal, death threats, bankruptcy business, and the sack. He divorced after a long affair, was rumored to have friends in the East End underworld, and he loved a drink. The tragedy of his life was to be ignored by soccer in his latter years and to drift into obscurity. After he applied to be England manager, the FA didn’t even bother to send a rejection letter. There was no job in the game and, famously, no knighthood. As well as the undeniable moments of glory, this long overdue, definitive biography won’t shy away from the grit. Tracing his journey from the East End to a pedestal outside Wembley Stadium, it will, for the first time, look at Moore’s life from all sides, through the testimony of teammates, rivals, family, and friends. What was Moore like to play with, to drink with? What was he like as a husband, father, opponent, and captain? A struggling manager and a failed businessman? This book will tell the story of an Essex boy who became the patron saint of English soccer, revealing a lifetime of intrigue, triumph, and tragedy in between.

    On the occasion of the centenary of his birth comes the definitive retrospective of the artist's work from his early years. Dali explores the development of the artist's technique and style, his relationship with the Surrealists, and his exploitation of Freudian ideas, as well as the image Dali created of himself as the mad genius artist. This catalogue will be the major reference work for Dali for decades to come. It includes illustrations of all the works loaned to the exhibition, as well as comparative illustrations and photographs. The volume contains an introductory essay by Dawn Ades, with scholarly research incorporated in a "Dali Dictionary," in the entries on individual works, and in the chronology, which includes a quantity of new material. The guide draws upon the best scholarship available on Dali, including that of Hank Hine, Director of the Salvador Dali Museum, Jennifer Mundy, Senior Curator of the Tate Museum, and Michael Taylor, Acting Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

    The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.

    Setting Realism in its social and historical context, this title discusses the crucial paradox posed by Realist works of art - notably in the revolutionary paintings of Courbet, the works of Manet, Degas and Monet, of the Pre-Raphaelites and other English, American, German and Italian Realists.

    The trove included massive, multi-volume illustrated manuscripts, double-sided nine-foot-long watercolor murals, photo-enlarged tracings, and hundreds of sketches. Depicting a turbulent world, these works are the product of the fertile yet tormented imagination of a secretive Chicago janitor who has since been recognized as one of the supreme self-taught artists of the 20th century.Cataloguing in full color the American Folk Art Museum's recent acquisition of 37 paintings, among other Darger works, this informative yet affordable volume offers a general introduction to a controversial self-taught artist.

    Pieced together, they form a revealing mosaic of the creative mind. It's like viewing an exhibit from the therapist's couch as each entry delves into the mental anguish that afflicts the artist and affects their art.The scope of the artists covered is as varied as their afflictions. Inside, you will find not just the creators of the darkest of dark literature, music, and art. While it does reveal what everyday problem kept Poe's pen to paper and the childhood catastrophe that kept Picasso on edge, it also uncovers surprising secrets of more unexpectedly tormented artists. From Charles Schultz's unrequited love to J.K. Rowling's fear of death, it's amazing the deep-seeded troubles that lie just beneath the surface of our favorite art.As much an appreciation of artistic genius as an accessible study of the creative psyche, Tortured Artists illustrates the fact that inner turmoil fuels the finest work.

    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.

    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.

    Surveys the origins, development, techniques, approaches, principles, motifs, and major paintings of the nineteenth-century British school, relating the painters and their works to their society.

    His talent soon caught the eye of 16th-century rulers, and he moved on to the imperial courts of Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II in Prague, where he created the scenes for his Seasons. In Arcimboldo's allegorical paintings, Spring appears as a young man composed entirely of flowers, Summer as a composition of fruits, Autumn as a head made of grapes, and Winter as a gnarled old man twined with ivy. Arcimboldo remained true to the allegorical principles informing the artistic and philosophical world view of the 16th century. His paintings are not only full of references to ancient classical gods and goddesses, but above all they reflect the courtly cosmos of the art chambers and wonder cabinets in which countless exotic and bizarre objects were housed. With the decline of this allegorical world vision between the Renaissance and Mannerism, Arcimboldo was forgotten- only to be rediscovered by modern artists.

    Rediscover Lara Croft's greatest moments with fascinating coverage of the smash hit Tomb Raider movies, fiction, comics, and collectibles, and be enthralled by the legacy of Tomb Raider across the decades.Packed with exclusive art, photographs, and interviews covering all facets of the Tomb Raider franchise, 20 Years of Tomb Raider is the essential guide to this game's action-packed history and a must-have for every Tomb Raider fan.

    In this remarkable novel, Gioia Diliberto tells Virginie's story, drawing on the sketchy historical facts to re-create Virginie's tempestuous personality and the captivating milieu of nineteenth-century Paris. Born in New Orleans and raised on a lush plantation, Virginie fled to France during the Civil War, where she was absorbed into the fascinating and wealthy world of grand ballrooms, dressmakers' salons, and artists' ateliers. Even before Sargent painted her portrait, Virginie's reputation for promiscuity and showy self-display made her the subject of vicious Paris gossip. Immersing the reader in Belle Epoque Paris, I Am Madame X is a compulsively readable and richly imagined novel illuminating the struggle between Virginie and Sargent over the outcome of a painting that changed their lives and affected the course of art history.

    We need not walk far, because paradise is right around the corner." --Hundertwasser Friedrich Stowasser, born in Vienna in 1928, called himself Friedensreich Hundertwasser Regentag Dunkelbunt. True to the colorful variety of his names, he has pursued many activities as a painter, architect, and ecologist, and as "one who awakens identities." This presentation of Hundertwasser's work in all of its different facets is guided by the artist's own view of himself and his purpose. And, because his work is, by nature, virtually inseparable from his biography, his artistic and political actions, and equally so from the "stories" of his (ostensibly) private life, a vivid portrait of the artist takes shape before the reader's eyes. Excerpts from conversations between the author and the artist lend a sense of immediacy and authenticity to the narration.