They have become cultural icons, standing not only for different kinds of art but also for different ways of living. Matisse, known for his restraint and intense sense of privacy, for his decorum and discretion, created an art that transcended daily life and conveyed a sensuality that inhabited an abstract and ethereal realm of being. In contrast, Picasso became the exemplar of intense emotionality, of theatricality, of art as a kind of autobiographical confession that was often charged with violence and explosive eroticism. In Matisse and Picasso , Jack Flam explores the compelling, competitive, parallel lives of these two artists and their very different attitudes toward the idea of artistic greatness, toward the women they loved, and ultimately toward their confrontations with death.

    It reproduces extensive extracts from his correspondence and is illustrated with his paintings, drawings and facsimile letters. Van Gogh's letters are a testimony to his struggle to survive and work. Here, the combination of letters and illustrations, concentrating on the period when he painted his greatest works, aims to provide an insight into his daily life in Arles and St-Remy, his spiritual torment and the process of artistic creation itself. The author is an "Observer" journalist specializing in the arts, and has published four previous books, including "Young Vincent: The Story of Van Gogh's Years in England".

    The Art of Urban Sketching is both a comprehensive guide and a showcase of location drawings by artists around the world who draw the cities where they live and travel.

    The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it as their favorite color. In this fascinating history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearance in prehistoric art to its international ubiquity today.Any history of color is, above all, a social history. Pastoureau investigates how the ever-changing role of blue in society has been reflected in manuscripts, stained glass, heraldry, clothing, paintings, and popular culture. Beginning with the almost total absence of blue from ancient Western art and language, the story moves to medieval Europe. As people began to associate blue with the Virgin Mary, the color became a powerful element in church decoration and symbolism. Blue gained new favor as a royal color in the twelfth century and became a formidable political and military force during the French Revolution. As blue triumphed in the modern era, new shades were created and blue became the color of romance and the blues. Finally, Pastoureau follows blue into contemporary times, when military clothing gave way to the everyday uniform of blue jeans and blue became the universal and unifying color of the Earth as seen from space.Beautifully illustrated, Blue tells the intriguing story of our favorite color and the cultures that have hated it, loved it, and made it essential to some of our greatest works of art.

     In The Essence of Watercolour Hazel shows how wonderfully versatile and beguiling the medium of watercolour is and how to get the most out of it. Hazel stresses how important it is to understand the characteristics of the medium in order to exploit it to the full.  She encourages the reader to explore the properties of watercolour and to be unafraid of strength of colour and brushstroke.Hazel shows through demonstration and projects that tone is king in watercolour and illustrates how to paint light with the use of shade. Armed with this understanding she demonstrates that watercolour is not such an unforgiving medium after all: accidents and mistakes can be disguised, overridden and corrected.The Essence of Watercolour is a culmination of many years of Hazel's teaching and demonstrating, in which she offers inspirational insights into the secrets of watercolour painting and encourages artists to take their art to the next level.

    These studios, a return to classical art training, are based on the nineteenth-century model of teaching artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. Students begin by copying masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. Classical Drawing Atelier is an atelier in a book—and the master is Juliette Aristides, a classically trained artist. On every page, Aristides uses the works of works of Old Masters and today’s most respected realist artists to demonstrate and teach the principles of realist drawing and painting, taking students step by step through the learning curve yet allowing them to work at their own pace. Unique and inspiring, Classical Drawing Atelier is a serious art course for serious art students.

    Wissman offers astute and illuminating insights into the art, career, and family life of this great artist--whose beautiful paintings of a better, purer time an place continue to find favor with contemporary viewers. Over fifty full-color reproductions and several black-and-white illustrations exemplify Bouguereau's precision in creating timeless works of sensual, emotional, and intellectual appeal.

    Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last.Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers--magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty--an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite. But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam--and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family--have been erased from memory until now.It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.From the Hardcover edition.

    Altered forms and transfigured ideas. Power and vulnerability. Parallel universes of the heart and mind. Space and time. In a few brief years, the stunning visual oeuvre of Tara McPherson has grown and evolved at thrilling speed. Expanding beyond the limits of rock poster art into the worlds of commercial illustration and fine art, her paintings, drawings, toys, sculptures, and installations have pushed her influence and authority across the breadth of creative expression and helped redefine the boundaries of pop surrealism. Lost Constellations: The Art of Tara McPherson Volume 2 is the compelling road map to the artist's most recent and ambitious journeys in paint, pencil, and vinyl.

    Though his name may be familiar to all of us, his work has been habitually detested and forced into obscurity. Not only was his theatrical realism unfashionable in his time, but his sacrilegious subject matter and use of lower class models were violently scorned. Michelangelo Mirisi de Caravaggio lived a life riddled with crime and scandal, producing a body of work that wouldn't be appreciated until centuries after his mysterious death. Though his body was never found, he is assumed to have been murdered by ruffians on a beach south of Rome-a fate strangely similar to that of controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini who was, like Caravaggio, a homosexual.Caravaggio's reputation was decidedly poor during his lifetime; sometimes rich, sometimes penniless, when he wasn't in prison he was running away from the police or his enemies. Perhaps no other painter has suffered such injustice: his works were often attributed to more respected painters while he was given the credit for just about anything vulgar painted in the chiaroscuro style. Caravaggio's great work had the misfortune of enduring centuries of disrepute. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that he was rediscovered and, quite posthumously, deemed a great master.

    For more than forty years, this book has been recognized as the most thorough reference work on art anatomy in the world. Now, it recommends itself even more strongly to the serious artist as an important study aid. Among its features are: (1) Clear, systematic presentation, taking the student step by step from the simpler skeletal drawings at the beginning to the more complicated body-in-action sketches at the end. (2) The juxtaposition of anatomical drawings and life photographs, making it easy to compare the inner structure of the body with its outer form. (3) Cross-section drawings that give the artist a thorough understanding of the relation of the muscles to each other, to the bone structure, and to the internal organs of the body. (4) Anatomical action drawings that reveal the interplay of muscles and skeleton in different positions. (5) The comparative proportions of the male, female, child, and adolescent. (6) A supplementary text on important features of each anatomical position, including the action of the muscles and their origin. "I recommend Fritz Schider's Atlas of Anatomy for Artists to those who wish to increase their understanding of the human figure." — Robert Beverly Hale, Lecturer on Anatomy, Art Students League of New York. Adopted by Pratt Institute, Cleveland School of Art, Art Students League of New York, and others.

    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

    Born in 1940 in Chur Switzerland, he studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. By 1964 he was producing his first artworks, mostly ink drawings and oils, leading to his first solo exhibition in 1966, followed by the world-wide distribution of his first published posters in 1969. Shortly after, he discovered the airbrush and his own signature freehand style, and created his most well known works, the Biomechanical dreamscapes which formed the cornerstone of his fame. Giger's first book, Necronomicon, published in 1977, servers as the visual inspiration for director Ridley Scott's blockbuster movie Alien, Giger's first film assignment, earning him the 1980 Oscar for "Best Achievement in Visual Effects," for his designs of the film's title character and otherworldly environment. Giger's album covers for Debbie Harry and the band ELP were voted among the 100 best in music history in a survey of rock journalists. Throughout his career, Giger also worked in sculpture and, in 1992, created his first total environment, the Giger Bar in Chur. The Museum H.R. Giger in Chateau Saint-Germain was opened in Gruyeres in 1998. Today, Giger continues to live and work in Zurich with his companion in life Carmen, where his current projects include the realization of his museum bar in Gruyeres.

    Celebrated by some for his naturalism and his revolutionary pictorial inventions, he was considered by others to have destroyed painting. Few other artists have provoked such controversy and so many contradictory interpretations right up to modern times.  On the heels of Caravaggio year 2010, this work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre, with a catalogue raisonné of his works. Five introductory chapters analyze his artistic career from his training in Lombard Milan and his triumphal rise in papal Rome, up to his dramatic final years in Naples, Malta, and Sicily. The spotlight thereby falls upon the radical nature and innovative force of Caravaggio’s art and its influence in all of Europe.   Our understanding of Caravaggio’s work has been substantially broadened in recent decades by major exhibitions, restoration campaigns, new attributions and archival discoveries. The new catalogue raisonné offers a detailed overview of the artist’s entire oeuvre based on the latest research. Every painting is reproduced in large-scale format, with spectacular details that offer dramatic close-ups and set new standards in print quality. A new photographic campaign has been undertaken, enabling the smallest details to be reproduced on a large scale for the first time.They reveal all the more clearly Caravaggio’s virtuosity and his enormous ability to capture the viewer’s attention and to build a communicative bridge between the worlds of picture and viewer. Sequences of spectacular details grouped by subject allow us to experience Caravaggio’s ingenious rhetoric of looks and gestures and their theatrical staging in paint.

    You’ll discover how to draw all types of dragons using nothing but a pencil. Drawing Dragons shows how to bring to life fierce warriors and bearded ancients as well as baby hatchlings and protective mothers. It also features a special section on adding claws, scales, horns, jewels and other unique details to your dragons.Learn to draw:• Ferocious, attacking dragons•Graceful sea dragons•Fire-breathing flying dragons•Wise, thoughtful dragons