In The Book of Jones, Steadman captures the special grace of cats and the strange power that they possess to enchant us. Line art throughout.

    . . . [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.

    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

    Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

    1922) has built up a reputation as one of the most distinctive contemporary figurative artists. Freud's startling and disconcerting portraits and nudes have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget. This stunning book -- which accompanies a major retrospective showing at Tate Britain in London, Fundacio"la Caixa" in Barcelona, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles -- brings together key works from Freud's entire career, including over 140 paintings, drawings, and etchings, some new, and many never before exhibited.Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs from the artist's personal archives, this volume contains a detailed analysis of Freud's work by curator William Feaver along with a contribution from the artist's friend, painter Frank Auerbach. Unprecedented in scope and providing an exciting opportunity to view the exceptionally productive period of the last 20 years in the context of earlier decades, this book celebrates the lifetime achievements of a powerful artist, one of the greatest realist painters of our time.

    From the controversy of his early work to the political storm surrounding the arrival of the exhibition Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, his work has redefined international expectations of modern art. Even people with only a passing knowledge of art are familiar with his installations of a shark, cows, and sheep pickled in formaldehyde. "On the Way to Work" is an extremely candid autobiography of Hirst presented in a series of conversations. He expounds in unpredictable and scabrously funny ways on everything from art to celebrity to sex, and these frank and intimate conversations are punctuated with art from all phases of his career chosen by Hirst himself. This book is a window into Hirst's world: growing up in working class northern England, roughhousing in pubs, obsessing about life and death, questioning art world fame, and believing that art and beauty make a difference in the modern world. In addition to the attention he generates, this dynamic artist also garners critical acclaim-he is the winner of the Turner Prize and, ever since the groundbreaking exhibition that he organized as a fledgling artist in the early nineties, he is considered the unofficial leader of the Young British Artists movement. Hirst's appeal goes beyond the world of art; he's an influential figure to architects, designers, and the fashion crowd as well. Engaging, well-illustrated, and a real event in the art world, "On the Way to Work," like its subject, will generate controversy and acclaim.

    The images were taken when Banksy joined Bristol's radical football team The Easton Cowboys on a tour of Mexico to play football against the Zapatista freedom fighters. The new edition also contains sections on the Banksy vs Bristol Museum show, Exit Through The Gift Shop, The Tesco Value Petrol Bomb, an interview with John Nation and more. The book is a celebration of Banksy's street art in his home city of Bristol and places him in the context of 3D, John Nation from the Barton Hill Youth Club, Inkie, Nick Walker and the other artists and musicians who were instrumental in linking Bristol to the original New York hip-hop scene. It is the most revealing account of Banksy's formative years and contains more than one hundred images of his Bristol art, as well as pictures of Banksy at work, many of which have never been published before. Steve Wright, traces Banksy's roots back to the rave culture of the Nineties and draws a rounded picture of an artist who is most famous for being anonymous.

    Manifestoes of Surrealism is a book by André Breton, describing the aims, meaning, and political position of the Surrealist movement.The translators of this edition were finalists of the 1970 National Book Awards in the category of translation.

    In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities. As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.

    He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. This is Tom Wolfe "at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent" (San Francisco Chronicle).

    This medical thriller will stay with you long past the final chapter." -Best ThrillersJackson Cooper, MD will never forget that first day, its stunning conclusion forever etched in his mind. His year as a surgical intern is a story of medical suspense, tragedy, and occasional terror, as a young physician deals with the world of surgery.The surgeon's knot is a surgical tie used in the operating room which the intern practices ceaselessly. The knot refers, as well, to the tangled world of the protagonist.Jackson's life soon becomes burned-out, resulting from events beyond his control as well as destructive behavior. Physicians, patients, and cases ranging from humorous to tragic are present.A Surgeon's Knot is a story of the dignity of medicine, the overwhelming duty to man, failure and recovery.

    Sister Marie's latest novitiate is a young woman named Noele whose fiancé, René, fled to Paris only to find it overrun by the Nazis. Now back in sleepy Brassac, both René and Noele realize that decisions of love and liberation can never, truly, be avoided. Sister Marie is not unsympathetic to the emotions with which Noele battles; having gone through a similar struggle when she was young. The offbeat nuns must wrestle with how far to expand the margins of their vows, in hopes of saving their town and themselves. A Habit of Resistance is a humorous, but thought-provoking story of personal denial and redemption.

    In Music by Philip Glass, he tells of his musical struggle and growth, from the Juilliard School, through his studies in Paris with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger (whose other students included Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson) and working with Ravi Shankar to 'translate' his scores for Western musicians, to his immersion in the avant-garde theater of Mabou Mines, LaMama, and Robert Wilson.

    Find your favourite pop-culture character in this collection of silhouettes from well-known movie, television, comics and video game characters!

    In this anthology of art-historical writings from the Renaissance to the present day, key texts have been chosen in which the authors reflect on the nature of their subject and on their own methods of inquiry. Included are texts by Vasari, Winckelmann, Burckhardt, Wolfflin, Panofsky, Gombrich and Pollock, among others. The introduction gives a lucid and readable summary of art-historical methods, and each of the texts is accompanied by a commentary that places it in context and discusses the issues it raises. Also provided is a critical glossary of terms and a select bibliography.