Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives Of The Pre Raphaelites


Franny Moyle - 2009
    - Times Online, 1/30/09

Fashion Photography 101


Lara Jade - 2012
    Lara shares her experience of fashion photography in the digital age, including dedicated sections on retouching, genres of fashion photography, and making the best use of social media. Whether you're taking your first-ever shot, working with a professional model for the first time, or pitching to new clients, here is everything you need to produce moody, magical images that leap from the page straight into the viewer's imagination.

Letters from Paris


Juliet Blackwell - 2016
    But these days she feels something lacking. Abruptly leaving her lucrative job in Chicago, Claire returns home to care for her ailing grandmother. There, she unearths a beautiful sculpture that her great-grandfather sent home from Paris after World War II.At her grandmother’s urging, Claire travels to Paris to track down the centuries old mask-making atelier where the sculpture, known only as “L’inconnue”—or the Unknown Woman—was created. With the help of a passionate sculptor, Claire discovers a cache of letters that offer insight into the life of the Belle Epoque woman immortalized in the work of art.As Claire uncovers the unknown woman’s tragic fate, she begins to discover secrets—and a new love—of her own.

Life with Picasso


Françoise Gilot - 1964
    During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. Life with Picasso, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti, among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental (and even abusive) genius that was Picasso. As one of the few intimate witnesses to Picasso as a human being and as an artist, her account of him is invaluable for assessing him on both counts.

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.

Design Thinking Workshop: The 12 Indispensable Elements for a Design Thinking Workshop


Pauline Tonhauser - 2016
    In this e-book you will learn what exactly is needed to run a successful Design Thinking Workshop which is fun and at the same time generates great results. In this e-book Pauline Tonhauser, founder of designthinkingcoach.de, shares her best practices.

Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and His Times


William E. Wallace - 1998
    In this vividly written biography, William E. Wallace offers a substantially new view of the artist. Not only a supremely gifted sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo was also an aristocrat who firmly believed in the ancient and noble origins of his family. The belief in his patrician status fueled his lifelong ambition to improve his family's financial situation and to raise the social standing of artists. Michelangelo's ambitions are evident in his writing, dress, and comportment, as well as in his ability to befriend, influence, and occasionally say "no" to popes, kings, and princes. Written from the words of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, this biography not only tells his own stories but also brings to life the culture and society of Renaissance Florence and Rome. Not since Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy has there been such a compelling and human portrayal of this remarkable yet credible human individual.Subscribe to William Wallace's podcast on individual works of the master! Click here!Episodes every week, right from this bookmark or your feed reader.

Jasper Johns


Michael Crichton - 1977
    Since it first appeared in 1977, Michael Crichton's Jasper Johns has been considered the preeminent study of one of America's foremost living artists. Abrams is proud now to publish this completely revised, expanded, and updated version of a modern classic. Jasper Johns has often been called an "artist's artist." In his use of found objects and commonplace imagery, he creates tantalizing, intellectually demanding works of unparalleled originality and uncommon beauty. His new work, with its puns, optical illusions, and embedded images ranging from George Ohr pots to the Isenheim Altarpiece to Picasso etchings, has attracted an unprecedented level of intense critical attention. Here Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Rising Sun, among other bestsellers, brings to bear his own extraordinary gifts, particularly his analytic skill and his superior abilities as narrator and storyteller. Crichton, who has known Johns and collected his work for more than twenty years, offers a dazzling succession of intimate glimpses of Johns' potent and seemingly contradictory aspects, many of them highlighted by interviews with the artist, his dealers, and distinguished contemporary critics. He also conducts a powerful, sensitive, and wide reaching critique of Johns' work - and in so doing offers an intriguing investigation into the very nature of the artistic response. Accompanying Crichton's text are 186 black-and-white illustrations, including works by Johns, photographs of him, and comparative examples. Then comes a spectacular display of 231 paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings by Jasper Johns, ranging from his earliest pieces to his most recent works, some forty years later. Of these, 128 are reproduced in duotone and 103 in full color, including six magnificent foldout pages - t

Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse


Stanley Meisler - 2015
    Art critics gave them the name "the School of Paris" to set them apart from the French-born (and less talented) young artists of the period. Modigliani and Chagall eventually attained enormous worldwide popularity, but in those earlier days most School of Paris painters looked on Soutine as their most talented contemporary. Willem de Kooning proclaimed Soutine his favorite painter, and Jackson Pollack hailed him as a major influence.Soutine arrived in Paris while many painters were experimenting with cubism, but he had no time for trends and fashions; like his art, Soutine was intense, demonic, and fierce. After the defeat of France by Hitler's Germany, the East European Jewish immigrants who had made their way to France for sanctuary were no longer safe. In constant fear of the French police and the German Gestapo, plagued by poor health and bouts of depression, Soutine was the epitome of the tortured artist. Rich in period detail, Stanley Meisler's Shocking Paris explores the short, dramatic life of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Gaudi: The Life of a Visionary


J. Castellar-Gassol - 1999
    

Essential Dali (256 Art Books)


Kirsten Bradbury - 1999
    While many of these are among his most famous, others may be less well known, but they are all essential to the development of Dalis artistic philosophy.

History of Art for Young People


H.W. Janson - 1971
    The authors have made revisions to the sections on ancient, medieval and Early Renaissance art and offer a totally new chapter on Postmodernism. Other additions feature the history of music and theatre, explanations of various technical processes, and an expanded glossary. There are also margin notes to cover the definitions and explanations of historical, mythological, religious and cultural figures and terms.

The Muse of Edouard Manet


M. Clifford - 2010
    Emily Porterfield is a conservator of paintings in 21st century Chicago. He made her fall in love with art when she was nine years old and yet Emily was the muse of Edouard's greatest artwork 150 years before she was born. Their story begins with a letter. While x-raying a painting for an upcoming Edouard Manet exhibition at the Art Institute, Emily stumbles upon a hidden letter painted in lead white beneath the layers of oil and varnish. Through the mysterious properties of the letter, Emily is raptured to the past where she becomes the muse who influences Manet's greatest works. As their relationship grows between each new letter and she discovers that his confusing iconography can finally be explained through their story, an underlying plot of murder and art forgery is uncovered in the present. With the exhibition gala approaching, a connection between the murderer and the forgeries reveals itself and Emily is forced to ask how their love can withstand the test of time when only a few letters remain.

A Month in Siena


Hisham Matar - 2019
    In the year in which Matar's life was shattered by the disappearance of his father the work of the great artists of Siena seemed to offer him a sense of hope. Over the years since then, Matar's feelings towards these paintings would deepen and, as he says, 'Siena began to occupy the sort of uneasy reverence the devout might feel towards Mecca or Rome or Jerusalem'.A Month in Siena is the encounter, twenty-five years later, between the writer and the city he had worshipped from afar. It is a dazzling evocation of an extraordinary place and its effect on the writer's life. It is an immersion in painting, a consideration of grief and a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.____________________________________'An exquisite, deeply affecting book' - Evening Standard'This book tells us much about the extraordinary power of art to inspire' Literary Review

Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing


Natalie Goldberg - 1997
    In Living Color, one of the country’s most celebrated writers expounds on her own path to artistic inspiration. Tailored to a new generation of aspiring creatives, this revised and expanded edition pairs 13 of Goldberg’s engaging and encouraging essays with 75 of her paintings and 22 never-before-shared artistic exercises. This timely re-publication will speak straight to the heart of readers everywhere who want to break down creative barriers or explore their creativity anew.