Nonetheless, the artist himself remains tantalisingly an enigma. A notoriously difficult man and an inveterate risk-taker in life and art, Rembrandt's aspirations to a grandiose Amsterdam lifestyle in the heyday of his popularity as a painter of portraits and large-scale historical works bankrupted him and he died in relative poverty. His personal effects and his treasured collection of paintings and natural rarities were sold off and dispersed, leaving the historian with a tantalisingly scant body of fragmentary records around which to build a convincing biography. In Rembrandt's Eyes Simon Schama--the leading historical craftsman of our era, with a career-long commitment to Dutch history--succeeds with consummate skill in bringing the heroic painter of such masterpieces as The Night Watch and Portrait of Jan Six vividly to life again. Returning to the bustling Dutch world with which he first made his reputation in his bestselling The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), Schama recreates Rembrandt's life and times with all the verve and panache of a historical novelist, whilst never for an instant losing his scrupulous grip on recorded fact and detail. The telling surviving fragments of archival information about Rembrandt's personal and professional history are embedded skilfully in a richer and denser tapestry of the commercial whirl and political hurly-burly of the 17th-century Low Countries--a divided territory, split between the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the contested powers of the Spanish Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic--with the tentacles of the tale reaching into the most unexpected shadowy corners of European love and war, aspiration and intrigue.Rembrandt's Eyes is, in fact, two biographies for the price of one. From the outset Schama contrasts the life of Rembrandt with that of his older, equally artistically talented, countryman Peter Paul Rubens, whose meteoric rise and sustained success as a society painter forms a revealing contrast with Rembrandt's unhappier relationship with fame and fortune. The comparison is a telling one. Where Rubens furnishes the wealthy and powerful with glorious reflections of and visual foils for their social and political aspirations and glory, Rembrandt can never resist testing the envelope of taste and stylistic acceptability. His challenge to his clients to rise to embrace the shock of his painterly experiments with technique, texture and composition, ultimately produced his downfall. The Amsterdam Town Council took down his The Oath-swearing of Claudius Civilis, rolled it up and returned his masterpiece to him, to be cut-down in an attempt to sell it to a suitable buyer. This is a gorgeous book to own, too. Rembrandt's Eyes is printed on heavy, high-gloss paper, lavishly illustrated throughout in full colour, with double-page colour spreads of the most memorable of Rembrandt's works, which take one's breath away as one turns the page. But above all, this is narrative history at its very best, a page-turner and an adventure story, which will make the reader laugh and cry by turns, in the time-honoured tradition of masterly writing. --Lisa Jardine

    Like the music on the discs, they address such issues as love, life, death, fashion, and rebellion. For music fans the covers are the expression of a period, of a particular time in their lives. Many are works of art and have become as famous as the music they stand for such as Andy Warhol's covers, for example, including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground. This special edition of Record Covers presents a selection of the best 60s to 90s rock album covers from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and ex-record publicity executive Michael Ochs's enormous private collection. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an under-appreciated art form.This edition is in English, French and German.

    "Like Hanslick, Professor Payzant is both musician and philosopher; and he has brought the knowledge and insights of both disciplines to this large undertaking." --Gordon Epperson, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

    Together these two volumes form the most comprehensive books available on Dylan's words. Clinton Heylin is the world's leading Dylan biographer and expert, and he has arranged the songs in a continually surprising chronology of when they were actually written rather than when they appeared on albums. Using newly discovered manuscripts, anecdotal evidence, and a seemingly limitless knowledge of every Bob Dylan live performance, Heylin reveals hundreds of facts about the songs. Here we learn about Dylan's contributions to the Traveling Wilburys, the women who inspired "Blood on the Tracks "and "Desire," " "the sources Dylan "plagiarized" for "Love and Theft "and "Modern Times," " "why he left "Blind Willie McTell" off of "Infidels "and "Series of Dreams" off of "Oh Mercy," " "what broke the long dry spell he had in the 1990s, and much more. This is an essential purchase for every true Bob Dylan fan.

    The highly readable texts and over 800 beautiful full-color images come together in a unique way to convey hidden dimensions of meaning. Each of the ca. 350 essays examines a given symbol’s psychic background, and how it evokes psychic processes and dynamics. Etymological roots, the play of opposites, paradox and shadow, the ways in which diverse cultures have engaged a symbolic image—all these factors are taken into consideration.Authored by writers from the fields of psychology, religion, art, literature, and comparative myth, the essays flow into each other in ways that mirror the psyche’s unexpected convergences. There are no pat definitions of the kind that tend to collapse a symbol; a still vital symbol remains partially unknown, compels our attention and unfolds in new meanings and manifestations over time. Rather than merely categorize, The Book of Symbols illuminates how to move from the visual experience of a symbolic image in art, religion, life, or dreams to directly experiencing its personal and psychological resonance.The Book of Symbols sets new standards for thoughtful exploration of symbols and their meanings, and will appeal to a wide range of readers: artists, designers, dreamers and dream interpreters, psychotherapists, self-helpers, gamers, comic book readers, religious and spiritual searchers, writers, students, and anyone curious about the power of archetypal images.

    The increasing awareness of the jacket’s potential to serve as a marketing tool across various areas of the publishing world—from literary fiction to academic titles, and children’s books—meant a proliferation of illustrative treatments. The book jackets reproduced here reflect the changing visual styles and motifs of the passing century, beginning with the Art Deco period and continuing through Modernism, the playful Thirties, the pre- and postwar Neo-Romantics, the new consumerism and realist subject matter of the Fifties, and the Pop Art of the Sixties.Featuring talent from the US and UK, Cover Up: The Illustrated Book Jacket explores the pictorial dust jacket through a selection of more than 300 key works and artists that influenced the course of book jacket design.

    In the 1st edition, published in 1962, he spoke to that perennial reader he gently called "the troubled layman." His opening paragraph revealed his sympathy: "Why is this supposed to be art?" he quoted rhetorically. "How often have we heard this question asked--or asked it ourselves, perhaps--in front of one of the strange, disquieting works that we are likely to find nowadays in the museum or art exhibition?" Keeping that curious, questioning perspective in mind, he wrote a history of art from cave painting to Picasso that was singularly welcoming, illuminating & exciting. Sojourning thru this book, a reader is offered every amenity for a comfortable trip. Because he never assumes knowledge on the part of the reader, a recent immigrant from Mars could comprehend Western art from this text. The only assumption the Jansons have made is that with a little guidance everyone can come to understand the artifacts that centuries of architecture, sculpture, design & painting have deposited in our paths. Countless readers have proven the Jansons right & found their lives enriched in the process.

    From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.

    Features commentary, color stills, sketches, storyboards, and illustrations used to envision the rich fantasy world of the film. Also includes a complete English-language script.

    Beatles.

    Logolounge features the work of superstar artists and firms such as Michael Vanderbyl and Sibley Peteet Design and includes both new campaigns and never-before-seen projects. With 2,000 logos from a variety of sources, this visually compelling volume will become the go-to resource for inspiration from the best in the field.

    Even if you're starting out in a scary basement or in the tiny bathroom in your cramped apartment with a $40 budget, Print Liberation will show you everything you need to know to get started. And if you're already in a rented studio with a few bucks to spend, this book can help you turn screen printing into your personal art or business.Seriously, this is a completely comprehensive how-to guide. You'll start by learning the history of the craft accompanied by graphic illustrations. Then, step-by-step photographs walk you through the ins and outs of all the main screen-printing techniques, including printing on dimensional surfaces, such as walls and goats (although the latter is not recommended). You'll even find advice about how to turn screen printing into a money-making venture, either by selling your work through galleries or by offering your services locally to make posters, T-shirts and anything else people might need.You can do it. Your imagination is your only limitation.

    Today, museums are staging exhibitions of encaustic art, workshops in the technique are thriving, and art collectors and dealers are assimilating encaustic art into their collections and galleries. The word encaustic is taken from the Greek and means “to burn in.” In the encaustic process, pigmented wax is applied and then fused to a surface with heat. The result is a broad range of surface effects and a luminous translucency that is unique to the encaustic medium. Encaustic Art is a complete resource for artists who wish to learn to create fine art with wax. It features step-by-step techniques with easy-to-understand instructions and detailed illustrations, stunning examples of encaustic works of art (including sculpture), along with practical advice and thoughtful aesthetic observations from more than 60 professional artists working in the encaustic medium.

    Few inventions have had the impact of this ingenious, elegant, and deceptively simple device.This gorgeous cornerstone volume, created in collaboration with the world-famous George Eastman House, celebrates the camera and the art of the photograph. It spans almost two hundred years of progress, from the first faint image ever caught to the instantaneous pictures snapped by today’s state-of-the-art digital equipment.The informative narrative by Todd Gustavson traces the camera’s development, the lives of its brilliant but often eccentric inventors, and the artists behind the lens. Images and highly descriptive captions for more than 350 cameras from the George Eastman House Collection, plus more than 100 historic photos, ads, and drawings, complement the text.A foreword by the George Eastman House Director Anthony Bannon, and insightful essays by Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, and Alexis Gerard, visionary founder and president of Future Image Inc., completes this illuminating study of one of the greatest modern technological achievements.

    Included are accounts of Ferry's affair with supermodel Jerry Hall and its public end when she left him for Mick Jagger, the band's various splits and regroupings, and the recent reunion in 2001 for a sold-out greatest hits tour. Years of research and interviews with all the major participants, including Ferry himself, have resulted in a definitive history of a band that changed popular music forever.