The History of Jazz


Ted Gioia - 1997
    From the seed first planted by slave dances held in Congo Square and nurtured by early ensembles led by Buddy Belden and Joe King Oliver, jazz began its long winding odyssey across America and around the world, giving flower to a thousand different forms--swing, bebop, cool jazz, jazz-rock fusion--and a thousand great musicians. Now, in The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia tells the story of this music as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history--Jelly Roll Morton (the world's greatest hot tune writer), Louis Armstrong (whose O-keh recordings of the mid-1920s still stand as the most significant body of work that jazz has produced), Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, cool jazz greats such as Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lester Young, Charlie Parker's surgical precision of attack, Miles Davis's 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality, Pat Metheny's visionary extension of jazz-rock fusion, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the post-modernists of the Knitting Factory. Gioia provides the reader with lively portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. Gioia also evokes the many worlds of jazz, taking the reader to the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the bawdy houses of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago during the Jazz Age, the after hours spots of corrupt Kansas city, the Cotton Club, the Savoy, and the other locales where the history of jazz was made. And as he traces the spread of this protean form, Gioia provides much insight into the social context in which the music was born. He shows for instance how the development of technology helped promote the growth of jazz--how ragtime blossomed hand-in-hand with the spread of parlor and player pianos, and how jazz rode the growing popularity of the record industry in the 1920s. We also discover how bebop grew out of the racial unrest of the 1940s and '50s, when black players, no longer content with being entertainers, wanted to be recognized as practitioners of a serious musical form. Jazz is a chameleon art, delighting us with the ease and rapidity with which it changes colors. Now, in Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz, we have at last a book that captures all these colors on one glorious palate. Knowledgeable, vibrant, and comprehensive, it is among the small group of books that can truly be called classics of jazz literature.

The Complete Pin-Ups


Gil Elvgren - 1999
    His technique-which earned him a reputation as "The Norman Rockwell of cheesecake"-involved photographing models and then painting them into gorgeous hyper-reality, with longer legs, more flamboyant hair and gravity-defying busts, and in the process making them the perfect moral-boosting eye-candy for every homesick private.

Norman Rockwell


Thomas S. Buechner - 1970
    A study of the artist and illustrator, Norman Rockwell, which reproduces 600 of his best illustrations, providing a panorama of nearly 60 years of American social history.

The Body: Photographs of the Human Form


William A. Ewing - 1994
    The body has been scrutinized by medical and anatomical photographers; it has been celebrated by photographers of sport and dance; it has inspired a long tradition of photographing the nude; and it has been depicted in phantasmagoric terms. In this rich, involving archive of over 360 duotone and color images culled from worldwide collections, renowned photo curator William A. Ewing has compiled the most comprehensive and arresting visual survey ever published of the human form. From nineteenth-century erotica to the politicized images of the 1990s, The Body offers an exciting, elegantly packaged, provocative record of the camera's infatuation with the human figure.

Subculture: The Meaning of Style


Dick Hebdige - 1979
    Hebdige [...] is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.' - Rolling StoneWith enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time OutThis book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times

Concerning the Spiritual in Art


Wassily Kandinsky - 1947
    Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art.Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings.This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

Humans of New York


Brandon Stanton - 2013
    With four hundred color photos, including exclusive portraits and all-new stories, Humans of New York is a stunning collection of images that showcases the outsized personalities of New York.Surprising and moving, Humans of New York is a celebration of individuality and a tribute to the spirit of the city.

Vincent Van Gogh


Victoria Charles - 2008
    While observing his paintings we see a panorama of his life story-a story that is now considered a legend. Van Gogh is the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the unconventional artist.

Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color


Leatrice Eiseman - 2011
    From the Pale Gold (15-0927 TPX) and Almost Mauve (12-2103 TPX) of the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris to the Rust (18-1248 TPX) and Midnight Navy (19-4110 TPX) of the countdown to the Millennium, the 20th century brimmed with color. Longtime Pantone collaborators and color gurus Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker identify more than 200 touchstone works of art, products, d cor, and fashion, and carefully match them with 80 different official PANTONE color palettes to reveal the trends, radical shifts, and resurgences of various hues. This vibrant volume takes the social temperature of our recent history with the panache that is uniquely Pantone.

Life: A Journey Through Time


Frans Lanting - 2006
    He made pilgrimages to true time capsules like a remote lagoon in Western Australia, spent time in research collections photographing forms of microscopic life, and even found ways to create visual parallels between the growth of organs in the human body and the patterns seen on the surface of the earth. The resulting volume is a glorious picture book of planet earth depicting the amazing biodiversity that surrounds us all. Lanting's true gift lies beyond his technical mastery: it is his eye for geometry in the beautiful chaos of nature that allows him to show us the world as it has never been seen before. From crabs to jellyfish, diatoms to vast geological formations, jungles to flowers, monkeys to human embryos, LIFE is a testament to the magical beauty of life in all its forms and is Lanting's most remarkable achievement to date. The photographer: Dutch-born Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. For the past two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. Exhibits of his photographs have been shown at major museums in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Madrid, and Amsterdam. Lanting's previous TASCHEN titles include Eye to Eye, Jungles, and Penguin. The editor: Christine Eckstrom is a writer and editor specializing in natural history. She collaborates with Lanting on fieldwork, books, and other publishing projects from their home base in California.

American Prospects


Joel Sternfeld - 1987
    Finally, photography and offset printing techniques have caught up with Sternfeld's eye, and this new edition of American Prospects succeeds in presenting Sternfeld's most seminal work as it has always meant to be shown. A specially-commissioned essay by Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, considers the historical context in which Sternfeld was working and the pivotal role that American Prospects has played in the course of contemporary filmmaking and art photography. In American Prospects, a fireman shops for a pumpkin while a house burns in the background; a group of motorcyclists stop at the side of the road to take in a stunning, placid view of Bear Lake, Utah; the high-tech world headquarters of the Manville Corporation sits in picturesque Colorado, obscured by a defiant boulder; a lone basketball net stands in the desert near Lake Powell in Arizona; and a cookie-cutter suburban housing settlement rests squarely amongst rolling hills in Pendleton, Oregon. Sternfeld's photographic tour of America is a search for the truth of a country not just as it exists in a particular era but as it is in its ever-evolving essence. It is a sad poem, but also a funny and generous one, recognizing endurance, poignant beauty, and determination within its sometimes tense, often ironic juxtapositions of man and nature, technology and ruin.

Graphic Design: A New History


Stephen J. Eskilson - 2007
    Organized chronologically, the book illuminates the dynamic relationship between design and manufacturing as well as the roles of technology, social change, and commercial forces on the course of design history. The layout of each chapter reflects the unique style of the period it describes, and some 450 illustrations throughout the volume provide a visual record of more than one hundred years of creative achievement in the field.Under the influence of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th century, a new era began for design arts. Fueled by popular Art Nouveau advertising, the work of graphic designers became central in the growing consumer goods economy. This book traces the emergence of varied modernist design styles in the early 20th century and then examines the wartime politicization of regional styles through American government patronage and revolutionary Soviet ideas. Richly contextualized chapters chronicle the history of the Bauhaus and the rise of the International Style, followed by the postmodern movement of the 1970s and '80s. After highlighting recent developments in graphic design around the globe, the author discusses the impact of inexpensive, powerful design software and the challenges facing designers now.

Hieronymus Bosch: Complete Works


Stefan Fischer - 2013
    1450–1516) was more than an anomaly. Bosch’s paintings are populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire, fantasy, and angst. One of his greatest inventions was to take the figural and scenic representations known as drolleries, which use the monstrous and the grotesque to illustrate sin and evil, and to transfer them from the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts into large-format panel paintings. Alongside traditional hybrids of man and beast, such as centaurs, and mythological creatures such as unicorns, devils, dragons, and griffins, we also encounter countless mixed creatures freely invented by the artist. Many subsidiary scenes illustrate proverbs and figures of speech in common use in Bosch’s day. In his Temptation of St Anthony triptych, for example, the artist shows a messenger devil wearing ice skates, evoking the popular expression that the world was “skating on ice”—meaning it had gone astray. In his pictorial translation of proverbs, in particular, Bosch was very much an innovator. Bosch—whose real name was Jheronimus van Aken—was widely copied and imitated: the number of surviving works by Bosch’s followers exceeds the master’s own production by more than tenfold. Today only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Bosch’s oeuvre. He continues to be seen as a visionary, a portrayer of dreams and nightmares, and the painter par excellence of hell and its demons. Featuring brand new photography of recently restored paintings, this exhaustive book, published in view of the upcoming 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death, covers the artist’s complete works. Discover Bosch’s pictorial inventions in splendid reproductions with copious details and a huge fold-out spread, over 110 cm (43 in.) long, of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Art historian and acknowledged Bosch expert Stefan Fischer examines just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective


Henri Cartier-BressonPhilippe Arbaizar - 2003
    Born in 1908, he studied painting before embarking on a career in photography in the 1930s. In 1940 he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in prisoner-of-war camps before escaping to join the Paris underground. With Robert Capa, David Seymour and others, he founded the photographic agency Magnum in 1947. Since then his work has taken him all over the world - from Europe to India, Burma, Pakistan, China, Japan, Indonesia, Bali, Russia, the Middle East, Cuba, Mexico, the United States and Canada. This new collection of work by Cartier-Bresson, created on the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday, provides the ultimate retrospective look at a lifetime's achievement. It includes the first photographs taken by him, a significant number of which have never been published, rarely seen work from all periods of his life, classic photographs that have become icons of the medium, and a generous selection of drawings, paintings and film stills. The book also features personal souvenirs of Cartier-Bresson's youth, his family and the founding of Magnum. Cartier-Bresson's extraordinary images are shaped by an eye a

The White Road: Journey Into an Obsession


Edmund de Waal - 2015
    From his studio in London, he starts by travelling to three "white hills" - sites in China, Germany and England that are key to porcelain's creation. But his search eventually takes him around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and figurines; rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest moments of twentieth-century history.Part memoir, part history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft and purity. In a sweeping yet intimate style that recalls The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal gives us a singular understanding of "the spectrum of porcelain" and the mapping of desire.