Together they provide a complete painting programme.

    In Surreal Lives, Ruth Brandon follows the lives and interactions of such firecracker minds as the movement's didactic "Pope," Andre Breton, and the ambitious and manic Salvador Dali, as well as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and filmmaker Luis Bunuel. It charts their shifting allegiances, and their ties to muses and patrons like Gala Dali and Peggy Guggenheim. Ruth Brandon spins the many stories of Surrealism with wit, energy, and insight, bringing sharp analysis to an eccentric cast of characters whose struggles and achievements came to mirror and define the way the world changed between the wars. "Fascinating, impassioned... admirable [for] the masterly storytelling, the richness of anecdotal incident, the keen reporting of intellectual enthusiasms and artistic collaborations, and the panorama of a spectacular cultural galaxy." -- The New York Times Book Review; "Superbly entertaining... A cousin to Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return." -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World; "A lively and absorbing complement to [the Surrealists'] work." -- The New Yorker

    Bernhardt's memoirs are composed with a novelist's (or actress's) sense of artistry and suspense that leaves no doubt of the charisma for which she was famed in her "double life, " both on- and offstage. Yet at the same time as this book very consciously contributes to the crafting of her image, it also illuminates a whole era: not only the world of theater, but also the worlds of women, politics, society, Europe and America, and, indeed, of history making itself.

    Illustrates outdoor sculptures created with a range of natural materials, including snow, ice, leaves, rock, clay, stones, feathers, and twigs.

    Its goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each book features the creative process and core thinking of a photographer told in their own words and through pictures of their choosing, and is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Todd Hido explores the genres of landscape, interior and nude photography, with emphasis on creating images from a personal perspective and with a sense of intimacy. Through words and photographs, he also offers insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, including mining one's own memory and experience as inspiration; using light, texture and detail for greater impact; exploring the narrative potential activated when sequencing images; and creating powerful stories with emotional weight and beauty.Todd Hido (born 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist. He is well known for his photography of urban and suburban housing across the United States, and for his use of detail and luminous color. His previous books include House Hunting (2001), Outskirts (2002), Roaming (2004) and Between the Two (2007). He is a recipient of a Eureka Fellowship and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Visual Arts Award, and is represented by Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. He is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts.Gregory Halpern received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. His third book of photographs, entitled A, is a photographic ramble through the streets of the American Rust Belt. His other books include Omaha Sketchbook and Harvard Works Because We Do. He currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the coeditor of The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture 2013).

    The legendary curator John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, has painstakingly selected what he considers Adams' finest work and has attempted to find the single best photographic print of each. Szarkowski writes that "Ansel Adams at 100 is the product of a thorough review of work that Adams, at various times in his career, considered important. It includes many photographs that will be unfamiliar to lovers of Adams' work, and a substantial number that will be new to Adams scholars. The book is an attempt to identify that work on which Adams' claim as an important modern artist must rest." Ansel Adams at 100-the highly acclaimed international exhibition and the book, with Szarkowski's incisive critical essay-is the first serious effort since Adams' death in 1984 to reevaluate his achievement as an artist. The exhibition prints, drawn from important public and private collections, have been meticulously reproduced in tritone to create the splendid plates in this edition, faithfully rendering the nuances of the original prints. Ansel Adams at 100 is destined to be the definitive book on this great American artist. John Szarkowski is director emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the author of such classic works as Looking at Photographs, The Photographer's Eye, Photography Until Now, and Atget, as well as several books of his own photographs, including the recently reissued The Idea of Louis Sullivan.

    Spanning a period of forty years, David Lynch's widely respected films and television series include "Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway," and "Mulholland Drive," However, his prolific visual art production, which began even before his films, has rarely been seen. This catalogue of his artistic output, published on the occasion of a large-scale exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, covers a wide variety of disciplines: painting, photography, drawings, sculpture, furniture, music, and "moving pictures." His art echoes his films in theme and aesthetic, yet offers viewers a fresh and more intimate glimpse into his singular universe. The book also contains several essays that analyze his artworks, as well as a conversation with Lynch, interviewed within the context of the show. 469 illustrations in color.

    Gerda Panofsky-Soergel has updated the commentary in the light of new material, and the bibliography that she has prepared reflects the scholarship on St.-Denis in the last three decades. She has obtained some additional and more recent photographs, and the illustrations include a new ground plan and a new section of the chevet of the Abbey Church, both drawn under the supervision of Sumner McKnight Crosby.

    And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp? In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes."In What Happened to Art Criticism?, art historian James Elkins sounds the alarm about the perilous state of that craft, which he believes is 'In worldwide crisis . . . dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism' even as more and more people are doing it. 'It's dying, but it's everywhere . . . massively produced, and massively ignored.' Those who pay attention to other sorts of criticism may recognize the problems Elkins describes: 'Local judgments are preferred to wider ones, and recently judgments themselves have even come to seem inappropriate. In their place critics proffer informal opinions or transitory thoughts, and they shy from strong commitments.' What he'd like to see more of: ambitious judgment, reflection about judgment itself, and 'criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.' Amen to that."—Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World

    The book comprises a string of dramatic and evocative locales, each embodying specific artistic tendencies and together spanning the modern era--from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, and visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and events--some famous, others forgotten--to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the distinctions between the different arts along with the borders separating them from ordinary experience.This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from conventional understandings of modernism.

    Artists painted, sculpted, and photographed her; poets praised her strange beauty. Among them were Gabriele D’Annunzio, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, and American writers Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, and Ezra Pound. Couturiers Fortuny, Poiret, and Erté dressed her. Some became lovers, others awestruck admirers, but all were influenced by this extraordinary muse. The extravagance ended in 1930 when Casati was more than twenty-five million dollars in debt. Fleeing to London, she spent her final flamboyant years there until her death in 1957. Now nearly a half-century later, Casati’s fashion legacy continues to inspire such designers as John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, and Tom Ford. Fully authorized and accurate, this is the fantastic story of the Marchesa Luisa Casati.Scot D. Ryersson is an award-winning freelance writer, illustrator, and graphic designer. He lives in New Jersey.Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a freelance writer specializing in international genre film, fashion, music, and unconventional historical figures. He lives in New Jersey.

    The demand for vintage trailers-the smaller the better-has risen dramatically in recent years, with the most in-demand trailers being "teardrops," first manufactured in the 1930s and containing just indoor sleeping space and an outdoor exterior kitchen. Also profiled in the book are "canned ham" trailers, whose shape resembles the profile of a can of ham; small-size examples of America's most beloved vintage trailer, the Airstream; miniscule gypsy caravans in Europe; and fiberglass trailers made in Canada. Two hundred color photographs showcase these trailers' sleek exteriors, retro-styled interiors, and, in many cases, the restored classic cars that tow them. Teardrops and Tiny Trailers includes a resource section chock-full of places to locate vintage trailers, clubs to join, and rallies to attend.

    Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 28-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, -I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.- Why? Because his models, friends, and increasingly, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever enters his mind at the moment. He denies his intentions are sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, -there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?- Ren responded, -It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.- True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed are not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, -Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex, - making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.Text in English, French, and German

    Having finally earned the money and gained the respect he sought in his early days as a struggling painter, Monet designed and built the home and gardens in the village on the Seine that would be the site of the famous "Grain Stacks" and "Water Lilies" paintings that would secure his reputation. A good, affordable introductory study of the pioneer of modern art.

    A talented violinist as well as a painter, Klee drew much of the inspiration for his abstract art from musical rhythms and structure. Like a composer, he developed and harmonized pictorial themes, weaving a complex series of signs and symbols into his painting. Art historian Hajo Duchting focuses his study primarily on Klee's decade-long tenure at the Bauhaus, where the artist's theories and practice first merged, and where he was to develop his Color Spectrum, Square and Polyphone painting series. Illustrated throughout with full-color reproductions of Klee's paintings and etchings, as well as entries from his diaries, this unique study sheds light on an important aspect of Klee's work while providing insights into his development as an abstract artist.