There is no question that Robert Frank's The Americans is the most famous and influential photography book ever published. It was 1959 when the book first came out: a series of deceptively simple photographs that Frank took on a trip through America in '55 and '56, pictures of normal people, everyday scenes: lunch counters, bus depots, cars, and the stangely familiar faces of people we don't quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures that saw the "American way of life" as we hadn't yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condensed the entire life of a nation in classic images that still speak to us today, forty years and several generations later.

    During his life he created numerous works of art and kept voluminous notebooks that detailed his artistic and intellectual pursuits.The collection of writings and art in this magnificent book are drawn from his notebooks. The book organizes his wide range of interests into subjects such as human figures, light and shade, perspective and visual perception, anatomy, botany and landscape, geography, the physical sciences and astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and inventions. Nearly every piece of writing throughout the book is keyed to the piece of artwork it describes.The writing and art is selected by art historian H. Anna Suh, who provides fascinating commentary and insight into the material, making Leonardo's Notebooks an exquisite single-volume compendium celebrating his enduring genius.

    Renowned artist Brian Froud and scholar Ari Berk have conducted a thorough investigation into the goblin realm. (For the uninformed, goblins, a subspecies of faery, are those maleficent creatures that cause all manner of havoc in the human realm.) The fruit of their labor, however, turned out to be a rotten apple: the book is infected with goblins. Now, thanks largely to Froud and Berk's continuing carelessness, the noxious, viscid, and largely nonsensical volume has been unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Among its pages are reproductions of the ancient, odoriferous Codex Goblinensis; a glossary of common goblins and their markings; and a gazetteer of goblin photographs taken with the arcane Goblin Camera. Those fearing an infestation can refer to the section detailing how to determine if you've "got goblins" and, if so, what you can do about it. (There is nothing you can do about it.)Combining the folkloric approach of Faeries with the utter wackiness of Lady Cottington, this is the team's most visually rich and outrageous opus yet.

    The book features 2,000 images and documents, many previously unpublished. Note: PBS-TV's American Masters will broadcast a 2 hour Warhol documentary by Ric Burns to air in May 2006.

    Along with a plethora of images of [Kahlo's] paintings, the book features archive images, family photographs, objects, and artifacts from her personal collection as well as photos of the surrounding landscape, all of which offer insight into how these places shaped her work and vision.' - An Artnet Favourite Art Book of 2016

    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

    Or maybe you weren’t afraid—maybe you just didn’t know what to ask or where to start. In The Oil Painting Course You’ve Always Wanted, author Kathleen Staiger presents crystal clear, step-by-step lessons that build to reinforce learning. Brush control, creating the illusion of three dimensions, foolproof color mixing, still-life painting, landscapes, and portraits—every topic is covered in clear text, diagrams, illustrations, exercises, and demonstrations. Staiger has taught oil painting for more than thirty-five years; many of her students are now exhibiting and selling their paintings. Everyone from beginning hobby painters, to art students, to BFA graduates has questions about oil painting. Here at last are the answers!

    "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius.Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work.Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon.This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement.Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.

    Her story—thousands of photo negatives and prints found in a storage locker and sold for pennies at auction—has stirred millions around the world. Maier was a painfully private woman who now speaks powerfully through the photographs she took only for herself. This new collection offers readers a chance to follow Maier as she travels the world, including images of France, Italy, Malaysia, Yemen, Puerto Rico, and America. These eye-to-eye portraits, published for the first time, are the single constant in her lifetime of photographic work. Maier is often cast as a quirky, antisocial character, moving on the outskirts of real connection. But these photographs show something more. Printed with the latest technology, the book utilizes a modified four-color process that produces images akin to traditional silver gelatin prints. Combined with 15u stochastic screening, Maier's 96 photographs in this volume are spectacularly sharp, full-range black-and-white reproductions.

    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.

    Packed with ideas for setting up and selling out, the book includes loads of advice from experts like Faythe Levine, Jenny Harada and Jenny Hart.Want to make some dough but don't know where to start? Inside find out how to:- Discover your expectations and motivations - Set up shop and get paid - Join an indie craft show - Get some press - Package goods and customer service - Balance life and craftsPlus, get business forms, lists of resources and a directory of indie craft shows so you can be on your way to becoming a Crafty Superstar!

    As soon as you open the book you will want to pick up a brush and start painting — and whatever your ability, Jean encourages you to simply ‘have a go’ and enjoy the freedom and happiness that painting can bring.Jean’s subjects include animals, landscapes, people and flowers, and there are many examples of Jean’s work throughout the book to both delight and inspire you. Jean takes a highly practical approach to her teaching, and there are numerous short exercises and demonstrations as well as longer projects that guide you through a painting from beginning to end. Wherever you are on your painting journey, Jean will open your eyes to the color and light that surrounds you and show you how to incorporate it into your paintings.

    Her vivid visual vocabulary--sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth--had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art. O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvases. Here is the first full account of her exceptional life-- from her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher, to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde, Alfred Stieglitz, to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death. And here is the story of a great romance between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, Georgia O'Keeffe is a twentieth-century legend who career spanned the history modern art in America.

    Pre-eminent among those who have is John Howe.  Now, for the first time ever, a portfolio of more than 250 of his paintings and sketches has been collected together which celebrates the breathtaking vision of one of the foremost fantasy artists working today. Myth & Magic takes the reader on a journey through John Howe’s work, from his early days as a student to his most recent paintings, and features a number of previously unseen pictures. All of his Tolkien work inspired by The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth is included, and this is complemented by a dazzling array of the many works of art that he has produced, ranging from books on dragons and myth and legend, children’s books that he has written as well as illustrated, to a wealth of cover paintings for some of the biggest names in fantasy. John Howe has additionally provided an entertaining and informative commentary which gives the story behind his work.  Myth & Magic also boasts contributions from Tolkien expert and author of The Lord of the Rings Movie Guide, Brian Sibley, and top fantasy authors such as Robin Hobb and Robert Holdstock, features a revealing insight from Oscar-winning actor Sir Ian McKellen into the challenge of becoming John Howe’s ‘Gandalf’, and includes an exclusive Foreword by Peter Jackson, the directorof The Lord of the Rings Movie Trilogy. From the beloved painting of ‘Smaug’ that decorates The Hobbit, and the world famous ‘Gandalf’ picture which is synonymous with the one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, to the spectacular images which adorn best-selling novels around the world, this sumptuous gallery will delight all fans of Tolkien and fantasy, as it takes us on an unforgettable tour through the imagination of one of the finest artists in the world. A tour through the realms of Myth & Magic.

    While he was notoriously protective of his privacy, Gorey did grant dozens of interviews over the course of his life. And as these conversations demonstrate, he proved to be unfailingly charming, gracious, and fascinating. Here is Gorey in his own words, ruminating on everything from French symbolist poetry to soap operas, from George Balanchine and the unique beauty of ballet to Victorian photographs of dead children. We meet the artist in his ramshackle, book-lined studio in Manhattan and his equally bizarre house on Cape Cod. He describes his legendary upbringing and vast range of influences, as well as how he managed to work amid all his cats. Ascending Peculiarity is a rare and wonderful entree into the inner workings of an artistic genius.Includes reproductions of previously unpublished drawings and photographs