The impressive photographs of works from all visual arts movements are at the center of these richly illustrated volumes. The books successfully provide an overview of the artistic diversity of the individual periods, and they couldn't have been written and illustrated any more clearly. The informative and interesting texts have been written by renowned authors from the fields of history, architecture and art history, providing a multifaceted view of each period. These books are a real pleasure for anyone with an interest in art.

    Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents. From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972. M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

    This phenomenally diverse tradition includes not only frescoes, relief carvings, colossal statues, silk embroideries and bronze ritual objects but also rock-cut shrines with a thousand Buddhas, the glorious stupas of South-East Asia and the pagodas of the Far East, the massive "mandala in stone" of Borobudur in Java and entire 13th-century temple complexes at Angkor in Cambodia. The author describes all the Buddhist schools and cultures, and explains their imagery, from Tibetan cosmic diagrams and Korean folk art to early Sri Lankan sites and Japanese Zen gardens.

    Suitable for a two semester course in complex analysis, or as a supplementary text for an advanced course in function theory, this book aims to give students a good foundation of complex analysis and provides a basis for solving problems in mathematics, physics, engineering and many other sciences.

    He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books

    It is both an introduction to the study of art and, for those with more specialized interests, a profound discussion of art and life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Panofsky's historical technique reveals an abundance of detail, detail he skillfully relates to the life and work of individual painters and their times. The papers in this volume represent a cross-section of Panofsky's major work. Included are selections from his well-known Studies in Iconology and The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, plus an introduction and an epilogue—"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" and "Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European"—as well as pieces written especially for this collection. All display Panofsky's vast erudition and deep commitment to a humanistic conception of art and art history.

    A low-pressure system had been stalled over Italy for six weeks and on the previous day it had begun to rain again. Nineteen inches fell in twenty-four hours, more than half of the annual total. By two o’clock in the morning twenty-thousand cubic feet of water per second was moving towards Florence. Soon manhole covers in Santa Croce were exploding into the air as jets of water began shooting out of the now overwhelmed sewer system. Cellars, vaults, and strong-rooms were filling with water. Night watchmen on the Ponte Vecchio alerted the bridge’s jewelers and goldsmiths to come quickly to rescue their wares. By then the water was moving at forty miles per hour at a height of twenty-four feet. At 7:26 a.m. all of Florence’s electric civic clocks came to a stop. The Piazza Santa Croce was under twenty-two feet of water. Beneath the surface, twelve feet of mud, sewage, debris, and oil sludge were starting to ooze and settle into the cellars and crypts and room after room above them. Six-hundred-thousand tons of it would smother, clot, and encrust the city. Dark Water brings the flood and its aftermath to life through the voices of witnesses past and present. Two young American artists wade heedlessly through the inundated city carrying their baby in order to witness its devastated beauty: the Ponte Vecchio buried in debris and Ghiberti’s panels from the doors of the Florence Baptistery, lying heaped in yard-deep mud; the swamped Uffizi Gallery; and, in the city libraries, one billion pages of Renaissance and antique books, soaked in mire. A Life magazine photographer, stowing away on an army helicopter, arrives to capture a drama that, he felt, “could only be told by Dante” amid the flooded tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo in Giotto and Vasari’s Santa Croce. A British student, one of thousands of “mud angels” who rushed to Florence to save its art, spends a month scraping mud and mold from Cimabue’s magnificent and neglected Crocifisso as intrigues and infighting among international art experts and connoisseurs swirl around him. And during the fortieth anniversary commemorations of 2006 the author asks himself why art matters so very much to us, and how beauty seems to somehow save the world even in the face of overwhelming disaster.

    It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

    Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion; instructs the painter on how to use the rules of composition, representation, light and colour to create work that is graceful and pleasing to the eye; and stipulates the moral and artistic pre-requisites of the successful painter. On Painting had an immediate and profound influence on Italian Renaissance artists including Ghiberti, Fra Angelico and Veneziano and on later figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, and remains a compelling theory of art.

    Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made.This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home.In showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright.

    Gothic monuments bear witness to a dynamic age, when old values were being redefined, often with great drama and debate. Here is a richly-illustrated overview of the period's architecture, sculpture, painting, stained glass, and jewelry, from its 12th-century French origins to its early 16th-century conclusion.

    Charmingly illustrated with author Eric Sloane's own sketches, the text illuminates with rare insight the enormously varied and useful qualities of wood.Covering such topics as the aesthetics of wood, wooden implements, and carpentry, Sloane remarks expansively and with affection on the resourcefulness of early Americans in their use of this precious commodity. From cradle to coffin, the pioneer was surrounded by wood. It was used to make tools, fence the land, and build barns. People sat at wooden tables on wooden chairs and ate from wooden dishes. Charcoal, one of the many by-products of wood, was used to preserve meat, remove offensive odors, and produce ink. The bark of various trees was processed to make medicine. An entertaining, factual, and historically accurate book, A Reverence for Wood will delight woodcrafters and lovers of Americana. It is "one of Eric Sloane's best books." — Library Journal

    Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

    Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world's most widely read books on design. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy.

    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.