The first half of this stunning new book explores Michelangelo's fascinating life through his family, friends, patrons and commissions. Born near Florence in 1475 Michelangelo grew up surrounded by new forms of architecture, painting and sculpture. His influences and achievements are explained clearly and comprehensively with informative and attractive illustrations throughout. The second half of the book contains a comprehensive gallery of over 300 of his major works of sculpture, painting and architecture. These superb reproductions are accompanied by thorough analysis of each artwork and its significance with the context of Michelangelo's life, his technique and his body of work as a whole.

At least since his spectacular exhibition in the Romanian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Adrian Ghenie (*1977 in Baia Mare, Romania) has been known to the broad public as one of the most interesting and unconventional painters of his generation. His works-painted in oils that have been scratched, applied with a palette knife, orthrown onto the canvas-have already gained entry into the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and have achieved one auction record after another in the art market. Yet neither Ghenie's subjects nor his technique cater to the taste of the public: the history of the "century of humiliation"-which is how Ghenie refers tothe twentieth century-its perpetrators and victims are the most important sources for his collage-like compositions. These subjects are joined by his positive heroes alike, such as Van Gogh and Darwin, and time after time, his self portrait.

British flower painting has its own unique, if relatively recent, history, but it can only be judged in the light of the wider history of the subject and by comparison with other, particularly European, countries. The first chapter of "A History and Dictionary of British Flower Painters", therefore, sets the scene with a brief introduction to floral art world wide before the next four chapters concentrate on British flower painting in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over ninety colour plates illustrate these five chapters. The Dictionary gives the biographical details of more than 970 British flower painters from 1650-1950 including their specialities, awards, exhibitions an bibliographical details. The work of many is illustrated in black and white.

Reprinted for the first time since 1889, this is the first biography and considered appraisal of one of England's most prodigiously talented painters. Sir John Everett Millais, P. R. A. (1829-1896) was the most precociously talented artist England has ever produced. His astonishing facility gained him entry as the Royal Academy's youngest ever pupil. At just 19 he founded with six other painters the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which revolutionized the English art world with a visionary intensity of both subject matter and style. Millais was its most creative member; as Jason Rosenfeld says in the introduction to this volume, "the sheer quality and distinctness of each of Millais's paintings of the 1850s is unmatched by any Western artist of the period." Yet there is much more to Millais' career than Pre-Raphaelitism. Some of the most emotive narrative paintings of the Victorian era, its greatest portraits, and especially some of its most beautiful, if neglected, landscapes, came from his brush--as did some of its most notoriously successful paintings, like "Bubbles," the "fancy picture" that was made into an advertisement for Pears' Soap. This volume includes not only Millais's only published work of art criticism, the pithy "Thoughts on Our Art of Today," but also the first extended biography and appraisal of his work by the important critic M. H. Spielmann. This hugely engaging "Sketch "gives both a warm and personal picture of the man and a level-headed evaluation of the qualities--and defects--of his work as they appeared to contemporaries. Neither essay has been in print for more than a century.

Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the most important woman artist before the modern period, was a major Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century and the only female follower of Caravaggio. This first full-length study of her life and work shows that her powerfully original treatments of mythic-heroic female subjects depart radically from traditional interpretations of the same themes.

Diversifying the current art historical scholarship, this edited volume presents the untold story of modern art by exposing global voices and perspectives excluded from the privileged and uncontested narrative of “isms.” This volume tells a worldwide story of art with expanded historical narratives of modernism. The chapters reflect on a wide range of issues, topics, and themes that have been marginalized or outright excluded from the canon of modern art. The goal of this book is to be a starting point for understanding modern art as a broad and inclusive field of study. The topics examine diverse formal expressions, innovative conceptual approaches, and various media used by artists around the world and forcefully acknowledge the connections between art, historical circumstances, political environments, and social issues such as gender, race, and social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, imperial and colonial history, modernism, and globalization.

A brilliant, concise account of the painting often described as the most important work of art produced in the twentieth century, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. Pablo Picasso had already accepted a commission in 1937 to create a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris World Fair when news arrived of the assault by the German Condor Legion on the undefended Basque town of Guernica, in which hundreds of civilians died. James Attlee offers an illuminating account of the genesis, creation and many-stranded afterlife of Picasso's Guernica. He explores the historical context from which it sprang; the artistic influences that informed its execution; the critical responses that it elicited; its journeyings across Europe and America in the late 1930s; its post-war adoption by new generations of anti-war protestors; and its eventual return to Spain following the death of Franco.

German artist Neo Rauch, championed as "the painter of the zeitgeist" by The New York Times's Roberta Smith, presents new paintings in PROPAGANDA. Rauch is widely celebrated for his captivating compositions that bring together figurative painting and surrealism into an entirely new kind of visual encounter. They often hint at broader narratives and histories-seemingly reconnecting with artistic traditions of realism-but they remain dreamlike and impossible to reduce to a single story. Though his art is highly refined and executed with great technical skill, Rauch himself stresses the intuitive, deeply personal nature of how he works. As the artist notes, "My process is far less a reflection than it is drawing from the sediments of my past, which occurs in an almost trance-like state. "Eight large-scale canvases and seven smaller, more intimately scaled works continue the artist's exploration of figuration and the ambiguous nature of meaning in visual art. In some of the larger works, the saturation of the canvas with characters, objects, and, forms, all rendered at different scales and in conflicting arrangements, creates a collage-like quality-a figurative scrapbook of Rauch's personal iconography. The publication features a short story by German novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, which was inspired by the paintings in this book. The fantastical text moves between present-day New York and an unknown time of enchanted forests, knights, and witches, exploring the many layers found in Rauch's canvases. Published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong in 2019, Neo Rauch: PROPAGANDA is available in both English only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

Painting buildings is an exciting and versatile genre - it allows you to enjoy the lines of architecture but also to add feeling and context to a picture. This practical book explains the full depth of the subject, from first sketches to final presentation. Using a range of examples, it is packed with advice and information, and follows the riches of painting the built landscape. Not just a handy reference, this is a beautiful and inspirational guide for every artist who wants to capture and interpret a scene. Topics covered include: Drawing - practise observation and sketching to identify the principal lines of view. Perspective - understand three-dimensional structures and their position to each other and in space. Oils - use the versatility of the paint to express and experiment with your ideas. Location - develop your paintings outdoors and in the studio. Style - add figures, weather and atmosphere to your work to give it character and mood. Finally, Inspiration - learn new ideas and themes from finished examples by a number of leading artists.

The collections of twentieth-century paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, have developed largely through the generosity of individuals. Notable among these in the early decades of the century were Frank Hindley Smith and Mrs W F R Weldon, while since the Second World War the Museum's collections have been enriched through gifts and requests from Thomas Balston, R A P Bevan, Molly Freeman, Christopher Hewett and others. This book gives the reader a taste of the wide range of the collection, with its representative group of Camden Town and Euston Road School pictures, and important early works by Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse.

15-Minute Watercolor Masterpieces, Anna’s first book, is one of our strongest selling titles. She made watercolour approachable, fun and easier than ever - and now she’s doing the same with the latest painting trend, gouache. A marriage between acrylics and watercolour, gouache is the next big thing in the art world - it’s easier to control than watercolour and allows for richer pigments and easy fixes, making it a great option for beginners. Anna shows you just how magical gouache can be - and each of her 50 projects can be completed in just five easy-to-follow steps. Divided into chapters on beautiful landscapes, colourful flowers and plants, cute animals and more, readers will have a big variety of projects to choose from. And each step is accompanied by an image, making it even easier for readers to follow along. Anna is the founder of DearAnnArt, an online art community with hundreds of thousands of followers.

An historic publishing event Endorsed by the Louvre and for the first time ever, every painting from the world's most popular museum is available in one stunning book. All 3,022 paintings on display in the permanent painting collection of the Louvre are presented in full color in this striking, slipcased book. Comes with an enclosed, supportive DVD-ROM.The Louvre is the world's most visited art museum, with 8.5 million visitors annually, and houses the most celebrated and important paintings of all time. For the first time ever, "The Louvre: All the Paintings" collects all 3,022 paintings currently on display in the permanent collection in one beautifully curated volume.Organized and divided into the four main painting collections of the museum-- the Italian School, the Northern School, the Spanish School, and the French School-- the paintings are then presented chronologically by the artist's date of birth.Four hundred of the most iconic and significant paintings are illuminated with 300-word discussions by art historians Anja Grebe and Vincent Pomarede on the key attributes of the work, what to look for when viewing the painting, the artist's inspirations and techniques, biographical information on the artist, the artist's impact on the history of art, and more.All 3,022 paintings are fully annotated with the name of the painting and artist, the date of the work, the birth and death dates of the artist, the medium that was used, the size of the painting, the Louvre catalog number, and the room in the Louvre in which the painting is found.The DVD-ROM is easily browsable by artist, date, school, art historical genre, or location in the Louvre. This last feature allows readers to tour the Louvre and its contents room by room, as if they were actually walking through the building.DVD-ROM System Requirements: DVD-ROM runs on a PC (Windows 2000/XP or later) and MAC (OSX 10.4.8 or later) running the following browser software Internet Explorer 7 or 8; Firefox 3.6 and above; or Safari 5.0 and above.

Of the triumvirate of sixteenth-century Venetian painters, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, Paolo [Caliari] Veronese (1528-1588) best conveyed Venice's civic splendor. His masterpieces in the Doge's Palace conferred on the Republic a magnificence and authority that was rapidly dwindling by the end of the Renaissance. But on a private level, he also reshaped the fashions of the Serenissima through a steady stream of portrait commissions. Many members of Venice's most elite families sat for Veronese, as did notable artists and authors, including Titian and Sir Phillip Sidney. Once regarded as Venice's best portraitist, his talents in this genre unfortunately remain largely unknown to modern audiences. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the approximately forty portraits that survive. Shedding new light on early works, such as the pendants of the Da Porto and the frescos of the Barbaro in the Palladian villa at Maser, Professor Garton also examines Paolo's images of women within the larger polemics surrounding the anonymous beauties of Giorgione, Palma il Vecchio, and Titian. The author analyzes Veronese's innovations in martial portraiture, melancholic portrayals of artists and nobility, and evocations of the antique. Relevant issues of social history, class insecurity, and poetic convention are all brought to bear in deciphering the meanings of these images and what they reveal about the painter and his clientele. This layered study of Venice's golden age of painting ends appropriately with a glance at the "moderns" who profited most from the study of Veronese's portraits: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Henri Fantin-Latour, Mary Cassatt, and Henri Matisse. A complete catalogue of Veronese's portraits follows the chapters.

Repainting the work of another into one's own canvas is a deliberate and often highly fraught act of reuse. This book examines the creation, display, and reception of such images. Artists working in nineteenth-century London were in a peculiar position: based in an imperial metropole, yet undervalued by their competitors in continental Europe. Many claimed that Britain had yet to produce a viable national school of art. Using pictures-within-pictures, British painters challenged these claims and asserted their role in an ongoing visual tradition. By transforming pre-existing works of art, they also asserted their own painterly abilities. Recognizing these statements provided viewers with pleasure, in the form of a witty visual puzzle solved, and with prestige, in the form of cultural knowledge demonstrated. At stake for both artist and audience in such exchanges was status: the status of the painter relative to other artists, and the status of the viewer relative to other audience members. By considering these issues, this book demonstrates a new approach to images of historic displays. Through examinations of works by J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, John Scarlett Davis, Emma Brownlow King, and William Powell Frith, this book reveals how these small passages of paint conveyed both personal and national meanings.

First published in 2005. Since the early nineteenth century, Byron, the man and his image, have captured the hearts and minds of untold legions of people of all political and social stripes in Britain, Europe, America, and around the world. This book focuses on the history and cultural significance for Federal America of the only portrait of Byron known to have been painted by a major artist. In private hands from 1826 until this day, Thomas Sulley's Byron has never before been the subject of scholarly study. Beginning with the discovery of the portrait in 1999 and a 200-year narrative of the portrait's provenance and its relation to other well-known Byron portraits, the author discusses the work within the broad context of British and American portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Somewhere in Brooklyn, a little boy dreams of being a famous artist, not knowing that one day he would make himself a king. Jean-Michel Basquiat and his unique, collage-style paintings rocketed to fame in the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon unlike anything the art world had ever seen. However, before that, he was a little boy who saw art everywhere: in poetry books and museums, in games, in the words that we speak and in the pulsing energy of New York City. Now, award-winning illustrator Javaka Steptoe's vivid text and bold artwork echoing Basquiat's own style introduces young readers to the powerful message that art doesn't always have to be neat or clean - and definitely not inside the lines - to be beautiful.

Vincent van Gogh continues to fascinate more than a century after his death in 1890. Yet how much of what is commonly known about this world-renowned artist is accurate? Though he left thousands of works and a trove of letters, the definitive Van Gogh remains elusive. Was he a madman who painted his greatest pieces in a passionate fury, or a lifelong student of art, literature and science who carefully planned each composition? Was he a loner dedicated only to his craft or an active collaborator with his contemporaries? Why is he best known for self-mutilation and ""The Starry Night""? This book has biographers, scriptwriters, lyricists, actors, museum curators and tour guides, among others, presenting diverse interpretations of his life and work, creating a mythic persona that may in fact help us in the search for the real van Gogh.

The artistic achievements of Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), both as a major expatriate American painter and as a formative innovator in the decorative arts, have long been overshadowed by her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney and a reputation as a fiercely independent, aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s. In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks's aesthetics and experimentation as an artist-and of her entire life, from her chaotic, traumatic childhood to the enigmatic decades after World War II, when she produced very little art. This provocative, lively biography takes aim at many myths about Brooks and her friends, lovers, and the subjects of her portraits, revealing a woman of wit and passion who overcame enormous personal and societal challenges to become an extraordinary artist and create a life on her own terms. Romaine Brooks: A Life, introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miro (1893-1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction. Over the course of his prodigious output, Miro evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of "bourgeois" art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, arranged in elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miro moved towards Surrealism, and, despite never fully identifying with the movement, emerged as one of its most celebrated practitioners with techniques including automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In later years, he diversified his media further, working with ceramics, textiles, and even proposing sculptures made of gas. Through his vivid colors, dreamlike fantasies, and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the numerous strands of Miro's kaleidoscopic oeuvre to introduce his fascinating career, its interaction with major modernist movements, and how it made him into a modernist legend. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. 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

Terrifying beasts, imaginary landscapes, portraits and ornaments - "All Manner of Murals" (papers presented during a series of symposia dedicated to the history, techniques and conservation of British secular wall paintings) celebrates the many ways we have decorated our day-to-day lives with wall paintings. Murals by their very nature must remain in and on the structures for which they were designed, inextricably at one with their surroundings, and so offer glimpses of vanished ways of living. Whether painted in a humble cottage or a grand palace, they illustrate the march not only of history, but of our view of ourselves. At once strange and strangely familiar, the ancient wall painting emerging from under layers of whitewash has much to tell us about how our predecessors saw the world around them. The tradition of wall painting, arguably the oldest of art forms, continues to this day, and our descendants may find our own values and views reflected in the murals, private and public, that we leave behind. The 20 papers collected in this volume (from 3 symposia hosted by the Stone and Wall Painting Group of the Institute of Conservation [Icon]) explore over 500 years of secular wall paintings, right up to contemporary work, looking at why and how they were painted, and the best ways of caring for them to ensure that future generations can also find in 'all manner of murals' a source of wonder and of kinship to their past.