From the fan-favorite Pop Surrealist painter and graphic artist, this coloring book features stunningly beautiful black-and-white images of mermaids and other legendary beasts of the ocean drawn in Camilla d'Errico's signature manga-inspired style. Following the success of her first coloring book, Pop Manga Coloring Book, artist Camilla d'Errico takes fans beneath the waves with 70 black-and-white images of beloved characters from undersea fairy tales and myths in this stunning coloring book. Along with beautiful and haunting images of mermaids, d'Errico also includes many-tentacled krakens, giant seahorses, narwhals, and more in pieces that you'll want to start coloring as soon as you open the book. Select pieces include designed, patterned backgrounds to keep colorists working away hour after hour in this underwater kingdom of cute.

Fantasy art, that colorful blend of myth, muscle and sexy maidens, took off in 1923 with the launch of Weird Tales magazine, was reinvigorated in the 1960s with The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian paperbacks with Frank Frazetta covers, and the late '60s emergence of fantasy psychedelia. It went big in the '70s with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, the brilliant French magazine Metal Hurlant, and the first Star Wars film. The number of active artists peaked in that decade, but a new generation of fans discovered the genre through fantasy trading card games in the '90s, leading to a massive interest in the art form today. Frank Frazetta's oil paintings-when they infrequently come to market-have sold for more than $ 5 million in recent years. Fans line up at Comic-Cons to meet Boris Vallejo, Rodney Matthews, Greg Hildebrandt, Michael Whelan, and Philippe Druillet, and memorialize dead icons HR Giger, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Frazetta. Imagine how eagerly they'll welcome TASCHEN's History of Fantasy Art, including all the artists listed above and more. This monster-sized tome features original paintings, contextualized by preparatory sketches, sculptures, calendars, magazines, and paperback books for an immersive dive into this dynamic, fanciful genre. Insightful bios go beyond Wikipedia to give a more accurate and eye-opening look into the life of each artist. Complete with tipped-in chapter openers, this collection will reign as the most exquisite and informative guide to this popular subject for years to come.

This ultimate picture book packed with wonderful, quirky, amusing and delightful images from the British Museum. There is no text at all: the pictures, and combinations of pictures, speak for themselves. This makes the book accessible to all ages. Quite young children will enjoy examining and talking about the pictures; even adult visitors familiar with the museums galleries will find much to surprise and entertain them. Every reader is likely to be surprised at the breadth and variety of images, all of which come from the British Museum.

Isaac played a pivotal role in that significant moment in the black diaspora arts, when gay sexuality, masculinity and race exploded into the same visual frame. -Stuart Hall Riot is an intellectual biography of artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (born 1960), looking at key moments in his career and discussing the influences that shaped them. Julien's trail-blazing career has moved across film and art, documentary, biography, narrative film and multi-screen installation, and has drawn on influences as disparate as silent cinema, cultural studies, Chinese myth and pirate radio culture. Riot is the first career-long overview on Julien, situating his work in the context of his personal and intellectual development: the friendships, mentors, night clubs, films, politics, records and the artworks that informed his practice. The backdrop to Julien's own story is a collage of some of the most important political and cultural events of the past 30 years: Thatcherism and the rise of neo-liberalism, the AIDS epidemic, punk rock, social riots, the globalization of the art market and the movement of filmmakers into the gallery.

The 2021 Capitol Hill Riot marked a watershed moment when the 'old world' of factbased systems of representation was briefly overwhelmed by the emerging hyper-individual politics of aestheticized emotion. In The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Kit Messham-Muir and Uros Cvoro analyse the aesthetics that have emerged at the core of 21st-century politics, and which erupted at the US Capitol in January 2021. Looking at this event's aesthetic dimensions through such aspects as QAnon, white resentment and strongman authoritarianism, they examine the world-wide historical trends towards ethno-nationalism and populism that emerged following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the dawning of the current post-ideological age. Building on their ground-breaking research into how trauma, emotion and empathy have become well-worn tropes in contemporary art informed by conflict, Messham-Muir and Cvoro go further by highlighting the ways in which art can actively disrupt an underlying drift in society towards white supremacism and ultranationalism. Utilising their outsiders' perspective on a so-called American phenomenon, and rejecting American exceptionalism, their theorising of the 'Trump Effect' rejects the idea of Trump as a political aberration, but as a symptom of deeper and longer-term philosophical shifts in global politics and society. As theorists of contemporary art and visual culture, Messham-Muir and Cvoro explore the ways in which these features of the Trump Effect operate through aesthetics, in the intersection of politics and contemporary art, and provide valuable insight into the current political context.

Takashi Murakami (b. 1962), one of contemporary art s most widely recognized exponents, receives a long-awaited critical consideration in this important volume. Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition devoted solely to Murakami s paintings, this book traces Murakami s career from his earliest training to his current studio practice. Where other books address the commercial aspects of Murakami s work, this is the first serious survey of his work as a painter. Through essays and illustrations many previously unpublished it explores the artist s relationship to the tradition of Japanese painting and his facility in straddling high and low, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, commercial and high art. New texts address Murakami s output in the context of postwar Japan, situating the artist in relation to folklore, traditional Japanese painting, the Tokyo art scene in the 1980s and 1990s, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This richly illustrated volume also includes a detailed biography and exhibition history. Takashi Murakami is a true essential for collectors and fans alike.

After punk's arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how England's state-funded education policy brought together art students from different social classes to create a fertile ground for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional music scene of lasting international significance.