Belgian artist Rene Magritte's biography is a key element of his art. His life is infused with bizarre moments: a surreal journey oscillating between fact and fiction that he always conducted as the straight-faced bowler-hatted man. The events of Magritte's childhood played an important part in creating the surrealist, but it was his popular culture borrowings from crime fiction, advertising and postcards that has made his work instantly recognizable. The often unreliable nature of Magritte's accounts of his own life have transformed his public image into a kind of fictional character rather than a 'real person'. He would shape his own life story to be its own surreal work of art.

Delve behind the scenes of artist Eric Guillon's artwork for Illumination and Entertainment's popular films, including Despicable Me, Sing, and upcoming The Secret Life of Pets 2. Illumination Entertainment has produced some of this century's most popular and successful animated films all over the world. Artist Eric Guillon helped design many of the most beloved and iconic characters for these films, such as Gru and the Mininons from Despicable Me, the adorable animals in The Secret Life of Pets, and more. Explore behind the scenes of Eric Guillon's artwork with this comprehensive coffee table book, which delves into Guillon's creative process and Illumination Entertainment's hit films. The Illumination Art of Eric Guillon features never-before-seen concept art, sketches, film stills, and other unique graphics, tracing the animation process from start to finish, and examines Guillon's many different roles, ranging from art director, character designer, and production designer to co-director.

Norman Rockwell gave us a picture of America that was familiar - astonishingly so - and at the same time unique, because only he could bring it to life with such authority. Rockwell best expressed this vision of America in his justly famous cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, painted between 1916 and 1963. All of his Post covers are reproduced in splendid full colour in this oversized volume, with commentaries by Christopher Finch, the noted writer on art and popular culture.

John Ruskin assembled 1470 diverse works of art for use in the Drawing School he founded at Oxford in 1871. They included drawings by himself and other artists, prints and photographs. This book focuses on highlights of works produced by Ruskin himself. Drawings by John Ruskin are uniquely interesting. Unlike those of a professional artist they were not made in preparation for finished paintings or as works in their own right. Every one - and they number several thousand, depending on what can be considered a separate drawing - is a record of something seen, initially as a memorandum of that observation but with the potential to illustrate his writings or for educational purposes, notably to form part of the teaching collection of the Drawing School he established after election as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. In addition, because of the range of interests of arguably the only true polymath of his time, every drawing touches on some interesting aspect of art and architecture, landscape and travel, botany and natural history, often connected with his writings and lectures. Ruskin's life is one of the best documented of any in the 19th century, through letters, diaries and the many autobiographical revelations in his published writings: this allows the opportunity to give almost any drawing a level of context impossible for any other artist. When there is so much background information, a single drawing reveals much about its creator, and becomes a window into the great sprawling edifice of his life and work.

Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemars Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists before it was censored during the era of Soviet realism. This volume introduces Markov as an innovative and pioneering art photographer and assembles, for the first time, five of his most important essays. The translations of these hard-to-find texts are fresh, unabridged, and authentically poetic. Critical essays by Jeremy Howard and Irena Buzinska situate his work in the larger phenomenon of Russian 'primitivism', i.e. the search for the primal. This book challenges hardening narratives of primitivism by reexamining the enthusiasm for world art in the early modern period from the perspective of Russia rather than Western Europe. Markov composed what may be the first book on African art and Z.S. Strother analyzes both the text and its photographs for their unique interpretation of West African sculpture as a Kantian 'play of masses and weights'. The book will appeal to students of modernism, orientalism, 'primitivism', historiography, African art, and the history of the photography of sculpture.

This is a fundamental reassessment of the work of William Holman Hunt, and the first critical text to reproduce his pictures in colour and set him on an international stage. Introducing a new critique of the autobiography and drawing on hundreds of private letters, drawings and paintings, the author depicts a radical man of his times, deeply troubled by the pivotal concerns of the materialist age - the isolation of the individual, the collapse of faith and the status of art - and seeking solutions through a systematic testing of the extremes of painting. A close examination of the pictures, including neglected later works, combined with recent scientific research relate the physical act of painting, and the paint, back to the body of the artist. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this book answers the longstanding lack of any monograph on Hunt and will make compelling reading for undergraduate and graduate students of History of Art, Victorian Studies, English Literature and Religious Studies, as well as curators, conservators and the artist's many admirers. -- .

A lavish, full-colour hardcover art book taking readers on a visual guide through Stephen Hickman's artwork. The collection focuses on his book covers for famous SFF authors such as Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffrey, and Larry Niven.

As a land artist Strijdom van der Merwe uses the materials provided by the chosen site. His sculptural forms take shape in relation to the landscape. It is a process of working with the natural world using sand, water, wood and rocks, he shapes these elements into geometrical forms that participate with their environment, continually changing until their final probable destruction. He observes the fragility of beauty while not lamenting its passing. What remains is a photographic image, a fragment of the imagination. While a visual record is materially all that is left, he also leaves us a reminder of the capacity, however feeble, of an individual to alter the universe by embracing the ceaseless changing of nature, actively contributing to it and in so doing, modulating and beautifying the outcome.

Sung closely examines William Blake's extant engraved copper plates and arrives at a new interpretation of his working process. Sung suggests that Blake revised and corrected his work more than was previously thought. This belies the Romantic ideal that the acts of conception and execution are simultaneous in the creative process.

Covers approximately 250 sales of Old Masters since 1980, with an average of five listings from each sale. There are 2,700 signature examples of 1,700 artists. Three sections following the main body of this volume offer the researcher easy cross-referencing monograms and initials, symbols, and alternate names. The appendix includes supplemental signature information on additional artists whose actual signatures were not available, but whose importance could not be omitted.

"When you land on this book, if you do not yet have an appreciation of butterflies or Chan's workmanship, after reading, it will leave you in awe of both."-Beth Bernstein, Forbes "When I was a young boy, butterflies were flying colours - I knew not their name. Then butterflies became the Butterfly Lovers: a tragedy, a love story, a symbol of eternal love. As I grew older, I found them to embody the words of a great philosopher: life is but a dream; only we need to decide whether we want it to be the dream of a man, or the dream of a butterfly. I could not decide, and so I became The Butterfly Man." - Wallace Chan Father of The Wallace Cut - an illusionary three-dimensional gemstone carving technique - and The Wallace Chan Porcelain - a ground-breaking material five times stronger than steel - Wallace Chan is a guiding light in the world of jewellery design. Always innovating, always testing boundaries with his materials and technique, Chan's creations are as stunning as they are intricate. Compiled by jewellery experts, this book explores the cultural and personal significance of Wallace Chan's most famous emblem: the butterfly. Winged Beauty: The Butterfly Jewellery Art of Wallace Chan features approximately 30 of his finest pieces. Enter a butterfly house of colourful gems, with brooches and necklaces so delicate they might have flown down and alighted on the page.

The Short Story of Women Artists tells the full history - from the breakthroughs that women have made in pushing for parity with male artists, to the important contributions made to otherwise male-dominated artistic movements, and the forgotten and obscured artists who are now being rediscovered and reassessed. Accessible, concise and richly illustrated, the book reveals the connections between different periods, artists and styles, giving readers a thorough understanding and broad enjoyment of the full achievements that female artists have made.

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids. These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist. This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

A deluxe art book showcasing Posuka Demizu's incredible artwork from the hit manga series. A beautiful hardcover art book featuring full-color art, sketches, comments, and a Q&A with Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu about their popular manga series. Featuring Posuka Demizu's incredible artwork, as well as creator commentary and interviews, The Promised Neverland: Art Book World is a beautiful and haunting gaze into the art of one of today's most popular Shonen Jump manga series.