Known for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and "continuous" looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist's oeuvre to date--ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping--all providing an expansive look into the artist's life. A document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa's spectacular oeuvre. With an introduction by Molesworth, this book features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a German-born biologist, naturalist, evolutionist, artist, philosopher, and doctor who spent his life researching flora and fauna from the highest mountaintops to the deepest ocean. A vociferous supporter and developer of Darwin's theories of evolution, he denounced religious dogma, authored philosophical treatises, gained a doctorate in zoology, and coined scientific terms which have passed into common usage, including ecology, phylum, and stem cell. At the heart of Haeckel's colossal legacy was the motivation not only to discover but also to explain. To do this, he created hundreds of detailed drawings, watercolors, and sketches of his findings which he published in successive volumes, including several marine organism collections and the majestic Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), which could serve as the cornerstone of Haeckel's entire life project. Like a meticulous visual encyclopedia of living things, Haeckel's work was as remarkable for its graphic precision and meticulous shading as for its understanding of organic evolution. From bats to the box jellyfish, lizards to lichen, and spider legs to sea anemones, Haeckel emphasized the essential symmetries and order of nature, and found biological beauty in even the most unlikely of creatures. In this book, we celebrate the scientific, artistic, and environmental importance of Haeckel's work, with a collection of 300 of his finest prints from several of his most important tomes, including Die Radiolarien, Monographie der Medusen, Die Kalkschwamme, and Kunstformen der Natur. At a time when biodiversity is increasingly threatened by human activities, the book is at once a visual masterwork, an underwater exploration, and a vivid reminder of the precious variety of life. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

One of "The Eight"--a major group in the history of American painting--John Sloan was also an illustrator and cartoonist. Sloan kept an almost daily diary for eight years, for the most part to entertain his first wife, Dolly. Sloan's second wife and widow, Helen Fan Sloan, turned over the diaries and his letters, as well as notes and drawings to Bruce St. John of the Delaware Art Center, which houses the Sloan collection.

John Sloan was interested in every social issue that went on around him: the people across the street, the people in the parks, and the policies of his country. He and Dolly entertained almost every night, though they were so poor that often the only dish was spaghetti, and their guests included Robert Henri (Sloan's mentor) and Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, Rollin Kirby, Stuart Davis (and his father), Alexander Calder (and his father), Rockwell Kent, John Butler Yeats, William Glackens, and George Luks.

Even if John Sloan had not been such an important figure in the American art world, these diaries would be splendid reading: they reveal a perceptive man and the city that fascinated him during one of its most interesting epochs. The editor writes that Sloan "was a direct and honest man, not afraid of expressing his opinions." This fascinating, unique, first-person view of New York City is a masterpiece. This edition includes a new introduction by Herbert I. London, providing insight into the social and political vision that animated Sloan's art.

Students new to the work of William Morris will find the full range of his achievements covered in this reissue of Peter Faulkner's excellent biography, first published in 1980. The author has carefully placed Morris in the context of the Victorian age, but has also suggested the relevance of his ideas today. The six chapters are organised biographically and cover all aspects of Morris's work in poetry, fiction, design and socialist politics. The emphasis is on his continuous struggle against the age in which he lived, seen as an idealism which went through various stages from the wistfulness of The Earthly Paradise through the practical activities of the firm of Morris & Company to the socialism of Morris's later years. The book quotes freely from writings by Morris not easily accessible at present and gives an overall account from which the student can develop his specialist interests. This reissue will appeal to sixth-formers and undergraduates interested in the Victorian period, as seen through one of its most striking personalities.

The first major monograph on Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), a leading Chinese contemporary artist, world-renowned for his haunting, surrealist works. Both a retrospective of his paintings and a biography of his dramatic life, Zhang Xiaogang: Disquieting Memories is a key resource for academia and art enthusiasts alike. This book features all of the artist's iconic series - major works as well as lesser-hyphen;known drawings - and never-before-published letters dating from the early 1980s between the artist and his friends. These offer an inside view of everyday life in China, historic and political events, as well as invaluable insight into Zhang's artistic practice. With a chronology illustrated with personal photographs from the artist's archive, this is the most comprehensive account of the artist's life and work.

The work of Robert Rauschenberg has had a profound impact on avant-garde art from the 1950s onwards. A pioneer of multimedia are, this book explores his experimentations from his Combines (works melding painting and sculpture), prints, silkscreen paintings to his use of technology and his collaborations with choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. This book explores his work.

American artist Brice Marden has had a profound impact on painting today. While there has been a sea change in art movements, Marden has unwaveringly adhered to modernist principles of abstraction. From his early monochrome paintings to landscapes of China or the Greek island, Hydra, composed of vivid and calligraphice loops and webs, Marden's deeply personal work incorporates multiple art historical and cultural inspirations. This book explores his work.

Craving pleasure as well as knowledge, Raphael Sanzio was quick to realize that his talent would only be truly appreciated in the liberal, carefree and extravagantly sensual atmosphere of Rome during its golden age under Julius II and Leo X. Arriving in the city in 1508 at the age of twenty-five, he was entranced and seduced by life at the papal court and within a few months had emerged as the most brilliant star in its intellectual firmament. His art achieved a natural grace that was totally uninhibited and free from subjection. His death, at just thirty-seven, plunged the city into the kind of despair that follows the passing of an esteemed and much loved prince.In this major new biography Antonio Forcellino retraces the meteoric arc of Raphael's career by re-examining contemporary documents and accounts and interpreting the artist's works with the eye of an expert art restorer. Raphael's paintings are vividly described and placed in their historical context. Forcellino analyses Raphael's techniques for producing the large frescos for which he is so famous, examines his working practices and his organization of what was a new kind of artistic workshop, and shows how his female portraits expressed and conveyed a new attitude to women. This rich and nuanced account casts aside the misconceptions passed on by those critics who persistently tried to undermine Raphael's mythical status, enabling one of the greatest artists of all time to re-emerge fully as both man and artist.

A long-overdue reassessment of one of the most important and influential woman artists working at midcentury Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a German textile designer, weaver, and printmaker, and among the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Although she has heavily influenced generations of artists and designers, her contribution to modernist art history has been comparatively overlooked, especially in relation to that of her husband, Josef. In this groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated volume, Albers's most important works are examined to fully explore and redefine her contribution to 20th-century art and design and highlight her significance as an artist in her own right. Featured works--from her early activity at the Bauhaus as well as from her time at Black Mountain College, and spanning her entire fruitful career--include wall hangings, designs for commercial use, drawings and studies, jewelry, and prints. Essays by international experts focus on key works and themes, relate aspects of Albers's practice to her seminal texts On Designing and On Weaving, and identify broader contextual material, including examples of the Andean textiles that Albers collected and in which she found inspiration for her understanding of woven thread as a form of language. Illuminating Albers's skill as a weaver, her material awareness, and her deep understanding of art and design, this publication celebrates an artist of enormous importance and showcases the timeless nature of her creativity.

The bamboo: tall, strong and flexible. This fast-growing shoot has been used as a construction material, a foodstuff and fuel for millennia, from India to Japan. Tanabe Chikuunsai IV's art elevates bamboo to new heights. By weaving together small pieces of fibrous stalk, he creates vast, detailed sculptures without the use of rivets or adhesives. Under Chikuunsai IV's skilled craftsmanship, bamboo is more than a functional tool: it is modern art, a unifying symbol of Japanese culture. His sculptures revere traditional workmanship, while conveying important contemporary messages - the codependence of nature and man, and the importance of protecting our environment. Part autobiography, part introduction to the craft, this monograph follows Chikuunsai IV's growth from a child marvelling at his grandfather's mastery of bamboo, to a maestro in his own right. Bamboo weaves his past to his present, providing a sturdy foundation on which his art continues to build. "Love bamboos, live with bamboos," says Chikuunsai IV. As this book demonstrates, he has done precisely that.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1950s, German writer and artist Unica Zurn produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material within psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. While Zurn is often discussed in relation to her partner, the controversial artist Hans Bellmer, this innovative book moves beyond the familiar model of the overlooked 'significant other' and re-introduces her as a member of the French Surrealist group. This is the first monograph on the life and work of the Unica Zurn in English. Esra Plumer presents Zurn's life and work in light of the artist's individual experiences with WWII, Post-war Surrealism and mental illness, at the same time revealing wider aspects of her artistic practice in relation to her contemporaries. She also reveals how the techniques of anagrams and automatism (writing and drawing methods designed to unlock the subconscious mind) form the pillars of Zurn's artistic creative output, which carry her work into the wider theoretical circles of psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralist thought.

Focusing on his evocative and profound references to children and their stories, Children's Stories and 'Child-Time' in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde studies the relationship between the artist's work on childhood and his search for a transfigured concept of time. This study also situates Cornell and his art in the broader context of the transatlantic avant-garde of the 1930s and 40s. Analisa Leppanen-Guerra explores the children's stories that Cornell perceived as fundamental in order to unpack the dense network of associations in his under-studied multimedia works. Moving away from the usual focus on his box constructions, the author directs her attention to Cornell's film and theater scenarios, 'explorations', 'dossiers', and book-objects. One highlight of this study is a work that may well be the first artist's book of its kind, and has only been exhibited twice: Untitled (Journal d'Agriculture Pratique), presented as Cornell's enigmatic tribute to Lewis Carroll's Alice books.

This book analyses the animal images used in William Hogarth's art, demonstrating how animals were variously depicted as hybrids, edibles, companions, emblems of satire and objects of cruelty. Beirne offers an important assessment of how Hogarth's various audiences reacted to his gruesome images and ultimately what was meant by 'cruelty'.

It happened after leaving the Slade School of Art. Anthony Green realised that Mary Cozens-Walker would be the subject of his life's work. Anthony's Green art foregrounding his wife, Mary Cozens-Walker has resulted in an impressive body of work. It encompassed over 50 years of creative enterprise: paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1988, Green has produced two to three prints each year, many of which have featured at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. Anthony Green: Printed Pictures features the University of Buckingham Collection which included almost all of Green's prints to date. His extraordinarily colourful palette has been faithfully reproduced, alongside captions for each print, revealing new and specific information about their background and production. Dr Paul Davis' fascinating introductory essay draws on the recent interviews with Anthony Green, as well as art critics' opinions, past and present, from the UK and beyond.

In How to See, David Salle explores how art works and how it moves us, informs us and challenges us. This internationally renowned painter's incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide range of Salle's friends and contemporaries-from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein and Alex Katz-How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres. Salle writes with humour and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the reader develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result is a master class on how to see with an artist's eye.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible and revealing analysis of his work. With more than 850 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions. Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.

The first book-length feminist analysis of Eileen Gray's work, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In argues that Gray's unusual architecture and design - as well as its history of abuse and neglect - emerged from her involvement with cultures of sapphic modernism. Bringing together a range of theoretical and historical sources, from architecture and design, communication and media, to gender and sexuality studies, Jasmine Rault shows that Gray shared with many of her female contemporaries a commitment to designing spaces for sexually dissident modernity. This volume examines Gray's early lacquer work and Romaine Brooks' earliest nude paintings; Gray's first built house, E.1027, in relation to Radclyffe Hall and her novel The Well of Loneliness; and Gray's private house, Tempe A Pailla, with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. While both female sexual dissidence and modernist architecture were reduced to rigid identities through mass media, women such as Gray, Brooks, Hall and Barnes resisted the clarity of such identities with opaque, non-communicative aesthetics. Rault demonstrates that by defying the modern imperative to publicity, clarity and identity, Gray helped design a sapphic modernity that cultivated the dynamism of uncertain bodies and unfixed pleasures, which depended on staying in rather than coming out.

A beautiful new gift art book all about Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist behind the first truly Expressionist picture The Scream. Absorbed by such motifs as love, life, death and anguish, Munch's paintings captured the psychological feelings evoked by man. Beginning with a fresh and captivating introduction to Munch's life and art, the book showcases several of his works in all their glory.

Kurt Jackson's Botanical Landscape is a new collection of poems, paintings, drawings, sculptures and printmaking by the artist and staunch environmentalist: responses to his engagement with and rich experience within the natural world of flora. From day-to-day plants - weeds, the flowers in the hedge, familiar trees and the vegetable garden - to the more unusual, twisted forms and strange fruit of the undergrowth, Jackson's works celebrate the staggering diversity of the plant kingdom. For the art enthusiast, the naturalist, the gardener and the armchair horticulturist, Kurt Jackson's Botanical Landscape maps a particularly expressive communion with nature and offers a unique and beguiling interpretation of the natural world.

Bartolome de Cardenas, known as "el Bermejo" (fl 1468-1495), was the most interesting painter of his generation in a time of great artistic and cultural as well as historic change in Spain. Originally from Cordoba, Bermejo appears to have received training directly in Northern Europe in the new technique of oil glazes. During his fascinating career he sometimes drew on the local "art scene" producing altarpieces of astounding quality. This monograph will examine Bermejo's career in the various cities in the Crown of Aragon where he worked: Valencia, Daroca, Zaragoza, and Barcelona."

Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore (1692-1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore's small oil painting known as The Angel of Mercy (1746, Yale), one of the most shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art. The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted fi gure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story - certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the `modern moral subject' of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this signifi cant British artist. Highmore expert, Jacqueline Riding, will set this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist's life and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This will include exploration of superb examples of Highmore's portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale `conversations' The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family, juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the Foundling Museum's Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore's `Pamela' series, inspired by Samuel Richardson's bestselling novel. Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues around the status and care of women and children, master/servant relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder.