Henri Rousseau was the first naive artist in the history of Western art to be recognized for his true worth. His paintings have now entered popular consciousness to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine how strongly they were resisted at the time. Much of the credit for his transformation is due to the author of these Recollections, dealer and art historian Wilhelm Uhde. It was Uhde who mounted the first exhibition of Rousseau's work, and the catalog he wrote for the occasion is the basis of the Recollections. In it, he painted a picture of a man of naivete, humor, and total commitment to an art of whose importance he was utterly convinced.

In his Illuminated Books, William Blake combined text and imagery on a single page in a way that had not been done since the Middle Ages. For Blake, religion and politics, intellect and emotion, mind and body were both unified and in conflict with each other: his work is expressive of his personal mythology, and his methods of conveying it were integral to its meaning. There is no comparison with reading books such as Jerusalem, America, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Blake's own medium, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colors. Tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction, and liberation. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now, for the first time, the plates from the William Blake Trust's Collected Edition have been brought together in a single volume, with transcripts of the texts and an introduction by the noted scholar David Bindman. Includes: Jerusalem; Songs of Innocence and of Experience; All Religions are One; There is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; America a Prophecy; Europe a Prophecy; The Song of Los Milton a Poem; The Ghost of Abel; On Homers Poetry and] On Virgil; Laocoon; The First Book of Urizen; The Book of Ahania; The Book of Los.

Swiss critic Johann Georg Sulzer's Dialogues on the Beauty of Nature (1750) and Reflections on Certain Topics of Natural History (1745) are exemplary specimens of eighteenth-century European theology, philosophy, natural history, and aesthetics. Sulzer's contemporaries-notably Goethe-read him with attention. Eric Miller's elegant translation comes with a vivid, informative, and strongly contextualizing introduction. Sulzer's early works are a curio cabinet of the philosophical and theological arguments that exercised and enticed the intelligentsia of his period. These topics and arguments have by no means forfeited pertinence today.

This is a story about rivalry among artists. Not the kind of rivalry that grows out of hatred and dislike, but rather, rivalry that emerges from admiration, friendship, love. The kind of rivalry that existed between Degas and Manet, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon. These were some of the most famous and creative relationships in the history of art, driving each individual to heights of creativity and inspiration - and provoking them to despair, jealousy and betrayal. Matisse's success threatened Picasso so much that his friends would throw darts at a portrait of his rival's beloved daughter Marguerite, shouting 'there's one in the eye for Matisse!' And Willem de Kooning's twisted friendship with Jackson Pollock didn't stop him taking up with his friend's lover barely a year after Pollock's fatal car crash. In The Art of Rivalry, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee explores how, as both artists struggled to come into their own, they each played vital roles in provoking the other's creative breakthroughs - ultimately determining the course of modern art itself.

The fourteen paintings reviewed in this study chronicle industrial artist Howard L. Worner's interpretation of the steel industry. By employing ethnographic techniques to his art, Worner contributed much to the understanding of the 'culture of work.' Worner identified closely with the occupational community he was painting by becoming an observer as well as a participant. Over time, he developed a rapport with the community and an acute understanding of its environmental processes. Worner used vibrant color, on-location painting, and a deep understanding of his subject to powerfully depict the rich culture of the steel mills. This book will provide students of art education a better understanding of the genre through artistic ethnography and interpretation, as well as an excellent overview of industrial art.

This is an authoritative account of the Italian painter, architect and draughtsman, Raphael, one of the most influential artists of the High Renaissance. It is a lively study that examines his life, the areas of Italy that shaped his work and the historical context of the times. It explores his innovative style and his compassionate depictions of Madonna and child groups, his portraits and his works based on Bible stories and myths. It features a wonderful gallery of his paintings and drawings with expert analysis, and descriptions of his style and technique. It includes beautiful illustrations of Raphael's great works, those of the painters who influenced him, as well as artists who were inspired by him in turn. Artist, architect and draughtsman, one of the great masters and one of the most influential painters of the High Renaissance, Raphael produced a huge body of work during his short working life. His artistic development took place in Umbria, Rome and Florence, where he met Michelangelo and Leonardo, and was influenced by their dynamic and evocative images. Some of his subsequent work reflected his admiration for them. In Rome, he painted The School of Athens, a major fresco depicting the greatest thinkers and philosophers of the past and present. His beautiful style is reflected in the second part of the book in a gallery of around 300 of Raphael's major paintings and drawings, with an analysis of each in the context of his life, his technique and oeuvre. Raphael was one of the greatest artists of all time; his death in 1520 marked the end of the 16th century.

In 1998, TASCHEN introduced the world to the masterful art of Touko Laaksonen with The Art of Pleasure. Prior to that, Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, enjoyed an intense cult following in the international gay community but was largely unknown to a broader audience. In 2009, TASCHEN followed up with the ultimate Tom overview: Tom of Finland XXL, a beautiful big collector's edition with over 1,000 images, covering six decades of the artist's career. The work was gathered from collections across the United States and Europe with the help of the Tom of Finland Foundation, featuring many drawings, paintings, and sketches never previously reproduced. Other images had only been seen out of context and were finally presented in the sequential order Tom intended for full artistic appreciation and erotic impact. The elegant oversized volume showed the full range of Tom's talent, from sensitive portraits to frank sexual pleasure to tender expressions of love and haunting tributes to young men struck down by AIDS, and was completed by eight commissioned essays on Tom's social and personal impact by Camille Paglia, John Waters, Armistead Maupin, Todd Oldham, and others, plus a scholarly analysis of individual drawings by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith. The only thing missing from Tom of Finland XXL was a widely affordable price tag-until now. The new Tom of Finland XXL is still big enough to work your biceps, and includes all of the original content, but costs a fraction of the original price. You're welcome.

Keith Haring was a revolutionary artist, who transformed the art world during his short but impactful life. Brought to life by Simon Doonan, Creative Director for Barneys New York, this new pocket-sized biography tells his inspirational story.

Revolutionary and renegade, Keith Haring was an artist for the people, creating an instantly recognisable repertoire of symbols - barking dogs, space-ships, crawling babies, clambering faceless people - which became synonymous with the volatile culture of 1980s. Like a careening, preening pinball, Keith Haring playfully slammed into all aspects of this decade - hip-hop, new-wave, graffiti, funk, art, style, gay culture - and brought them together.

Haring's fanatical drive propelled him into the orbit of the most interesting people of his time: Jean Michel Basquiat envied him; Warhol, William Boroughs and Grace Jones collaborated with him. Madonna and he shared the same tastes in men. Famous at 25, dead from AIDS at 31, Keith Haring is remembered as a Pied Piper, an unpretentious communicator who appeared happiest when mentoring a gang of kids, arming them with brushes and attacking the nearest wall.

A series of brief biographies of the great artists, Lives of the Artists takes as its inspiration Giorgio Vasari's five-hundred-year-old masterwork, updating it with modern takes on the lives of key artists past and present. Focusing on the life of the artist rather than examining their work, each book also includes key images illustrating the artist's life. Hardbound, but pocket-sized, the books each sport a specially-commissioned portrait of their subject on the half-jacket.

Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback (1943 2003) created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer. Drawing on Sandback's substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist's work with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback's site-determined practice draws viewers' focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback's art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.

More than an index to the nine volumes of letters, this volume is a concise guide to an entire cultural era seen through the lens of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Volume 10 of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the first ever analytical and biographical index to all Rossetti's letters from 1835-82. It gives readers the widest possible contextual access to all names of persons, places, works of art, writings, movements, organizations and activities, both physical and intellectual, mentioned in these letters with their annotations and appendices. But this index, augmenting the partial ones in Vols2 and 5, is far more than a simple listing of names: it also serves as a subject index, providing mini-precis descriptions of the information detailed in the annotated letter texts. Subheadings within entries depend on the complexity of the subject and may include letters to/from (for recipients) and lists of artistic and literary works by Rossetti's correspondents, or predecessors such as Blake, Keats and Coleridge. It is a concise guide to an entire cultural era. Since Rossetti is the lens through which all other entries are filtered, his own entry is divided into multiple subheadings to facilitate easy access. The researcher can quickly locate all references to the sonnet sequence The House of Life, the various versions of the Proserpine picture or the complex relationship of his drug use to Rossetti's life and work.

Instrumental in the formation of the underground comics scene in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb has ruptured and expanded the boundaries of the graphic arts, redefining comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms. Presenting a slice of Crumb's unique universe, this book features a wide array of printed matter culled from the artist's five-decade career-tear sheets of drawings and comics taken directly from the publications where the works first appeared, magazine and album covers, broadsides from the 1960s and 1970s, tabloids from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, Oakland, Manhattan's Lower East Side, and other counterculture enclaves, as well as exhibition ephemera. Complementing this volume are historical works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have inspired Crumb and pages from his rarely seen sketchbooks from the 1970s and 1980s that reveal his exemplary skill as a draftsman. Documenting the critically acclaimed exhibition Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, curated by Robert Storr, this publication offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in Crumb's singular mind. In the accompanying text, Storr explores the challenging nature of some of Crumb's work and the importance of artists who take on the status quo.

'[Beardsley's] vision is permanently that of a child lying in bed watching his mother dress for a dinner-party... He is allured, yet afraid to touch: driven back on a cold minuteness of detailed attention, and yet passionately curious, with the emotional and involved curiosity children give to sex.' Brigid Brophy first published her study of 'the most intensely and electrically erotic artist in the world' in 1968, at the height of her own powers and in the moment of a notable revival of interest - both scholarly and pop-cultural (amid 'the dandified realm of Carnavy Street') - in Beardsley's work. An infant prodigy, Beardsley retained through the brief years of his adult life the peculiar genius of a precocious child, and Brophy, well-versed in Freudian analyses, adroitly points out the polymorphous perversity of his pictures - that perversity, coupled with his inimitable graphic/monochromatic signature, accounting for why Beardsley, however 'high-baroque rococo' his style, has remained endlessly modern.

Written by Musa Mayer - Philip Guston's daughter and President of The Guston Foundation - this book brings Guston's life and his hugely rich and diverse output together into one succinct volume. Split into three sections covering Guston's early career, his mid-century Abstract Expressionist work, and his controversial but now hugely influential late period, the book offers a complete introduction and overview of a mercurial figure.

To his contemporaries in late 16th-century Venice, El Greco (1541 -1614) was a contrary fellow, an innate artist blessed with extraordinary talent, but stubborn in the pursuit of his own path. Throughout his career, as he progressed from Crete to Venice, to Rome and ultimately Toledo, Spain, "The Greek" stood apart from his peers, merging different Western art traditions to create a unique pictorial language. El Greco's single-minded style rejected naturalism and rejected accessibility. Works such as The Disrobing of Christ (1577-79), The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586-88), and The Vision of St John (1608-14) reveal elongated, twisted figures; unreal colors; and an experimental rendering of space - all resistant to easy viewing and intent, instead, on an art of epic grandeur and intellectual beauty. Frequently regarded with suspicion and criticism during his lifetime, El Greco was revived by a troop of ardent modern admirers, including Pablo Picasso, Roger Fry, and Der Blaue Reiter pioneer Franz Marc. Today, the artist belongs to the privileged group of great old master painters, as much an anomaly of his age, as a reference point across the centuries. This essential introduction from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 explores the influences and the ingredients of El Greco's radical and singular vision, from the symbolic world of Byzantine icons and the humanistic values of the Renaissance to the nascent beginnings of conceptual practice. 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

John Constable is one of the greatest painters of the English weather. His depictions of the sky are essential components of all his landscape paintings, from famous works such as The Hay Wain and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows to his numerous cloud studies painted on Hampstead Heath, culminating in paintings in which the landscape beneath the ever-changing sky is completely absent. Constable kept a weather diary and was endlessly fascinated by the sky. In a letter written in 1821 to friend John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, Constable commented, 'That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids ... It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.' Written by Mark Evans, a leading authority on the work of John Constable, Constable's Skies captures the artist's fascination with the sky and brings together his depictions of the English weather from throughout his career. It will appeal to a broad readership of museum visitors and art lovers, as well as practising landscape painters keen to learn new skills by studying the work of one of the most enduringly popular English artists of all time.

The expression 'the Zola of Sculpture' was coined in the circles of the Royal Academy in the 1880s as a term of abuse. Rodin: 'The Zola of Sculpture' reveals how the appraisal of Rodin in British culture was shaped by controversies around the literary models of Zola and Baudelaire, in a period when negative notions about French culture were being progressively transformed into positive expressions of modern sculpture. Embedded within this collaborative book is the editor's proposition that Rodin came to play an important role in the cultural politics of the Entente Cordiale at a critical juncture of European history. Encompassing new scholarship in several disciplines, drawn from both sides of the Channel, Rodin: 'The Zola of Sculpture' offers the first in-depth account of Rodin's career in Britain in the period 1880-1914 and weaves this historical trajectory into a complex investigation of the interactions between French and British cultures. The authors examine the cultural agencies in which conceptions of Rodin's practice played a defining role, dealing in turn with artists' professional associations, art criticism, private and public collectors and the education of women sculptors.

The Art of Eliza Ivanova is an evocative, edgy, and beautiful book filled with the work of this exciting artist. A graduate of the California Institute of Arts, Bulgarian-born Eliza now lives in San Francisco where she created much of the art on these pages. She produces effortless movement with her sketched lines and animation-influenced dynamic touches. Well known for her portraits and figures of women and children, Eliza's style is distinctive and rich in detail. In addition to a gallery filled with a mix of old favorites, new creations and bespoke commissions for this book, you will be invited into Eliza's world. Enter her studio to discover her workspace and favorite tools. Eliza also shares techniques with us in step-by-step workshops to help us capture some of that dynamic movement that infuses her work. Both aspiring and established artists will benefit from Eliza's technical tips and words of wisdom about life, work, and more.

One of the most wide-ranging and ambitious creative minds of his generation, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has produced a dizzying spectrum of work around the world. Best known for his large-scale public works in a wide range of settings, from museums to gardens, his constant inventiveness and publicly oriented projects across the globe have entranced huge numbers of people. Focusing on a single artwork situated across a large site in his native country, the project's title refers to the glaciers that formed the landscape around sites in Denmark, as can still be seen in the country's topography and geology. Five mirrors, ranging from a perfect circle to elongated ellipses, reflect the changing sky above and the contemplator's own gaze as if in the surfaces of glacial pools. This book offers a unique and highly detailed insight, captured over the course of four seasons, of a singular landscape. Working with geologists, landscape architects and other specialists, Eliasson has created a unique space seen by few. This publication documents and enhances the work itself through photographs, essays and collaborators who render the poetic power of the project in images and words. Exquisitely produced and packaged in a limited quantity, this very special volume is a gift to collectors, bibliophiles and all those seeking new perspectives on one of the world's leading artists.