Kinbaku is the Japanese word for rope bondage: In the west it is often referred to as Shibari. Although it originated in Japan as a means of restraint and torture, during the last hundred years it has also been used as an activity which gives emotional, physical, and visual pleasure for the participants. Nawashi Murakawa, the Artistic Director of the annual London festival of the Art of Japanese Rope Bondage provides the historical context for the practice which goes back 12000 years. He also explains how Kinbaku has developed as a dramatic art form which is performed in front of audiences in many countries. This series of ten chapters demonstrates how the art of rope bondage has developed in the UK, Russia, Canada and the USA as well as presenting a modern day live performance in Tokyo. The final section shows more traditional Japanese techniques. Chapters with Japanese contributors provide the text in Japanese as well as in English. The stunning and surprising photographs reveal the beauty and daring of the models, and their written accounts together with those of the photographers and rope experts give an insight into the lifestyle of those who practice this particular fetish.

Step inside a world of arcane imagery and rich esoteric symbolism in this deeply imaginative embroidery art book! Author Gayla Partridge draws upon her knowledge of phrenology, anatomy, floral design and Ouija to create unique twists on an age-old craft. Through extraordinary, stylised photography and detailed close-ups of designs, the pieces in 'Stitchcraft' are entirely achievable with basic embroidery stitches and easy-to-follow instructions, enchanting embroidery beginners and experts alike.

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist's book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Berard, Bernard Fay, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

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.

The British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is famed for his idiosyncratic mode of depicting the human figure. Thirty years after his death, his working methods remain underexplored. New research on the Francis Bacon Studio Archive at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, sheds light on the genesis of his works, namely the photographic source material he collected in his studios, on which he consistently based his paintings. The book brings together the artist's pictorial springboards for the first time, delineating and interpreting recurring patterns and methods in his preparatory work and adoption of photographic material. In addition, it correctly locates 'chance' as a driving force in Bacon's working method and qualifies the significance of photography for the painter.

What does it mean to be nude? What does the nude do? In a series of constantly surprising reflections, Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari encounter the nude as an opportunity for thinking in a way that is stripped bare of all received meanings and preconceived forms. In the course of engagements with twenty-six separate images, the authors show how the nudes produced by painters and photographers expose this bareness of thought and leave us naked on the verge of a sense that is always nascent, always fleeting, on the surface of the skin, on the surface of the image. While the nude is a symbol of truth in philosophy and art alike, what the nude definitively and uniquely reveals is unclear. In Being Nude: The Skin of Images, the authors argue that the nude is always presented as both vulnerable in its exposure and shy of conceptualization, giving a sense of the ultimate ineffability of the meaning of being. Although the nude represents the revealed nature of truth, nude figures hold a part of themselves back, keeping in reserve the reality of their history, parts of their present selves, and also their future possibilities for change, development, and demise. Skin is itself a type of clothing, and stripping away exterior layers of fabric does not necessarily lead to grasping the truth. In this way, the difference between being clothed and being nude is diminished. The images that inspire the authors to contemplate the nudity of being show many ways in which one can and cannot be nude, and many ways of being in relation to oneself and to others, clothed and unclothed.

First World War Poets by Alan Judd and David Crane. This collection of short biographies of those remarkable men who sought to record and convey the horrors of the Great War in poetry draws on letters, memoirs and portraits in a variety of media. Key poems by each of the poets are reproduced in full, and familiar images of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are presented along with the haunting faces of lesser-known poets such as Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney to provide a new approach to one of the most devastating events of the last century. Published to coincide with the centenary of the start of the Great War.

The first book to focus exclusively on women as subjects in street art, this study, part travelogue and part dialogue, examines these depictions of women artistically, politically, and culturally across continents. Interviews with artists peel back the layers between artist and image, revealing stories about their work, its context, and its environment. From artists in LA pushing back on Hollywood's shiny perfection; to painters in Costa Rica examining the cultural links of women, myth, and nature; to women in South Africa decrying domestic violence, what links these works are their temporality and public ownership. Why do wall artists choose women as their frequent and favourite subjects? What does it say about our conceptions of gender and rebellion, protest, pride, place, and community? And how does the growing commercialisation of street art affect their portrayal? Colour photos and guided historical context provoke these questions and inspire further ones.

Despite his posthumous fame as a painter of flowers, still-lifes, gardens, landscapes and city scenes, during his lifetime Vincent van Gogh believed that his portraits constituted his most important works. Although as an artist he was `touched by so many different things', he was nevertheless committed to the art of portraiture - a quality that distinguished him from his contemporaries. Van Gogh was passionate in his avoidance of bland, photographic resemblances, in the hope of capturing the essential character of his models by means of expressive colour and brushwork. Showcasing a dramatic set of portraits created during Van Gogh's ten-year career, this book reflects the strong visual impact with which the artist captured the diversity of contemporary life. In his many portraits, we can discern the artist's desire to record expressively a number of themes, from the plight of the agricultural workers in his native Brabant and the destitution of prostitutes and their children in urban Europe, to the lives of his cosmopolitan acquaintances in Paris, including cafe owners and art dealers. It was here that he began his remarkable sequence of self-portraits. With reference to Van Gogh's extensive correspondence, Skea elaborates how the artist perceived his chosen subjects as would a writer, and how he felt that his portraits should somehow evoke what he considered to be the spiritual underpinning of human existence

An all-new compendium of cut-throat cuties from the ample imagination of the ever-devilish Dave Nestler! His eye for beauties and iconic approach to illustration make him the go-to guy for modern day pin-up perfection! First rule of Bad Girl Club? Buy the book!

Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937) was born into a humble Hungarian family in Budapest and rose to become the preeminent portrait artist working in Britain between 1907 and 1937. He painted nearly 3,000 portraits, including those of numerous kings and queens, four American presidents, and countless members of the European nobility. "Has any one painter ever before painted so many interesting and historical personages?" asked his contemporaries. There has been no biography of him since 1939, and this new account of both his life and his work draws on previously untapped material from the family archive of over 15,000 documents, to which the author has had unrivaled access. It establishes the intrinsic importance of his art and re-positions him in his rightful place alongside his great contemporaries John Singer Sargent, Sir John Lavery, and Giovanni Boldini.

Art and Pornography presents a series of essays which investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature, and explores the distinction, if there is any, between pornography and erotic art. Is there any overlap between art and pornography, or are the two mutually exclusive? If they are, why is that? If they are not, how might we characterize pornographic art or artistic pornography, and how might pornographic art be distinguished, if at all, from erotic art? Can there be aesthetic experience of pornography? What are some of the psychological, social, and political consequences of the creation and appreciation of erotic art or artistic pornography? Leading scholars from around the world address these questions, and more, and bring together different aesthetic perspectives and approaches to this widely consumed, increasingly visible, yet aesthetically underexplored cultural domain. The book, the first of its kind in philosophical aesthetics, will contribute to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the many representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes, in both high art and demotic culture, in Western and non-Western contexts. It is sure to stir debate, and healthy controversy.

Powerful, supple, and sensual - these are words best used to describe the art of TC Cor - an illustrator with an expert eye for the way flesh glistens and muscle ripples on the female form. His newest "bodies" of work have been assembled in this meticulous collection, and is a magnificent gallery of pencil and airbrush illustrations.

A fresh take on a beloved masterpiece of portraiture, focusing on the complex significance of the color pink in eighteenth-century France Francois Boucher's 1750 half-length portrait of Madame de Pompadour-influential court figure and mistress to King Louis XV-has been the subject of much art historical attention, particularly with regard to gender and representation. Building on that foundation, this volume turns toward an underappreciated aspect of the portrait: the use and significance of the color pink. Four scholarly essays, including one by noted Boucher expert Mark Ledbury, establish a framework that connects Pompadour's fondness and promotion of the color, Boucher's artistic association with the color, and developments in the material basis of the color, including its application in other media such as porcelain. This engaging close look offers new ways to understand the portrait, revealing its links to motherhood and sentiment, race and the transatlantic slave trade, and the crosscurrents of natural history and scientific discovery. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums

Showcasing a diverse variety of women, these portraits demonstrate the work of famed nude photographer Thomas Karsten. The collection captures a variety of unique subjects from different parts of the world, depicting the individual beauty of each culture and going beyond endeavored poses to communicate intense emotion and eroticism. Combined with the author's poetic reflections, this painstakingly produced volume is both an optical and sensual pleasure. This bilingual edition includes English and German.

Nick Baer continues his portfolio collection of fine art male nude models, with his picks for 2006. Two dozen men, athletes, artists, from various parts of the world: Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, South American, Mid-Eastern. Full frontal male nudity, color, 40 pages. On some websites, Dylan Jordan is known as Jeremy Steele and/or Jordan Banks.

"Girls, Gags & Giggles," ran publisher Robert Harrison's recipe for dishing up pin-up to the American male. Men loved his tasty dishes, a mixture of strippers and starlets dressed in outfits so fetishistic no one noticed they were never nude. While other magazines delivered the girl next door, Harrison's publications banked on bad girls in satin and leather, fishnet stockings, and six-inch heels performing slapstick stunts straight from the burlesque stage. Harrison lured his readers in with vibrantly painted covers by top pin-up artists Earl Moran, Billy DeVorss and, most famously, Peter Driben. This Bibliotheca Universalis edition celebrates this eye-catching candy with every single cover from Beauty Parade, Wink, Titter, Eyeful, Flirt, and Whisper, from 1942 to 1955, as well as interior spreads, featuring, among others, a budding Bettie Page. In an age when far more graphic material is the norm, 1000 Pin-Up Girls celebrates an era of pin-up and pulp style to fuel your erotic imagination. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Yo ho, indeed! Here's a magnificent gallery of exquisite lady pirate portraits by one of the great erotic pin-up artists working today -- Stefano Mazzotti. His photo-realism blends seamlessly with the fantasy of beautiful brigands (brigandettes?) fully prepared to attack your mast and swarm your deck in search of treasure, pleasure, and yes -- BOOTY! From his works in the "Velvet Love" series, as well as "Tatz: Sin on Skin", Mazzotti is turning into one of the hottest, most requested talents in the SQP mega-pool of illustrators! We're delighted to present this latest collection of brand new works. Eye-patch and peg-leg not required to thoroughly enjoy this book, although you will let out with the occasional "ARRRRRRR"!

We owe a great debt to Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery (1797-1849) for his Atlas of Anatomy, which was not only a massive event in medical history, but also remains one of the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated anatomical treatises ever published. Bourgery began work on his magnificent atlas in 1830 in cooperation with illustrator Nicolas Henri Jacob (1782-1871), a student of the French painter Jacques Louis David. The first volumes were published the following year, but completion of the treatise required nearly two decades of dedication; Bourgery lived just long enough to finish his labor of love, but the last of the treatise's eight volumes was not published in its entirety until five years after his death. The eight volumes of Bourgery's treatise cover descriptive anatomy, surgical anatomy and techniques (exploring in detail nearly all the major operations that were performed during the first half of the 19th century), general anatomy and embryology, and microscopic anatomy. Jacob's spectacular hand-colored lithographs are remarkable for their clarity, color, and aesthetic appeal, reflecting a combination of direct laboratory observation and illustrative research. Unsurpassed to this day, the images offer exceptional anatomical insight, not only for those in the medical field but also for artists, students, and anyone interested in the workings and wonder of the human body.

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.