Caravaggio was one of the most important Italian painters of the 17th century. He was, in fact, the wellspring of Baroque painting. In Hibbard's words, Caravaggio's paintings "speak to us more personally and more poignantly than any others of the time". In this study, Howard Hibbard evaluates the work of Caravaggio: notorious as a painter-assassin, hailed by many as an original interpreter of the scriptures, a man whose exploration of nature has been likened to that of Galileo.

"I painted my world, my life, all the things I loved, all the things I dreamed of, all the things I could not say in words. I painted my beloved Russia, my hometown Vitebsk, the Jewish neighborhood where I grew up, the way I saw everything as a child."

During prayers he would daydream; in school he was distracted; and at home he worried about what profession he should choose. But when the young Marc Chagall realized he had artistic talent, he translated his unusual way of looking at the world into color and shape.

Chagall grew up, became a painter, and traveled the world, but he never forgot about his hometown of Vitebsk, Belarus, the place that shaped his character and inspired his art.

This book, loosely based on Chagall's autobiography, gives readers a glimpse into the early life of one of the twentieth century's most significant painters. Landmann's charming three-dimensional mixed-media illustrations celebrate the colorful, the whimsical, and the extraordinary aspects of Chagall's life and work.

Born in Yugan, near Jingdezhen, the birthplace of porcelain, Bai Ming has contributed to the revival of contemporary Chinese ceramics and introduced it to a new worldwide audience through numerous exhibitions. Today he is arguably China's greatest exponent of this most traditional art form. In this book, Bai Ming traces his career, revealing a sensitive yet creative and flamboyant style, built on the most rigorous traditional techniques. Focussing particularly on his blue and white ceramic work, this book, through a large selection of glorious images and the artist's own words, reveals Bai Ming's exquisite style and superb attention to detail.

Admired for his trompe l'oeil style, American painter William Harnett (1848-1892) was as intellectually ambitious as he was technically skilled. The first scholarly monograph on the artist, William Harnett's Curious Objects details Harnett's career-long effort to position still life as a serious art. Nika Elder elevates the significance of Harnett's academic training and questions his apparent turn away from it. Reading his still lifes in relation to wartime visual culture, literary realism, museum display, and industrial design, she shows how Harnett experimented with inanimate objects and pictorial techniques to represent the human condition without depicting the human body. His paintings illustrate late nineteenth-century American material culture, but they also represent Reconstruction, interiority, death and life, and the imagination. By engaging such lofty themes, Harnett reimagined history painting for the modern era. His work thus locates Gilded Age art and culture in the long shadow of the Civil War and its politics.

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world's greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch's artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858-1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch's work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development. Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch's early 'realist' phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist's move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch's career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch's famous 'Frieze of Life' series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his 'Frieze of Life' works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch's powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century. This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

This book, a biography on Francis Bacon, is inspired by the friendship the author had with Bacon and based on records of the conversations that took place since 1963. The book forms the first comprehensive account of the artist's life and his work.

Schiele's oils have often been reproduced and are well recognized. However, limited access to the fragile works on paper and dispersion among several collections have made for an unbalanced representation of his work as a draftsman. This book assembles drawings and watercolors from public and private collections and reproduces work from every year of the artist's career, beginning with the juvenilia and early academic studies. The focus means that work that is rarely reproduced is represented extensively, providing a unique opportunity to study the rapid artistic development of Schiele over the course of his brief twelve-year career. The book is organized chronologically and divided into year-by-year sections. Each section includes a text that discusses the major events in Schiele's life and the interrelation between the artist's drawing and developments in his oil painting. Features a previously unpublished Schiele watercolor and several works that have never been reproduced in color.

The artwork of Spider Webb explodes across these pages with bold strokes and bright flashes. Here are eighty dragons you have never seen before. Well known for his tattoo imagery, Spider takes the dragon myths of many cultures and gives them a modern twist that resonates with twenty-first century viewers. Believed to symbolize impending doom to some and great good fortune to others, Spider's dragons, captured in lead, ink, acrylic, and mixed media, leap forth, from whimsical and unusual to sexual and frightening. Be stimulated and inspired by his original interpretations.

Noma Bar's innovative, playful style has made him one of the most sought-after illustrators working today, with a broad range of commissions from magazines and newspapers - including Empire, the New York Times, Wired, the Guardian and Time Out - and numerous private and advertising clients. His use of negative space and minimalist forms creates images with multiple readings that can delight and shock in equal measure. Each of Bar's illustrations tells a story that is hidden in the details, with the message revealing itself as you look more closely. Noma Bar has handpicked his most iconic illustrations and favourite works, each one displaying the distinctive style that has established his reputation. The works are organized into thematic chapters such as `Pretty Ugly' (portraits), `In Out' (sex), `Life Death' (conflict), and `Less More' (daily life). Alongside the images, Bar reveals his working methods and the stories behind his often idiosyncratic inspiration for different illustrations, and reflects on how his life experiences have shaped him as an artist. As a collection, the whole is much greater than the sum of these many, many-layered parts. It is destined to become a must-have reference source for all professionals in the worlds of graphic design and illustration, while also being an enthralling treasury for any follower of visual and popular culture. This limited, slipcased edition includes an exclusive screen print. One copy in this release of 1000 copies contains a one-of-a-kind gold-leaf print.

American painter Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) pioneered a new epoch in American art, bursting onto a scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s New York and defining a new art vocabulary for a new era. With his groundbreaking use of industrial production techniques and trivial, quotidian imagery such as cartoons, comic strips, and advertising, Lichtenstein joined contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist to reflect and satirize American mass media and consumer culture. Works such as Look, Mickey! (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), and Whaam! (1963) deployed mass production techniques, particularly Ben-Day dots printing, to create a blow-up effect and pixelated "dot" style, with which Lichtenstein has become synonymous. This book provides an essential overview of Lichtenstein's career, tracing his earliest Pop statements through to later "brushstroke" retorts to Abstract Expressionism and reinterpretations of modern masterpieces. We look at his leading position in midcentury modernism, and the ways in which his works both critique and chronicle 20th-century America. 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

Exploring the life and works of the great artist, World's Greatest Art: Da Vinci considers the achievements of Italy's most well-known and influential artist. The book follows his artistic development, from early drawings and paintings while apprentice to artist Andrea del Verrocchio, to his later works, including the renowned Mona Lisa as well as his scientific observations and inventions that still impact the world today.

First published 1990, this volume consists of an introductory essay by Ian Lowe and a comprehensive catalogue of all Wilfred Fairclough's prints, some 140, from 1932 to the present (1990). Al the prints are illustrated in the body of the catalogue for ease of identification and 48 are also reproduced as large format duotone illustrations. From the Royal College of Art, Wilfred Fairclough won the Rome Scholarship in Engraving in 1934 and was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in the same week. His engravings, inspired by his travels in Italy, Spain and Germany in the 1930s, were succeeded by etchings of British subjects and topography, notably of Oxford, until, with a Leverhulme grant, he returned to Italy in 1961. Increasingly, thereafter he has found his subjects and his inspiration in Venice, in concerts, restaurant interiors, and the Carnival, and in Lucerne, in markets and the human figure. Wilfred Fairclough has exhibited consistently at the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and at the Royal Academy (where his most recent Venetian subject, Venice Carnival. Clowns, sold out in three days). Now aged 83 he is still working. There has been no slackening off in his productivity nor in the quality of his work since he retired from teaching at the Kingston College of Art in 1972. The Catalogue is based on his own meticulous records. It will be an essential source of information for all who are interested in his work as a printmaker. Elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1975, Ian Lowe worked in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1962 until 1987. There he was responsible for the collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British prints. He arranged and catalogued numerous exhibitions including those devoted to ~F.L. Griggs, R.S. Austin, Robin Tanner, Alan Gwynne-Jones and Richard Shirley Smith. His association with Wilfred Fairclough dates from 1974. His introductory essay is both biographical and an appreciation of Fairclough's achievement as a printmaker. It is based on their correspondence, lectures, and meetings as well as on the study of the archives and records of the last sixty years.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918), was a German sociologist of high regard who was in league with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Though his most famous work is The Philosophy of Money, first published in 1916 in German, Rembrandt is one of Simmel's most important works. Answering such questions as 'What do we see in a work of art?' and 'What do Rembrandt's portraits tell us about human nature?' this study offers insights not only into art, but also into larger questions on culture, symbols and human relations. Previously, Rembrandt had never been translated into English, and now there are no other titles on art by Simmel in English available. For fans of Simmel and Rembrandt alike, this unique book offers a fresh understanding of their work.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918), was a German sociologist of high regard who was in league with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Though his most famous work is The Philosophy of Money, first published in 1916 in German, Rembrandt is one of Simmel's most important works. Answering such questions as 'What do we see in a work of art?' and 'What do Rembrandt's portraits tell us about human nature?' this study offers insights not only into art, but also into larger questions on culture, symbols and human relations. Previously, Rembrandt had never been translated into English, and now there are no other titles on art by Simmel in English available. For fans of Simmel and Rembrandt alike, this unique book offers a fresh understanding of their work.

'[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.