Flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840) devoted himself exclusively to capturing the diversity of flowering plants in watercolor paintings which were then published as copper engravings, with careful botanical descriptions. The darling of wealthy Parisian patrons including Napoleon's wife Josephine, he was dubbed "the Raphael of flowers," and is regarded to this day as a master of botanical illustration. This collection brings our best-selling XL-sized edition to a smaller, more convenient format, still gathering some of the finest color engravings from Redoute's illustrations of Roses, Lilies, and Choix des plus belles fleurs et quelques branches des plus beaux fruits (Selection of the Most Beautiful Blooms and Branches with the Finest Fruits). Offering a vibrant overview of Redoute's admixture of accuracy and beauty, it is also a privileged glimpse into the magnificent gardens and greenhouses of a bygone Paris. 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.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.

With 101 "Life" magazine covers to his credit, Philippe Halsman (1906-1979) was one of the leading portrait photographers of his time. In addition to his distinguished career in photojournalism, Halsman was one of the great pioneers of experimental photography, motivated by a profound desire to push this youngest of art forms toward new frontiers by using innovative and unorthodox photographic techniques.
One of Halsman's favorite subjects was Salvarod Dali, the glittering and controversial painter and theorist with whom the photographer shared a unique friendship and extraordinary professional collaboration that spanned over thirty years. Whenever Dali imagined a photograph so strange that its production seemed impossible, Halsman tried to find the solution, and invariably succeeded.
As Halsman explains in his postface, "Dali's Mustache" is the fruit of this marriage of the minds. The jointly conceived and seemingly nonsensical questions and answers reveal the gleeful humor and assumed cynicism for which Dali is famous, while the marvelous and inspired images of Dali's mustache brilliantly display Halsman's consummate skill and extraordinary inventiveness as a photographer.
This combination of wit, absurdity, and the offhandedly profound is irresistible and has contributed to the enduring fascination inspired by this unique photographic interview, which has become a cult classic and valuable collector's item since its original publication in 1954. The present volume faithfully reproduces the first edition and will introduce a new generation to the irreverent humor and imaginative genius of two great artists.

London-based artist Stephen Willats is a pioneer of conceptual art and has made work examining the function and meaning of art in society since the late 1950s. His first South London Gallery exhibition in 1998, entitled Changing Everything, brought together a body of work made in partnership with local residents over a two-year period. Aiming to create a cultural model of how art might relate to society, the work invited visitors to make their own contributions to it, shifting the way the art institution relates to the world around it. For his latest SLG show, Surfing with the Attractor, Willats re-presents material from Changing Everything alongside a new installation featuring a huge 'data stream' spanning 15 metres and made in collaboration with 14 London-based artists. Comprising hundreds of carefully ordered images in various media, the data stream documents two contrasting streets of London: Rye Lane in Peckham and Regent Street in the West End.Extending beyond the gallery space, the show also includes films from the data stream shown on monitors in shops on Peckham Road and Camberwell Church Street, and graphic stickers will be widely distributed.

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.

Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi's stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists. Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you "can feel what the other feels" (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi's own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramovic, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

Genius. Anti-artist. Charlatan. Impostor! Since 1914 Marcel Duchamp has been called all of these. No artist of the 20th century has aroused more passion and controversy, nor exerted a greater influence on art, the very nature of which Duchamp challenged and redefined as concept rather than product by questioning its traditionally privileged optical nature. At the same time, he never ceased to be engaged, openly or secretly, in provocative activities and works that transformed traditional artmaking procedures. Written with the enthusiastic support of Duchamp's widow, this is one of the most original and important books ever written on this enigmatic artist, and challenges received ideas, misunderstanding and misinformation. With 172 illustrations in colour

Antonio Lopez Garcia's Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting is the first book to give the famed Spanish artist the critical attention he deserves. Born in Tomelloso in 1936 and still living in the Spanish capital today, Antonio Lopez has long cultivated a reputation for impressive urban scenes-but it is urban time that is his real subject. Going far beyond mere artist biography, Benjamin Fraser explores the relevance of multiple disciplines to an understanding of the painter's large-scale canvasses. Weaving selected images together with their urban referents-and without ever straying too far from discussion of the painter's oeuvre, method and reception by critics-Fraser pulls from disciplines as varied as philosophy, history, Spanish literature and film, cultural studies, urban geography, architecture, and city planning in his analyses. The book begins at ground level with one of the artist's most recognizable images, the Gran Via, which captures the urban project that sought to establish Madrid as an emblem of modernity. Here, discussion of the artist's chosen painting style-one that has been referred to as a 'hyperrealism'-is integrated with the central street's history, the capital's famous literary figures, and its filmic representations, setting up the philosophical perspective toward which the book gradually develops. Chapter two rises in altitude to focus on Madrid desde Torres Blancas, an urban image painted from the vantage point provided by an iconic high-rise in the north-central area of the city. Discussion of the Spanish capital's northward expansion complements a broad view of the artist's push into representations of landscape and allows for the exploration of themes such as political conflict, social inequality, and the accelerated cultural change of an increasingly mobile nation during the 1960s. Chapter three views Madrid desde la torre de bomberos de Vallecas and signals a turn toward political philosophy. Here, the size of the artist's image itself foregrounds questions of scale, which Fraser paints in broad strokes as he blends discussions of artistry with the turbulent history of one of Madrid's outlying districts and a continued focus on urban development and its literary and filmic resonance. Antonio Lopez Garcia's Everyday Urban Worlds also includes an artist timeline, a concise introduction and an epilogue centering on the artist's role in the Spanish film El sol del membrillo. The book's clear style and comprehensive endnotes make it appropriate for both general readers and specialists alike.

Claude Monet spent most of his life painting his own spontaneous impressions of nature and the world that was closest to him. His works provoked the description 'Impressionist', the name given to the style of art that he created together with Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

Walt Kelly (1913-1973) is one of the most respected and innovative American cartoonists of the twentieth century. His long-running Pogo newspaper strip has been cited by modern comics artists and scholars as one of the best ever. Cartoonists Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes), Jeff Smith (Bone), and Frank Cho (Liberty Meadows) have all cited Kelly as a major influence on their work. Alongside Uncle Scrooge's Carl Barks and Krazy Kat's George Herriman, Kelly is recognized as a genius of "funny animal" comics. We Go Pogo is the first comprehensive study of Kelly's cartoon art and his larger career in the comics business. Author Kerry D. Soper examines all aspects of Kelly's career--from his high school drawings; his work on such animated Disney movies as Dumbo, Pinocchio, and Fantasia; and his 1930s editorial cartoons for Life and the New York Herald Tribune. Soper taps Kelly's extensive personal and professional correspondence and interviews with family members, friends, and cartoonists to create a complex portrait of one of the art form's true geniuses. From Pogo's inception in 1948 until Kelly's death, the artist combined remarkable draftsmanship, slapstick humor, fierce social satire, and inventive dialogue and dialects. He used the adventures of his animals--all denizens of the Okefenokee Swamp--as a means to comment on American and international politics and cultural mores. The strip lampooned Senator Joseph McCarthy during the height of McCarthyism, the John Birch Society during the 1960s, Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and many others. Kerry D. Soper, Orem, Utah, is associate professor of humanities, classics, and comparative literature at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire, also published by University Press of Mississippi.

This title was first published in 2000: In their stunning simplicity, George Romney's portraits of eighteenth-century gentry and their children are among the most widely recognised creations of his age. A rival to Reynolds and Gainsborough, Romney was born in 1734 on the edge of the Lake District, the landscape of which never ceased to influence his eye for composition and colour. He moved in 1762 to London where there was an insatiable market for portraits of the landed gentry to fill the elegant picture galleries of their country houses. Romney's sitters included William Beckford and Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton. An influential figure, one of the founding fathers of neo-classicism and a harbinger of romanticism, Romney yearned to develop his talents as a history painter. Countless drawings bear witness to ambitious projects on elemental themes which were rarely executed on canvas. Richly illustrated, this is the first biography of Romney to explore the full diversity of his oeuvre. David A. Cross portays a complex personality, prone to melancholy, who held himself aloof from London's Establishment and from the Royal Academy, of which Sir Joshua Reynolds was President, and chose instead to find his friends among that city's radical intelligentsia.

A leading female sculptor and figure in Chinese contemporary art, Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing, China) began her career in the early 1990s following her graduation from Capital Normal University in Beijing where she received a B.A. from the Fine Arts Department in 1989. Best known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects, Yin uses her artwork to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy. The artist explains, "In a rapidly changing China, 'memory' seems to vanish more quickly than everything else. That's why preserving memory has become an alternative way of life."

In answering the question posed by its title, and drawing on his twenty year relationship with the artists, Michael Bracewell is the first writer to engage directly with Gilbert & George to understand why they have devoted their lives exclusively and continuously - to the vision of art they conceived within months of first meeting. What emerges piece by piece is a portrait of Gilbert & George as two men who are infinitely more intense, strange, determined and alone than their longstanding public image suggests.

This book investigates Jimmie Durham's community-building process of making and display in four of his projects in Europe: Something ... Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy (2005); two Neapolitan nativities (2016 and ongoing); The Middle Earth (with Maria Thereza Alves, 2018); and God's Poems, God's Children (2017). Andrea Feeser explores these artworks in the context of ideas about connection set forth by writers Ann Lauterbach, Franz Rosenzweig, Pamela Sue Anderson, Vinciane Despret, and Hirokazu Miyazaki, among others. Feeser argues that the materials in Durham's artworks; the method of their construction; how Durham writes about his pieces; how they exist with respect to one another; and how they address viewers, demonstrate that we can create alongside others a world that embraces and sustains what has been diminished. The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, animal studies, new materialism research, and eco-criticism.

Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo's amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist. The 170-page journal contains the artist's thoughts, poems, and dreams-many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera-along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. The text entries, written in Frida's round, full script in brightly colored inks, make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist's political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than 35 operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of 18. This intimate portal into her life is sure to fascinate fans of the artist, art historians, and women's culturalists alike.

Emil Nolde was one of the most important exponents of Expressionism, and is consid ered one of the main precursors of modernism. His virtuoso handling of colour and the incomparable expressiveness of his paintings, watercolours, and Unpainted Pictures astound viewers again and again, and ensure that every exhibition of his work is a great success. This volume was produced in close collaboration with the Nolde Stiftung Seebull. The authors - both noted Nolde experts - illuminate Nolde's life and work and provide extended discussions of key compositions. The richly illustrated essay section and biography are supplemented by rarely seen documents from the artist's archive, making the book especially attractive to bibliophiles.

Blake's only wood engravings, made near the end of his life for a school edition of Virgil, are among his most lyrical and enduringly influential creations. This is their first publication as a stand-alone book, with the original text of Ambrose Philips' version of the first Eclogue of Virgil.

This book follows Chagall's life through his art and his understanding of the role of the artist as a political being. It takes the reader through the different milieus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - including the World Wars and the Holocaust - to present a unique understanding of Chagall's artistic vision of peace in an age of extremes. At a time when all identities are being subsumed into a "national" identity, this book makes the case for a larger understanding of art as a way of transcending materiality. The volume explores how Platonic notions of truth, goodness, and beauty are linked and mutually illuminating in Chagall's work. A "spiritual-humanist" interpretation of his life and work renders Chagall's opus more transparent and accessible to the general reader. It will be essential reading for students of art and art history, political philosophy, political science, and peace studies.

I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can. Close to the Knives is the artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz's extraordinary memoir. Filthy, beautiful, and sharp to the point of piercing, it is both an exploration of the world seen through the eyes of an artist, and a moving portrait of a generation living, grieving, and dying through the AIDS crisis. It is a triumphant hymn of resistance, and a dizzying celebration of the joys of seeing and living in the world.

One of the best-loved painters in English history, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was also one of the most personally engaging. Bon vivant, wit, amateur and enthusiastic musician, he charmed sitters and friends alike. His ebullient, if not always reliable, personality comes to life in these two memoirs, written by two very different friends.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead's highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard University, and he continued to espouse Whitehead's processist theories as germane to his art throughout his life. This book examines how Whitehead's process philosophy-inspired by quantum theory and focusing on the ongoing ingenuity of dynamic forces of energy rather than traditional views of inert substances-set the stage for Motherwell's future art. This book will be of interest to scholars in twentieth-century modern art, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and art history.

Sigmund Freud was already internationally acclaimed as the principal founder of psychoanalysis when he turned his attention to the life of Leonardo da Vinci. It remained Freud's favourite composition. Compressing many of his insights into a few pages, the result is a fascinating picture of some of Freud's fundamental ideas, including human sexuality, dreams, and repression. It is an equally compelling - and controversial - portrait of Leonardo and the creative forces that according to Freud lie behind some of his great works, including the Mona Lisa. With a new foreword by Maria Walsh.

Pettibon is known for his characteristically youthful aesthetic and sharply satirical critique of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic of the many motifs present in Pettibon's oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985 Pettibon began Surfers--a series he continues to work on to this day--popular for its depiction of the lone surfer silently carving "a line of beauty," along an impossibly large wave. This publication traces a selection of one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon's protagonist in these works-his countercultural hero-surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of so much sublime power. Pettibon's lyrical writings on these painted surfaces-both his own and taken from literature-reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality-he critiques the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the renowned New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan, perfectly distills the transcendent nature and lack thereof in Pettibon's work.