The Biographic senes presents an entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey all of them in vivid snapshots. Many people know that Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was a French artist and leading light of Impressionism, whose paintings brilliantly capture the movement of ballet dancers. What, perhaps, they don't know is that by his mid-twenties he had made over 700 copies of other artists' works; that he produced 1,500 studies of ballet dancers, one of which sold in 1999 for over GBP17 million; and that, although Degas exhibited only one sculpture in his lifetime, 150 wax figures were found in his studio after his death.

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.

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903-75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans's work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans's practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans's dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists-from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner-underscoring how Evans's travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style. A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world-to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

A comprehensive introduction to Velazquez's life and art which includes a discussion of all his major works. Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) was one of the towering figures of western painting and Baroque art, a technical master renowned for his focus on realism and startling veracity. Everything he painted was 'treated' as a portrait, from Spanish royalty and Pope Innocent X, to a mortar and pestle. This comprehensive introduction to Velazquez's life and art includes a discussion of all his major works, and illustrates most of Velazquez's surviving output of approximately 110 paintings. The artist's greatest innovation - his unorthodox and revolutionary technique is explored in relation to the styles of certain of his most celebrated contemporaries both in Spain and beyond, including Titian and Rubens. The book concludes with a final chapter on the influence and importance of Velazquez's art on later painters from the time of his own death to the art of recent times including Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and the Impressionists.

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.

This major new biography recounts the extraordinary life of one of the most creative figures in Western culture, weaving together the multiple threads of Michelangelo's life and times with a brilliant analysis of his greatest works. The author retraces Michelangelo's journey from Rome to Florence, explores his changing religious views and examines the complicated politics of patronage in Renaissance Italy. The psychological portrait of Michelangelo is constantly foregrounded, depicting with great conviction a tormented man, solitary and avaricious, burdened with repressed homosexuality and a surplus of creative enthusiasm. Michelangelo's acts of self-representation and his pivotal role in constructing his own myth are compellingly unveiled.
Antonio Forcellino is one of the world's leading authorities on Michelangelo and an expert art historian and restorer. He has been involved in the restoration of numerous masterpieces, including Michelangelo's Moses. He combines his firsthand knowledge of Michelangelo's work with a lively literary style to draw the reader into the very heart of Michelangelo's genius.

James Lawrence Isherwood (1917-1989) is widely regarded by his followers as one of the best impressionist painters this country has produced. Born and bred in Wigan, now part of Greater Manchester, England, he was a prolific painter and produced his best work from the early 1960s on. His work has always been considered truly original and is typified by strong brushwork and extravagant colours. His subjects ranged from rural and industrial landscapes to nudes and portraiture, and his work has found its way into art collections across the world. Now Dr. Brian Iddon has written this authoritative biography about James Isherwood and his work.

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown's murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878-93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown's twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown's unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism. -- .

This book, which accompanies the first major exhibition devoted to David Hockney's drawings inover 20 years,will explore Hockney as a draughtsman from the 1950s to now, with a focus on himself, his family and friends. From Ingres to the iPad -this book demonstrates the artist's ingenuity in portrait drawing with reference to both tradition and technology. David Hockney is recognised as one of the master draughtsmen of our times and a champion of the medium. This book will feature Hockney's work from the 1950s to now and focus on his depictions of himself and a smaller group of sitters close to him: his muse, Celia Birtwell; his mother, Laura Hockney; and his friends, the curator, Gregory Evans, and master printer, Maurice Payne. This book will examine not only how drawing is fundamental to Hockney's distinctive way of observing the world around him, but also how it has been a testing ground for ideas and modes of expression later played out in his paintings. From Old Masters to modern masters, from Holbein to Picasso, Hockney's portrait drawings reveal his admiration for his artistic predecessors and his continuous stylistic experimentation throughout his career. Alongside an in-depth essay from the curator, this book will feature an exclusive interview between author and curator, Sarah Howgate, and artist, David Hockney. In addition, an 'In Focus' essay by British Museum curator Isabel Seligman, will explore the relationship between Hockney, Ingres and Picasso drawings.

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.

This groundbreaking reconstruction of Goya's so-called 'Witches and Old Women' album will offer rich insights into the artist's concerns and preoccupations and will immeasurably deepen our understanding of the artist. With its themes of witchcraft, madness and nightmares, the predominant imagery of the album offers a particularly important perspective on the development of Goya's interest in old age and its relationship to the fantastic and diabolical.

Norman Ackroyd CBE RA has been a familiar face to the boatmen of the British Isles for the past 50 years, often requiring their services to take him out on the water, where he paints the coastal landscape in vivid watercolours. An Irish Notebook is a collection of 40 such sketches created by Ackroyd on the west coast of Ireland. From Malin to Mizen, via the rocky outcrops of Puffin Island and the emerald depths of Roaringwater Bay, Ackroyd records the Irish coast in all its rugged beauty.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has entered mainstream culture as one of the founding fathers of modern art. Despite his popularity, books on Duchamp often shroud his work in theoretical and critical writing. Here, instead, is a book exploring the artist's life and work in a thoroughly new and engaging manner, with short, alphabetical dictionary entries written in lively, jargon- free prose that at last allow Duchamp's work and influence to be accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience. The book features more than 200 entries on the most interesting and important artworks, relationships, people and ideas in Duchamp's life, from chess, puns, the fourth dimension, love and genius, to the Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Katherine S. Dreier and Arturo Schwarz. A contextual introduction shows how the dictionary form has been an inspiration to artists and writers from Flaubert to the Surrealists. Underpinned by the latest scholarship and research, Thomas Girst's texts show how, in the words of contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Duchamp was 'the most intelligent mind of his time'.

Ronnie Wood is one of the foremost rock guitarists in the world, but his artistic talents extend beyond music. Throughout his stellar musical career from The Birds to the Faces and the Rolling Stones, Ronnie has never lost his passion for painting, drawing and sculpture. Exuding the same irrepressible energy as Ronnie himself, Ronnie Wood: Artist is the first ever comprehensive collection of his paintings and other artworks, created to mark the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The bright, bold volume brings together the fruits of a lifetime in the arts, brimming with six decades of memorable and diverse work, from his art college portfolio (he studied alongside Pete Townshend) to the intimate work of his personal life today. Inside, a generous selection of his Stones work, including rare watercolours of Mick, Keith and Charlie backstage, meets acrylics of contemporaries Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck and Keith Moon. Portraits of formative jazz innovators Count Basie, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday sit alongside blues heroes Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy. Paintings of Hollywood's elite - Paul Newman, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe - juxtapose real-time fashion sketches of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell and deft pastel compositions from his residency at the Royal Ballet. The artist himself provides the captions and insights into the thought and motivation behind each piece. With an introduction by Emmanuel Guigon (director of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, where Ronnie will be beginning a residency in 2018) and an afterword by none other than Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood: Artist exists where fine art and rock 'n' roll collide. This extensive and eclectic collection offers unique insights into the entire world of Ronnie Wood, and, with close to 400 works, is a fitting testament to the artistic range and ambition of rock 'n' roll's most successful artist

Many people know that Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a founder of French Impressionism, a master of landscape painting whose works include Impression, Sunrise and Water Lilies. What, perhaps, they don't know is that he created the ponds featuring those water lilies and spent 30 years painting 250 oils of them; that his water-lily work Le Bassin aux Nymphease sold in 2008 for $40 million; that his painting Cliffs Near Dieppe was stolen not once but twice; and that he was almost blind when he painted some of his most famous works. Biographic: Monet presents an instant impression of his life, work and fame, with an array of irresistible facts and figures convered into infographics to reveal the artist behind the pictures.

Pedro de Mena y Medrano (1628-1688) is the most highly regarded master of Spanish Baroque sculpture, on a par with his contemporaries, the great seventeenth-century painters Velazquez, Zurbaran and Murillo. Mena's contributions to Spanish Baroque sculpture are unsurpassed in both technical skill and expressiveness of his religious subjects. His ability to sculpt the human body was remarkable, and he excelled in creating figures and scenes for contemplation. This first monograph of Pedro de Mena shows incredible details and remarkable images of his hyper-realistic sculptures, full of passion. In addition to text by curator Xavier Bray, Pedro de Mena also features important contributions by Jose Luis Romeo Torres, curator of the exhibition Pedro de Mena, to be held in Malaga in 2019.

Examining the literary career of the eighteenth-century Irish painter James Barry, 1741-1806 through an interdisciplinary methodology, The Writings of James Barry and the Genre of History Painting, 1775-1809 is the first full-length study of the artist's writings. Liam Lenihan critically assesses the artist's own aesthetic philosophy about painting and printmaking, and reveals the extent to which Barry wrestles with the significant stylistic transformations of the pre-eminent artistic genre of his age: history painting. Lenihan's book delves into the connections between Barry's writings and art, and the cultural and political issues that dominated the public sphere in London during the American and French Revolutions. Barry's writings are read within the context of the political and aesthetic thought of his distinguished friends and contemporaries, such as Edmund Burke, his first patron; Joshua Reynolds, his sometime friend and rival; Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, with whom he was later friends; and his students and adversaries, William Blake and Henry Fuseli. Ultimately, Lenihan's interdisciplinary reading shows the extent to which Barry's faith in the classical tradition in general, and the genre of history painting in particular, is permeated by the hermeneutics of suspicion. This study explores and contextualizes Barry's attempt to rethink and remake the preeminent art form of his era.

Long recognized as one of the most significant paintings of the twentieth century, contributors to this volume consider Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon from a variety of methodological and topical perspectives, including psychoanalytical, feminist, historical, and postcolonial. Through these various analyzes, the contributors explore the power and significance of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, situating the work within twentieth century art history and debates over Primitivism, sexuality, and stylistic change.

A major career survey of Yayoi Kusama, one of the most widely admired and popular artists of our time, published in collaboration with M+, Hong Kong, to accompany M+'s first Special Exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, from 12 November 2022 to 14 May 2023. Yayoi Kusama is that rare thing: an artist who has achieved truly global acclaim. In a wide-ranging career spanning seven decades and multiple media, she has established profound connections with audiences around the world. Emerging at the forefront of artistic experimentation in Asia in the mid-20th century, Kusama soon became a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1960s. Today, Kusama continues to communicate her highly personal and spiritual world view through her art. Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is the most comprehensive survey of her work to date. Structured around six thematic sections, 'Infinity', 'Accumulation', 'The Biocosmic', 'Radical Connectivity', 'Death' and 'Force of Life', the volume elucidates the aesthetic and philosophical concerns at the heart of the artist's oeuvre. In addition to a selection of Kusama's writings, some of which have never been published before, the book features correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, an interview with critic and curator Yoshie Yoshida, and a roundtable discussion among leading authorities in the field. Also included are curatorial essays exploring different aspects of Kusama's practice, and a detailed visual chronology of her life. Appealing not only to those already familiar with Kusama and her work, but also to anyone discovering it for the first time, this monograph reveals an artist who, while shaped by international artistic currents, remains deeply connected to the traditions and culture of her native Japan.

On June 10, 1935, Dorse Lanpher was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. After he was resuscitated by the doctor, Dorse began living a meaningful life ruled by his vivid imagination, artistic talent, and passion for creating unforgettable special effects environments for the animated characters.

In his memoir, Dorse shares a revealing glimpse into his fascinating life as an artist in the animated film industry. He begins by offering entertaining childhood anecdotes that describe cherished moments like skinny-dipping with his friends, saving his money and buying his family their first television, and constructing a homemade golf course in a field of wild grass. After he graduated from high school in California and entered the Art Center School of Los Angeles, Dorse's talent was recognized by his teachers; after five challenging semesters, however, he left the school. As Dorse embarked on a journey to conquer a new world with nothing but a portfolio of his best art and a desire to live his dream, he soon discovered that, with a little tenacity, he could do anything.

Dorse's captivating story proves that following one's passion is never free from struggle, but staying true to a dream can lead to a life fulfilled.

Widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the history of visual depictions of war, Francisco de Goya's renowned print series The Disasters of War remains a touchstone for serious engagement with the violence of war and the questions raised by its artistic representation. The Art of Witnessing provides a new account of Goya's print series by taking readers through the forty-seven prints he dedicated to the violence of war. Drawing on facets of Goya's artistry rarely considered together before, the book challenges the notion that documentary realism and historical testimony were his primary aims. Michael Iarocci argues that while the depiction of war's atrocities was central to Goya's project, the lasting power of the print series stems from the artist's complex moral and aesthetic meditations on the subject. Making novel contributions to longstanding debates about historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, The Art of Witnessing tells a new story, print by print, to highlight the ways in which Goya's masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.