Contemplate the Immensity

A survey of panorama paintings

Enigmatic and ambiguous in its role as both setting and subject, the landscape has been one of the most important genres in painting for centuries. This dedicated survey spans from the late Middle Ages to modern times to bring the evolution of the landscape genre to life through its most critical works, executed by groundbreaking artists as diverse as Titian and Warhol.

As a form, landscapes represent the topography of the natural world as much as our own; reflecting the diversity of earth's vistas, but also keen indications of developments in representational aesthetics, religious and political history, notions of the sublime and the romantic, as well as the arrival of modernity and the vast changes wrought on the environment by industrialization and urbanization.

Opening this insightful volume is an introductory essay offering a meticulous overview of the genre and its most crucial developments. Luscious double page spreads on each of the 34 featured artworks include a crisp painting reproduction and an extensive art historical analysis on the masters of the form - including such greats as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, El Greco, John Constable, Claude Monet, and David Hockney.

One of the most prolific and influential auteurs at work over the past 40 years, cult Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has beguiled audiences worldwide with his thrilling dissertations on desire, passion, and identity. Cast an eye over his long list of productions and you're confronted with intoxicating tales of psychological melodrama, black comedy, familial feud, and violent lust. This edition of The Pedro Almodovar Archives offers unique inside access to behind-the-scenes pictures and personal reminiscences as the director guides us through his journey, from his early days right through to I'm So Excited (2013) and Julieta (2016). Based on and expanded from the original TASCHEN XL volume produced in collaboration with Almodovar himself, the book offers a fascinating insight into the creative process behind such cinematic tours de force as Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and the Academy Award-winning All About My Mother and Talk To Her. Each film is featured with its original poster, full cast and crew listings, as well as an essay by a leading Spanish author. Almodovar personally supplements the vivid photographic material, captioning each image with his own reflections and comments. As an overview of a true original's creativity and a luminous era of cinema, this is an indispensable companion to the mighty Almodovar canon created by the master himself.

So rich and unique is traditional Japanese architecture that it's nearly impossible to improve upon. Yet contemporary Japanese designers and architects keep finding fresh approaches to refurbish and take inspiration from the ways of old. Whether it's a pristinely preserved traditional house or a sleek modern apartment, the best Japanese homes share a love of cleverly designed spaces and warm materials like wood, brick, and bamboo. From a thatched roof farmhouse occupied by a Zen priest to Tadao Ando's experimental 4x4 House, from Shigeru Ban's conceptual Shutter House to a beautiful domestic homage to bamboo, this elegant compendium traverses the multifaceted landscape of Japanese living today. Enriched by 170 brand new, unpublished photographs, this re-edition takes you on breathtaking journey through the Land of the Rising Sun-complete with a list of addresses, should you wish to undertake this journey to Japan's most fascinating inns and homes yourself. An insightful glossary of key terms, such as tatami, shoji, and noren, will also help you come to grips with all elements of Japan's unique aesthetic of Eastern minimalism.

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, sculpture to ceramics. This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum fur Gestaltung in Berlin, the world's largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a "total" work of art. As we approach the Bauhaus centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.

A polymath of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was a prolific artist, theorist, and writer whose works explored everything from religion to art theory to philosophy. His vast body of work includes altarpieces, portraits, self-portraits, watercolors, and books, but is most celebrated for its astonishing collection of woodcut prints, which transformed printmaking from an artisan practice into a whole new art form. Durer's woodcuts astonish in scale as much as detail. Through works such as Apocalypse and the Triumphal Arch for Emperor Maximilian I, he created dense, meticulous compositions that were much larger, much more finely cut, and far more complex than any earlier woodcut efforts. With an ambitious tonal and dynamic range, he introduced a new level of conceptual, emotional, and spiritual intensity. His two major woodcut series on Christ's Passion, named The Large Passion and The Small Passion after their size, are particularly remarkable for their vivid human treatment of the Christian narrative. In his copper engraving, Melancholia I, meanwhile, Durer created a startling vision of emotional ennui, often cited as a defining early image of a depressive or melancholic state. Ever inquisitive, Durer absorbed ideas not only from masters and fellow artists in Germany but also from Italy, while his own influence extended across Europe for generations to come. In this essential TASCHEN introduction, we explore this pioneering figure's complex practice, his omnivorous intellect, and the key works which shaped his enduring legacy.

Inventor, painter, sculptor, scientist, architect, and engineer Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was nothing short of a quintessential Renaissance genius. No other artist of his generation has left behind such an extensive, authentic, and innovative oeuvre-yet Leonardo remains the most enigmatic of them all. From the beguiling Last Supper to the showstopping Mona Lisa, discover the complete painted oeuvre of one of history's most insatiable creative masters. This collection draws from our extensive best-selling XXL edition, one of the most complete explorations of Leonardo to date, to trace his life and work across 10 chapters. All known paintings are featured, gathering some of the finest treasures of the Louvre, Prado, and National Gallery, as well as works lost to time, but no less startling in their precision and poise. This definitive volume is complete with crisp details, accessible essays situating Leonardo's approach within its socio-cultural context and pictorial traditions of the time, the latest scientific insights, as well as an updated foreword that illuminates one of the most sensational art historical discoveries of our time: the record-breaking Salvator Mundi.

In the 15 years since TASCHEN released The Great American Pin-up, international interest in this distinctly American art form has increased exponentially. Paintings by leading artists such as Alberto Vargas, George Petty, and Gil Elvgren that sold for $ 2,000 in 1996 are going for $ 200,000 and more today. Pin-up-drawings, paintings, and pastels of an idealized female face and figure intended for public display-was produced between 1920 and 1970 for use on calendars, magazine covers, and centerfolds. The majority of original paintings were discarded by publishers and calendar companies after printing, making the surviving art that much more precious. Today its popularity is huge, and ripe for an equally huge and truly comprehensive Collector's Edition. Formidably sized, The Art of Pin-up is an impressive book that will be coveted by casual fans as well as hardcore pin-up collectors. The top 10 artists are profiled in depth. Each chapter opens with a tipped-in reproduction of an original calendar or magazine cover by that artist. The reproduction quality of the paintings, pastels, and preparatory sketches that follow-largely sourced from the original art-invites the viewer to trace the brushstrokes, while the exquisite period calendars, vintage prints, and original model photos document the artists' creative process. Much of these ephemera were photographed on-site at the historic Brown & Bigelow Company, home to the world's largest archive of vintage pin-up calendars. In addition to the chapters on the 10 featured artists, the book includes thumbnail bios and representative art of 85 additional artists, the most complete compendium of pin-up artists ever compiled. All this adds up to a hard-to-beat book on this popular subject.

In a world where products are out as soon as they're in, where communicating without wires doesn't come without strings, and even our accessories need accessories, we need simple tools. A book that helps us look inside because we are overloaded outside.
Keel's Simple Diary(TM) offers structure for those who don't have time to wonder, making it easy to record life's moments. It gives the pleasure of a quick response and the sense that no matter what's wrong, more is right.
Why Simple Diary(TM)?
There are three reasons why most people, although they have tried, won't keep a diary:
1. Not every day is very eventful.
2. It actually takes a lot of discipline to write.
3. In retrospect, many find what they have written embarrassing.
What is Simple Diary(TM)?
It is an assistant for life, a book for any occasion, for any person at any age. On every page you will discover a taste of philosophy, a pinch of psychology and a twist of insight.
And here are three things Simple Diary(TM) can do for you:
1. Entertain the mind.
2. Help you focus.
3. Keep you company.
Simple Diary(TM) is Keel's response to having too much information and not enough meaning, and needing to remember what made him smile. Three volumes and many pastrami sandwiches later, Keel finally had the answers to his own questions. Simple Diary(TM) is the culmination of his quest to gain insight into who we are, and why we do what we do.
Simple Diary(TM)
Let it happen.
Visit: SimpleDiary.com

In a world where products are out as soon as they're in, where communicating without wires doesn't come without strings, and even our accessories need accessories, we need simple tools. A book that helps us look inside because we are overloaded outside.
Keel's Simple Diary(TM) offers structure for those who don't have time to wonder, making it easy to record life's moments. It gives the pleasure of a quick response and the sense that no matter what's wrong, more is right.
Why Simple Diary(TM)?
There are three reasons why most people, although they have tried, won't keep a diary:
1. Not every day is very eventful.
2. It actually takes a lot of discipline to write.
3. In retrospect, many find what they have written embarrassing.
What is Simple Diary(TM)?
It is an assistant for life, a book for any occasion, for any person at any age. On every page you will discover a taste of philosophy, a pinch of psychology and a twist of insight.
And here are three things Simple Diary(TM) can do for you:
1. Entertain the mind.
2. Help you focus.
3. Keep you company.
Simple Diary(TM) is Keel's response to having too much information and not enough meaning, and needing to remember what made him smile. Three volumes and many pastrami sandwiches later, Keel finally had the answers to his own questions. Simple Diary(TM) is the culmination of his quest to gain insight into who we are, and why we do what we do.
Simple Diary(TM)
Let it happen.
Visit: SimpleDiary.com

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", Rene Magritte (1898-1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation. Like other Surrealist works, Magritte's paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to "what is hidden by what we see." This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humor, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting, but at our sense of self and the world.

Weekends on the road: The ultimate travel guide to the USA and Canada To travel in North America is to face a delicious quandary: over these vast spaces with so many riches, from glittering cities to eccentric small towns and heart-stoppingly beautiful mountains and plains, how to experience as much as possible in limited time? The New York Times has the answer, and has been offering up dream weekends with practical itineraries in its popular weekly 36 Hours column for over a decade. And since 2011, starting with the publication of 36 Hours: USA & Canada, TASCHEN has been collecting these stories into best-selling books, organized continent by continent. Now, after compiling volumes on Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world, editor Barbara Ireland has come home, with a fully revised and updated second edition of 36 Hours: USA & Canada.* Marquee metropolises like New York, Montreal, and Los Angeles; world-famous natural wonders at Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon; the hidden charm of Rust Belt cities like Duluth and Detroit they re all here. And so are 29 new destinations not published in the first edition, from Banff, with its crystal blue glacier-fed lakes, to El Paso, where the border culture spans two states and two countries. For a taste of adventure and a veritable journey throughout the continent, explore 36 Hours in America. 150 North American destinations, from metropolitan hot spots to unexpected hideaways Practical recommendations for over 600 restaurants and 450 hotels Color-coded tabs and ribbons to bookmark your favorite cities in each region Nearly 1,000 photos All stories have been updated and adapted by Barbara Ireland, a veteran Times travel editor Illustrations by Olimpia Zagnoli of Milan, Italy Easy-to-reference indexes Detailed city-by-city maps that pinpoint every stop on your itinerary Also in this series: 36 Hours: Europe* 36 Hours: Latin America & The Caribbean* 36 Hours: Asia & Oceania* 36 Hours: USA & Canada Region Volumes: West Coast, Northeast, Southeast, Midwest & Great Lakes, and Southwest & Rocky Mountains 36 Hours: World (3/36/365) *Also available as ebooks"

At the intersection of the visual, graphic, and cinematic arts, film posters are a unique and thrilling record of a particular cultural Zeitgeist. This book brings together 250 posters from the pre-Stalin Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s to explore the energy and invention of this period, before Soviet Realism became the official art doctrine. Drawn from the private collection of connoisseur Susan Pack, the selection includes the work of 27 different artists. From bold figuration to architectural elements, each artist displays a distinct style and aesthetic, as much as they collectively eschew the glamour of Hollywood for more stark, striking, even challenging images, often marked by unusual angles, dynamic compositions, and startling close-ups.

With his instantly recognizable decorative style, Czech artist and Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) defined the look of the fin-de-siecle. In evocative shades of peach, gold, ochre, and olive, his seductive compositions of patterns, flowers, and beautiful women became paradigms of the Belle Epoque years. Mucha's work permeated illustration, posters, postcards, and the advertising designs of his day. His striking posters of star actress Sarah Bernhardt were particularly famous. Alongside this delicate decorative work, Mucha also harbored strongly felt political ideas. With his monumental cycle The Slav Epic, he expressed his staunch support for Pan-Slavism, promoting the political independence of the Czech and Slavic nations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Compiled in association with the Mucha Foundation, this book presents key works and introduces the full reach of Mucha's uvre from patterned decoration to his book illustrations, posters, photographs and monumental paintings.

Travelling the world with an architect's eye Architect Harry Seidler spent more than 50 years traveling the globe, extensively photographing the peak achievements in architecture from 3000 B.C. to the present day. Thanks to sound advice given to him early on by his photographer brother Marcell ("Only use Leica cameras and Kodachrome film, which is archival"), Seidler's hobby quickly developed into a passion and, finally, an impressive archive of world architecture.
Including, of course, many of the world's most famous architectural structures, Seidler's photographs illustrate the history and style--country by country--of architecture in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Divided into chapters by country, each with a brief introduction outlining its architectural history, "The Grand Tour" offers armchair travelers, students, architecture buffs, and historians the opportunity to browse the buildings of the world through one man's photographs--the fruits of a passionate, half-century endeavor.

Daniel Kramer's classic Bob Dylan portfolio captures the artist's transformative "big bang" year of 1964-65. Over the course of a year and a day, Kramer's extraordinary access to Bob Dylan on tour, in concert, and backstage, allowed for one of the most mesmerizing photographic portfolios of any recording artist and a stunning document of Dylan breaking through to superstardom. Highlights include the Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall concert with Joan Baez; the Bringing It All Back Home recording sessions; and the now-famous concert at Forest Hills, when Dylan's controversial transition to electric guitar exemplified his constant, cryptic state of becoming. As much a document of a seminal period of rock 'n' roll history as of Dylan himself, the pictures also feature such compelling friends and collaborators as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Allen Ginsberg, and Albert Grossman.Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day presents a curated selection of nearly 200 images, including outtakes from the Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited album cover shoots. Previously published by TASCHEN as a signed Collector's Edition, this standard edition is the more affordable boon to any serious photography or Dylan fan. With stories throughout the book by Kramer, this is at once an intimate and evocative testament to a seminal photographer, to a particular point in time, and to an exceptional, mysterious artist at the moment his career went global.First published as a TASCHEN Collector's Edition, now available as an affordable, compact edition

Modern matters: A blow-by-blow account of groundbreaking modernismMost art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the Salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions.After this first assault on the artistic establishment, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Abstract Art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and conceptual practice.This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards, and broke down barriers. Introductory essays outline the most significant and influential movements alongside explanatory texts for each major work and its artist.About the series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite!"

""It was during dinner one evening just before the first publication of my photographs that Helmut asked me what name I intended to use. Jean Seberg and her Spanish boyfriend, Ricardo, were among the guests and Ricardo...asked for an atlas which I produced. He opened it to the map of Australia, asked for a pin, told me to shut my eyes and aim. The pin landed at the center of The Continent--Alice Springs. 'There's your name, ' he said."" The photographs by and of Springs featured throughout the book--a wonderful contemporary mix of personal snapshots and professional portraits of creative figures including Yves Saint Laurent, Gore Vidal, Balthus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Brassai, Nicole Kidman, and Angelica Houston--illustrate the story of her life, in which the houses and apartments where she has lived stand as milestones. Her previously unpublished diary extracts and her new writing are lit up by gentle irony, disarming honesty, and a photographer's eye for telling detail. Intensely personal and engaging, this book charts a remarkable 20th century woman's journey through life.

In the German city of Dresden on June 7, 1905, the foundation of the Die Brucke artists' group (1905-1913) is widely regarded as the birth of Expressionism. Led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the group sought to reject the limits of academia and, as their name suggested, to bridge the path to an artistic future. Their manifesto, printed with woodblock, insisted on absolute freedom from convention in their work as well as their lives. This new, liberated art incorporated portraits, landscapes, and city scenes, but substituted an objective rendering of reality with an expression of interior geography. In paintings, as well as their favored wood and linocut prints, the artists of Die Brucke would fill pictorial space with jagged lines, crude forms, and clashing colors, all to express their subjective experience of the world. Like the Fauves, the artists took stylistic lead from non-Western traditions of Oceanic and African arts, while also reviving the print and painting techniques of Albrecht Durer and Lucas Cranach the Elder. This richly illustrated book introduces this essential expressionist movement. We examine Die Brucke's key works and protagonists; its varied, international inspirations; and its crucial influence on later 20th century art. Along the way, we find candid nudes, crowded street views, and blissful bathing idylls, each of them vivid with energy and intent on a new kind of art.

The name Alfred Hitchcock is synonymous with suspense-that is to say, masterful, spine-tingling, thrilling, shocking, excruciating, eye-boggling suspense. With triumphs such as Rebecca, Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho, Hitchcock (1899-1980) fashioned a new level of cinematic intrigue and fear through careful pacing, subtlety, and suggestiveness. This complete guide traces Hitchcock's life and career from his earliest silent films right through to his last picture in 1976, Family Plot. Updated with fresh images, the book combines detailed entries for each of Hitchcock's 53 films, an incisive essay that sheds light on his fear-inducing devices, photos of the master at work, and an illustrated list of each of his cameos, together adding up to a movie buff's dream.

The 1970s: that magical era betwixt the swinging '60s and the decadent '80s, the epoch of leisure suits and Afros, the age of disco music and platform shoes. As war raged on in Vietnam and the Cold War continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather. Thanks to directors like Spielberg and Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon: the blockbuster. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog had its heyday. The sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the U.S., more freely in Europe) most notably in Bertolucci's steamy, scandalous Last Tango in Paris. Amid all this came a wave of nostalgic films (The Sting, American Graffiti) and Vietnam pictures (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter), the rise of the antihero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre, blaxploitation.

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect, who for many years built almost nothing, despite winning critical acclaim. Some even said her audacious, futuristic designs were unbuildable. During the latter years of her life, Hadid's daring visions became a reality, bringing a unique new architectural language to cities and structures as varied as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, hailed by The New York Times as "the most important new building in America since the Cold War"; the MAXXI Museum in Rome; the Guangzhou Opera House in China; and the London 2012 Olympics Aquatics Centre. At the time of her unexpected death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among the elite of world architecture, recognized as the first woman to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, but above all as a giver of new forms, the first great architect of the noughties. From her early sharply angled buildings to later more fluid architecture that made floors, ceilings, walls, and furniture part of an overall design, this essential introduction presents key examples of Hadid's pioneering practice. She was an artist, as much as an architect, who fought to break the old rules and crafted her own 21st-century universe.

In art history, we tend to be on first name terms only with the most revered of masters. The Renaissance painter and architect Raphael Santi (1483-1520) is one such star. The man we call simply Raphael has for centuries been hailed as a supreme Renaissance artist. For some, he even outstrips his equally famous, equally first-named, contemporaries, Leonardo and Michelangelo. From 1500 to 1508, Raphael worked throughout central Italy, particularly in Florence where he secured his reputation as a painter of portraits and beautifully rendered Madonnas, archetypical icons within the Catholic faith. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II and later embarked on an ambitious mural scheme for the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. Within this room, Raphael's The School of Athens is considered a paradigm of the High Renaissance, merging Classical philosophy with perfected perspectival space, animated figures, and a composition of majestic balance. This essential introduction explores how in just two decades of work, Raphael painted his way to legendary greatness. With highlights from his prolific output, it presents the mastery of figures and forms that secured his place not only in the trinity of Renaissance luminaries but also among the most esteemed artists of all time.

Richard Kern's gloriously natural girls
""These photographs may strike some people as sexist and others as sexy. Either way they are uncommonly visceral." - The New York Times," New York
Richard Kern likes real women: unpretentious, unadorned, and definitely undressed. Those who love Kern know each book is an invitation to join him in his privileged world where natural young women share their most intimate moments. Kern has never lost his boyish curiosity with girls and their secrets, so instead of posing them in sterile sets he follows them through the house--or rather his New York apartment--from backyard to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, capturing every sexy and embarrassing moment. "Action "is his most revealing book yet. But we know that sometimes it can be a little risky to look at a book this revealing in public, so this special edition comes with TASCHEN's clever new Panic Cover feature to end public censure once and for all. Simply slip off the attractive but explicit cover, reverse, and redress your book for a sedate look perfect for all occasions. For 240 pages we will still be careening through the life of Kern, accompanied by dozens of energetic, fun-loving, clothes-dropping exhibitionists, but those ladies in the park will think you're reading "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" "Young women want to show the world they're not like their man-hating women's lib mothers," a Kern model once told me, and these girls certainly get the point across. To further assist the young ladies in their rebellion, the book includes an hour-long DVD of original Kern film with an exclusive musical score by Thurston Mooreof Sonic Youth. "Way to stick it to the Mom, ladies And thank you, Richard, you lucky dog."-Dian Hanson