The most famous 18th-century copper engraver, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) made his name with etchings of ancient Rome. His startling, chiaroscuro images imbued the city's archaeological ruins with drama and romance and became favorite souvenirs for the Grand Tourists who traveled Italy in pursuit of classical culture and education. Today, Piranesi is renowned not just for shaping the European imagination of Rome, but also for his elaborate series of fanciful prisons, Carceri, which have influenced generations of creatives since, from the Surrealists to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Loosely based on contemporary stage sets rather than the actual dingy dungeons of Piranesi's day, these intricate images defy architectural reality to play instead with perspective, lighting, and scale. Staircases exist on two planes simultaneously; vast, vaulted ceilings seem to soar up to the heavens; interior and exterior distinctions collapse. With a low viewpoint and small, fragile figures, the prison scenes become monstrous megacities of incarceration, celebrated to this day as masterworks of existentialist drama.

At the dawn of the automobile age, Americans' predilection for wanderlust prompted a new wave of inventive entrepreneurs to cater to this new mode of transportation. Starting in the 1920s, attention-grabbing buildings began to appear that would draw in passing drivers for snacks, provisions, souvenirs, or a quick meal. The architectural establishment of the day dismissed these roadside buildings as "monstrosities". Yet, they flourished, especially along America's Sunbelt, and in particular, in Southern California, as proprietors indulged their creative impulses in the form of giant, eccentric constructions - from owls, dolls, pigs, and ships, to coffee pots and fruit. Their symbolic intent was guileless, yet they were marginalized by history. But, over the past 40 years, California's architectural anomalies have regained their integrity, and are now being celebrated in this freshly revised compendium of buildings, California Crazy. Brimming with the best examples of this architectural genre, California Crazy includes essays exploring the influences that fostered the nascent architectural movement, as well as identifying the unconventional landscapes and attitudes found on Los Angeles and Hollywood roadsides which allowed these buildings to flourish in profusion. In addition, California Crazy features David Gebhard's definitive essay, which defined this vernacular movement almost forty years ago. The California Crazy concept is expanded to include domestic architecture, eccentric signage, and the automobile as a fanciful object.

Eye on Africa: Thirty years of Africa images, selected by Salgado himself Sebasti?o Salgado is one the most respected photojournalists working today, his reputation forged by decades of dedication and powerful black and white images of dispossessed and distressed people taken in places where most wouldn?t dare to go. Although he has photographed throughout South America and around the globe, his work most heavily concentrates on Africa, where he has shot more than 40 reportage works over a period of 30 years. From the Dinka tribes in Sudan and the Himba in Namibia to gorillas and volcanoes in the lakes region to displaced peoples throughout the continent, Salgado shows us all facets of African life today. Whether he's documenting refugees or vast landscapes, Salgado knows exactly how to grab the essence of a moment so that when one sees his images one is involuntarily drawn into them. His images artfully teach us the disastrous effects of war, poverty, disease, and hostile climatic conditions. This book brings together Salgado's photos of Africa in three parts. The first concentrates on the southern part of the continent (Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia), the second on the Great Lakes region (Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya), and the third on the Sub-Saharan region (Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Ethiopia). Texts are provided by renowned Mozambique novelist Mia Couto, who describes how today's Africa reflects the effects of colonization as well as the consequences of economic, social, and environmental crises. This stunning book is not only a sweeping document of Africa but an homage to the continent's history, people, and natural phenomena.

Of all building materials in the world, brick is one of the most enduring and ubiquitous. Traces of brickmaking date back to 7500 BC and fired brick first made its appearance in about 3500 BC. Since then, the trusty brick has shown amazing resilience and remains one of the mainstays of contemporary architecture. Rooted in tradition in countries as different as China and the Netherlands, it is inexpensive, flexible in use, and can also be ecologically fabricated. This comprehensive two-volume set tours the world to cover the most exciting and innovative brick buildings of the past 15 years, from Argentina to New Zealand. True to all TASCHEN architecture tomes, it includes new talents like Argentina's Diego Arraigada and Vietnam's Nguyen Hai Long as well as established starchitects such as Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor. Featured buildings showcase the variety of brick applications across cultural, domestic, infrastructure, and leisure spaces, including Tate Modern Switch House by Herzog & De Meuron, Tidy Architects' Amorio Restaurant in Santiago, and Mass Design Group's Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu, Malawi.

This book deals with the seminal surrealist. It explores Dali's grandiose and grotesque oeuvre. Picasso called Dali "an outboard motor that's always running." Dali thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics - and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This publication presents the entire painted oeuvre of Salvador Dali. After many years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret finally located all the paintings of this highly prolific artist. Many of the works had been inaccessible for years - in fact so many that almost half the illustrations in this book had rarely been seen.

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: Violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. This work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio's entire uvre with a catalogue raisonne of his works. Each painting is reproduced in large format, with recent, high production photography allowing for dramatic close-ups with Caravaggio's ingenious details of looks and gestures. Five introductory chapters analyze Caravaggio's artistic career from his early struggle to make a living, through his first public commissions in Rome, and his growing celebrity status. They look at his increasing daring with lighting and with a boundary-breaking naturalism which allowed even biblical events to unfold with an unprecedented immediacy before the viewer.

Anxious angles: The pioneers and masterworks of "degenerate" ExpressionismGerman Expressionists were uneasy and angry. Emerging at the dawn of the 20th century, they railed against Christian and bourgeois values as much as rampant urban industrialization. Anti-imperialist, they were dispersed, shattered, and depleted by the horrors of the First World War, and rallied their efforts only to be officially erased by the Nazi "Degenerate Art" exhibition of 1937.In this comprehensive TASCHEN collection, director of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger gathers the many artists and elements of this urgent, scattered, complex movement into one authoritative overview of its protagonists, principles, and essential role in 20th-century modernism. Finding a critical calm amid the frenzy of color and distortion, the book distills Expressionism's leading collectives, Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as its regional characteristics across its Berlin and Munich hubs, and its North German, Rheinland, and Viennese variants.Along the way, we compare and contrast themes and stylistic choices as this dispersed group of artists wrestled with their modern industrial reality. We find luminous streaks from Wassily Kandinsky, and the sickly hues of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the futurist facets of Franz Marc, and a partial Impressionist throwback in the gaudy dabs of Emil Nolde. We meet fat faces, tired faces, and faces like African masks. We walk into seedy bars with bloated old men, and then enter a claustrophobic yellow room occupied by an awkwardly posed nude. We are crushed in a cacophony of city sound and smoke, and then left alone with woods, a lake, and silence.Spanning this richness and range in Expressionist output, Elger features such well-known figures as Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schiele, while taking care to present inadequately studied artists such as Conrad Felixmuller, Ludwig Meidner, and Marianne von Werefkin. The result is an expansive, inclusive, dependable digest of a vivid, often violent mode of expression, and the yearning and unease behind its frenzied paintwork.

After flirtations with Realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism, Kiev-born Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) found his metier in dissolving literal, representational figures and landscapes into pure emotionally-charged abstraction. In 1915, he created what is widely lauded as the first and ultimate abstract artwork: Black Square, a black rectangle on a white background, hailed as the "zero point of painting," a seminal moment for modern and abstract practice. In this book, we follow Malevich's key innovations and ideas and place his groundbreaking achievements within the context of both the Russian and global avant-garde. Through rich illustrations of his work, we explore the artist's theory of Suprematism, based on severe geometric abstraction and "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art"; his leading role in the development of Constructivism; as well as his interests in philosophy, literature, Russian folk art, and the fourth dimension.

A Visual History of Graphic Design - A comprehensive look at hundreds of landmark projects, industry leaders profiles, and illustrated timelines for each decade. History is a complex business. Fortunes boom and bust, empires wax and wane, and change-whether social, political, or technological-has its winners, its losers, its advocates, and its enemies. Through all the turbulent passage of time, graphic design-with its vivid, neat synthesis of image and idea-has distilled the spirit of each age. This book offers a comprehensive history of graphic design from the end of the 19th century to the remains of World War II. It traces the evolution of this creative field from its beginning as poster design to its further development into advertising, corporate identity, packaging, and editorial design. Organized chronologically, the volume features over 2,500 seminal designs from all over the world, 71 of which are profiled in detail besides 61 leaders in the field, including Alphonse Mucha (chocolate advertisements), Edward Johnston (London Underground logo and typeface), El Lissitzky (constructivist graphics), Herbert Matter (photomontage travel posters from Switzerland), Saul Bass (animated opening titles), and A. M. Cassandre (art deco posters). With his sweeping knowledge of the field, author Jens Muller curates the standout designs for each year alongside a running sequence of design milestones. Meanwhile, in his introductory essay, David Jury situates graphic design from its point of origin in early printing, engraving, and lithography to striking creative developments in the 19th century. Each consecutive decade is then prefaced by a succinct overview as well as a stunning visual timeline, offering a vivid display of the variety of graphic production in each decade as well as the global landscape which it at once described and defined. As we move on from and reflect upon the 20th century, this staggering collection represents the foundations of what would influence some of the fastest changing creative fields, and a long-overdue recognition of the enormous contribution graphic design has made to economics, politics, social causes, arts, media, and the way we see the world. A second volume in preparation will cover the period from 1960 to today.

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.

Happy birthday, dear Tramp Celebrating Chaplin's life and work as his alter-ego turns 100 George Bernard Shaw called him "The only genius to come out of the movie industry." From Alaska to Zimbabwe, his "Tramp" is still the most recognized silhouette in the world 100 years after its creation. He owns the bowler hat and toothbrush moustache combo. He is, of course, the incomparable Charlie Chaplin, and this is the ultimate book on his life and work. Within a year of arriving in Hollywood in 1914, British-born Chaplin, playing the Tramp, had become the slapstick king of America. By the end of his second year on the silver screen, Chaplin's fame had spread worldwide he was the first international film star resulting in a million dollar contract that made him one of the richest men in the world. With his own studio and his stock company of close collaborators, Chaplin began making his greatest movies: The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940) an unassailable collection of work that has enshrined him in the collective consciousness of world culture. Chaplin was reluctant to talk about his working methods, perhaps because he worked instinctually rather than methodically. For the first time, using the complete resources of Chaplin's vast archives, this book follows the making of every one of Chaplin's films. From the impromptu spontaneity of his early shorts, many filmed in a day, to the meticulous retakes and reworking of scenes and gags in his classic movies, we can see how Chaplin takes the caricature figure of the Tramp and turns him into a living character. Becoming the most famous man in the world meant that Chaplin lived life in the spotlight. His meetings with great figures like Albert Einstein, Gandhi, and Henry Ford, as well as his personal life and political statements, were reported worldwide. Yet Chaplin's philosophy, which he animated through his films, remained consistent throughout his life and career. The Tramp is the ultimate underdog, the working man, the individual trying to survive economic depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. Whatever crises life threw at him, the Tramp shrugged it off, straightened his shoulders, and walked off into a brighter future. Celebrating 100 years of "the Tramp," the most famous character in cinema history Made with unrestricted access to the Chaplin archives, this XL tome recounts his entire life history in words and pictures Among the 1,200 images are many previously unseen stills, on-set photos, memos, documents, storyboards, posters, and designs, plus scripts and images for unmade films Includes Chaplin's personal letters to his brother Sydney at key moments in his life Like the best-selling The James Bond Archives, the text is an oral history, told from the point of view of Chaplin himself, drawing upon his extensive writings, many of which have never been reprinted before. This is supplemented by interviews with some of his closest collaborators. Draws upon over 150 books of press clippings in Chaplin's archives, which range from his early days in music halls to his death Includes Chaplin's short films, from Making a Living (1914) to The Pilgrim (1923), as well as all of his feature-length movies, from The Kid (1921) to A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) The first printing of the book includes a film strip from the classic City Lights (1931) cut from a print in Chaplin's archives Sketches from Chaplin's original storyboard of The Great Dictator"

Pocket-sized, pink and super gay, the first issue of BUTT magazine arrived in the spring of 2001, sweeping aside the cliches of the mainstream homo press. Ever since, BUTT has maintained its independence, resisting clean-cut commercialism in favor of frank Q&As, revealing photography and a delightfully direct take on sex between men. Just by being its horny, happy self, BUTT has attracted contributions from the world's best writers and photographers. Meanwhile, frequent BUTT parties and the CLUB BUTT social network have mobilized an international army of loyal friends and fans in sexy solidarity. This meaty anthology, FOREVER BUTT, revisits some of the magazine's finest and most thrilling moments from more than a decade in print. Material from now rare and collectible editions of BUTT is here made available again here, including sexy pictures, and candid interviews with such spectacular men as Gore Vidal, Francois Sagat, Marc Jacobs and Your Big Dick Host. In true BUTT style, the book not only celebrates sex as something joyous, social and silly while but is also, as artist Wolfgang Tillmans writes in his introduction, "first and foremost an exhilarating read". With sexy pictures of, and candid interviews with: AA Bronson, Aiden Shaw, Andy Butler, Bernhard Willhelm, Bruce LaBruce, Christopher Ciccone, Dennis Cooper, Didier Lestrade, Don Bachardy, Ed Droste, Edmund White, Francesco Vezzoli, Francois Sagat, Gore Vidal, Jason Whipple, Javier Peres, Jayne County, Joe Gage, John Holland, John Waters, Jonny Wooster, Julian Ganio, Karl Kolbitz, Marc Jacobs, Marco Flores, Nico Muhly, Paul Antonio, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Perez Hilton, Greek Pete, Rick Owens, Roger Payne, Rosa von Praunheim, Ryan Trecartin, Slava Mogutin, Stephen Galloway, Stephin Merritt, Tommy DeLuca, Ian & Marc Hundley, Vince Aletti, Walter Pfeiffer and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Time-travel through the Automobile Age with a collection that puts you in the driver's seat. 20th Century Classic Cars offers a lush visual history of the automobile, decade by decade, via 400-plus print advertisements from the Jim Heimann Collection. Using imagery culled from a century of auto advertising, this book traces the evolution of the auto from horseless carriage to rocket on wheels-and beyond. With an introduction and chapter text by New York Times automotive writer Phil Patton, as well as an illustrated timeline, this volume highlights the technological innovations, major manufacturers and dealers, historical events, and influence of popular culture on car design.

Some of the most spectacular architectural designs of the moment have to do with our most basic needs: eating, drinking, and shopping. Restaurants, bars, and boutiques are the substance of this new book that puts an emphasis-like all volumes of the Architecture Now!-series-on the very latest and best creations. This is where you will find the likes of David Chipperfield and Peter Marino in the same book, where Jean Nouvel and BIG star Bjarke Ingels meet. But it is also the place to discover new talents like the designer of London's Late Night Chameleon Cafe, Gary Card, to see how the director David Lynch imagined the subterranean Paris nightclub Silencio, or what designer Tom Dixon conjured up for the Tazmania Ballroom in Hong Kong. Also included is A Cantina, in Galicia, Spain, winner of Best Overall Restaurant at the 2012 Restaurant and Bar Design Awards. From Kobe, Japan to Turku, Finland to Sao Paulo, Brazil, Eat Shop Drink rounds up the newest and brightest places to see and be seen.

Founded in 1928 as a "living diary" by the great Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti, domus has been hailed as the world's most influential architecture and design journal. With style and rigor, it has reported on the major themes and stylistic movements in industrial, interior, product, and structural design. This fresh reprint of domus's coverage of the 1940s brings together the most important features from a decade of destruction and reconstruction. Even amid the bombing raids inflicted on Milan, domus continued to publish through much of the war, charting the design zeitgeist, while managing a successive turnover of editors and editors-in-chief during Ponti's "interregnum" between 1941 and 1948. The pages from this period record reports and features on modern industrial design and furniture, new prefabricated houses, American academic architecture, the building projects of Carlo Mollino, Gian Luigi Banfi, Franco Albini, and Giuseppe Terragni, as well as the postwar flowering of Organic Design.domus distilled Seven volumes spanning 1928 to 1999 Over 6,000 pages featuring influential projects by the most important designers and architects Original layouts and all covers, with captions providing navigation and context New introductory essays by renowned architects and designers Each edition comes with an appendix featuring texts translated into English, many of which were previously only available in Italian A comprehensive index in each volume listing both designers' and manufacturers' names

With Salvador Dali as its figurehead, the great ship of Surrealism traversed the turbulent seas of the early 20th century with sails billowing with dreams and desires. Inspired by the psychoanalytical practice of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists championed the unconscious as the domain of truth, uninhibited by the standards or expectations of society. With techniques ranging from hypnotism to nocturnal walks to automatic writing, the likes of Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Brassai, and Meret Oppenheim produced paintings, drawings, texts, and films in which they sought to excavate their most intimate and primal instincts. The results abound with sexual fantasies, with mysterious, menacing creatures, and with the juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory objects or ideas. This book introduces the origins and the sensational legacy of the Surrealist movement, one of the most profound and enduring influences on film, theater, literature, art, and thought. Featured artists: Hans Arp, Andre Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, Matta, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Meret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy

From a house without walls to exhibition spaces in shipping containers, Shigeru Ban has constantly challenged architectural rule and expectation. In the age of the "starchitect," he has also demonstrated a commitment to humanitarian practice: Over the course of his esteemed career, his inventive, elegant designs have been applied as much to private commissions as to emergency relief work at the sites of natural and man-made disasters around the world, from Kobe to New Orleans. For the Pritzker Prize jury, which chose Ban as its 2014 winner, the architect manifests "total curiosity and commitment; endless innovation; an infallible eye; an acute sensibility." This updated monograph, compiled with the architect's collaboration, brings together every one of Ban's built works, including such recent projects as the Tamedia headquarters in Zurich, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch.

Poised at the start of the 21st century, we can see clearly that the previous century was marked by momentous changes in the field of design. Aesthetics entered into everyday life with often staggering results. Our homes and workplaces turned into veritable galleries of style and innovation. From furniture to graphics, it's all here-the work of artists who have shaped and re-created the modern world with a dizzying variety of materials. From the organic to the geometric, from Art Deco, through to Pop and High-Tech, this book contains all the great names-Harry Bertoia, De Stijl, Dieter Rams, Philippe Starck, Charles and Ray Eames, to name only a very few. This essential book is a comprehensive journey through the shapes and colors, forms and functions of design history in the 20th century. An A-Z of designers and design schools, which builds into a complete picture of contemporary living. Lavishly illustrated, this is design in the fullest sense.

Hiroshige's Edo: Masterful ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Tokyo in the mid-19th century
"Stunning woodblock prints, beautifully reproduced." Elle Decor, New York
Literally meaning "pictures of the floating world," ukiyo-e refers to the famous Japanese woodblock print genre that originated in the 17th century and is practically synonymous with the Western world's visual characterization of Japan. Because they could be mass produced, ukiyo-e works were often used as designs for fans, New Year's greeting cards, single prints, and book illustrations, and traditionally they depicted city life, entertainment, beautiful women, kabuki actors, and landscapes. The influence of ukiyo-e in Europe and the USA, often referred to as Japonisme, can be seen in everything from impressionist painting to today's manga and anime illustration. This reprint is made from one of the finest complete original sets of woodblock prints belonging to the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Though he captured a variety of subjects, his greatest talent was in creating landscapes of his native Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and his final masterpiece was a series known as "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-1858). This resplendent complete reprint pairs each of the 120 large-scale illustrations with a description, allowing readers to plunge themselves into Hiroshige's beautifully vibrant landscapes.

Her coat is so warm, and now so affordable From the time "The Big Penis Book" was published, readers anticipated "The Big Book of Pussy." Granted, perhaps not the same readers, but the seed had been planted and the calls and letters began flowing in. Once they had that long-awaited book, some found themselves overwhelmed by the variety and abundance, as well as the sheer size of the book. As one reviewer wrote, ""let's give credit to Amazon for...the strength of its packaging. Who wants a 2-ton pussy book being 'exposed' for the mailman...?""
For those who worry that there can be too much of a good thing, we've made a pared down, ""best of"" edition of "The Big Book of Pussy," a petite little kitten of a book that puts those in-your-face photos in proper perspective. Now you can follow the evolution of genital exposure with ease, through 100 years of photos with one thing in common: the exhibitionistic pleasure with which the models present their feminine pulchritude. And with over 150 photos - 36 new to this book - of the pet we love to pet, no bothersome text to interrupt the flow, all in a package that won't stress the mailman's back, we just may have produced the perfect self-gifter of the year.

Spanish visionary Santiago Calatrava is renowned around the world as an architect, structural engineer, sculptor, and artist. Famed for bridges as much as buildings, he has made his name with neofuturistic structures that combine deft engineering solutions with dramatic visual impact. From the Athens 2004 Olympic sports complex and the Museum of Tomorrow to the Peace Bridge in Calgary, Alamillo Bridge in Seville, and the Mujer Bridge in Buenos Aires, Calatrava's creations show particular interest in the meeting point of movement and balance. With influences ranging from NASA space design to da Vinci's nature studies, the structures dazzle with a sense of lightness, agility, and aerodynamism, but always with a graceful poise amid their particular surroundings. This compact introduction explores Calatrava's unique aesthetic with key projects from his career, from early breakthroughs to his most recent work. Through buildings of culture, science, faith, and across his many famous bridges, we explore his integration of organic forms and human movements, and a uniquely fluid futurism, soaring towards tomorrow.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid visual documents of 1920s Art Deco. De Lempicka's style deployed cool colors and tight post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects are often nude and always sensual, aloof, and powerful. Bedecked in seductive light and textures, they command our attention but typically avert their gaze with an aspect of haughty grandeur. They include both high-society patrons and progressive portraits of emancipated and lesbian women, such as Women Bathing and Portrait of Suzy Solidor. De Lempicka's notorious Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, meanwhile, was commissioned for the cover of German magazine Die Dame and became an icon of speed, sophistication, and female independence. Through some of de Lempicka's finest, most compelling portraits, this introduction explores the artist's unique visual language and its privileged place not only in the annals of interwar art but also in the history of female artists and our collective consciousness of the Roaring Twenties.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a German-born biologist, naturalist, evolutionist, artist, philosopher, and doctor who spent his life researching flora and fauna from the highest mountaintops to the deepest ocean. A vociferous supporter and developer of Darwin's theories of evolution, he denounced religious dogma, authored philosophical treatises, gained a doctorate in zoology, and coined scientific terms which have passed into common usage, including ecology, phylum, and stem cell. At the heart of Haeckel's colossal legacy was the motivation not only to discover but also to explain. To do this, he created hundreds of detailed drawings, watercolors, and sketches of his findings which he published in successive volumes, including several marine organism collections and the majestic Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), which could serve as the cornerstone of Haeckel's entire life project. Like a meticulous visual encyclopedia of living things, Haeckel's work was as remarkable for its graphic precision and meticulous shading as for its understanding of organic evolution. From bats to the box jellyfish, lizards to lichen, and spider legs to sea anemones, Haeckel emphasized the essential symmetries and order of nature, and found biological beauty in even the most unlikely of creatures. In this book, we celebrate the scientific, artistic, and environmental importance of Haeckel's work, with a collection of 450 of his finest prints from several of his most important tomes, including Die Radiolarien, Monographie der Medusen, Die Kalkschwamme, and Kunstformen der Natur. At a time when biodiversity is increasingly threatened by human activities, the book is at once a visual masterwork, an underwater exploration, and a vivid reminder of the precious variety of life.

Through blood, sweat, tears, and writhing, bikini-clad bodies, this book compiles the best images of Theo Ehret, an unsung giant of sports photography. From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, Ehret chronicled the matches at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in L.A. as well as the erotic sub-genre of "apartment wrestling." Through the weigh-ins, the injuries, the backstage brawls, and the captivated crowds, Ehret's images capture all the action and the atmosphere of the Grand Olympic Auditorium, where the likes of Andre the Giant, Killer Kowalski, The Sheik, Gordman and Goliath, and Jesse "The Body" all punched their way to stardom. Alongside the Grand Olympic shots are the dramatic apartment wrestling images, a male fantasy phenomenon of bare breasts and buttocks, long, strong limbs and staged passions. An interview with Ehret adds his personal commentary to both sides of the wrestling scene, the legends he met along the way, and the interplay of fantasy, reality, and photography.

Little Nemo may be a diminutive hero of comic narrative but he sure stands tall as one of the greatest voyagers of the 20th century. The master creation of Winsor McCay (1869-1934), this small and restless sleeper inspired generations of artists with his weekly adventures from bed to Slumberland, a dream realm of colorful companions, elaborate architecture, psychedelic scenery, and thrilling adventures.Winsor McCay's Little Nemo 1905-1909 collects, in glorious full color, all 220 of Nemo's nocturnal escapades from the period 1905 to 1909. Through them, we delight not only in the splendor of Slumberland, a surreal benchmark for Robert Crumb and Federico Fellini, but also McCay's pioneering panel layout and storytelling techniques, his timing and pacing, and extraordinary architectural detail. In the accompanying 150-page illustrated essay, art historian and comics expert Alexander Braun places Winsor McCay's life and work within the cultural history of the U.S. media and entertainment industry, and explores the immense art historical significance of McCay's dream narrative. At once an adventure story, visual delight, and piece of cultural history, this publication is a tremendous monument to one of the most innovative pioneers-and one of the most intrepid explorers-of comic history.