The infinite subtlety of the female form
Sensual and softly surreal, the nude photography of Ralph Gibson frames the female form both organically and graphically, referencing art history while also innovating in the arena of erotic imagery, at once summoning visceral sensation and calling out for tactile attention. Thumb through this exquisite tribute to the contours and curves of womanhood and experience the intimacy of the photographic lens.
Reviving TASCHEN’s sold-out Collector’s Edition, this tribute gathers the best of Gibson’s exquisite nudes alongside some of his most recent works in an accessible, revised format, complete with a fresh in-depth interview by Eric Fischl. Strikingly graphic, meticulously composed, and loaded with subtle provocations, the master photographer’s mysterious, dreamlike images pay homage to greats such as Man Ray and Edward Weston, while continually pursuing new frontiers.
"A photographer once said that beauty in women is endless. Perhaps it was I who said it. [...] I love photographing women and could say that the form of the female body is absolute and perfect." —Ralph Gibson
How the Farm Security Administration introduced America to Americans
“Through these travels and the photographs, I got to love the United States more than I could have in any other way.” — Jack Delano
Amid the ravages of the Great Depression, the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) was first founded in 1935 to address the country’s rural poverty. Its efforts focused on improving the lives of sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning farmers, with resettlement and collectivization programs, as well as modernized farming methods. In a parallel documentation program, the FSA hired a number of photographers and writers to record the lives of the rural poor and “introduce America to Americans.”
This book records the full reach of the FSA program from 1935 to 1943, honoring its vigor and commitment across subjects, states, and stylistic preferences. The photographs are arranged into four broad regional sections but otherwise allowed to speak for themselves—to provide individual impressions as much as they cumulatively build an indelible survey of a nation.
The images are both color and black-and-white, and span the complete spetrum of American rural life. They show us convicts, cotton workers, kids, and relocated workers on the road. We see subjects victim to the elements of nature as much as to the vagaries of the global economic market. We find the work of such perceptive, sensitive photographers as Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange, and read their own testimonies to the FSA project and their encounters with their subjects, including Lange’s worn, weather-beaten and iconic Migrant Mother.
What unites all of the pictures is a commitment to the individuality and dignity of each subject, as much as to the witness they bear to this particular period of the American past. The subjects are entrenched in the hardships of their historical lot as much as they are caught in universal cycles of growing, playing, eating, aging, and dying. Yet they face the viewer with what is utterly their own: a unique, irreplaceable, often unforgettable presence.
Space Shapers
An encyclopedia of modern architecture
With more than 280 entries, this architectural A–Z, now part of our Bibliotheca Universalis series, offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. From the period spanning the 19th to the 21st century, pioneering architects are featured with a portrait, concise biography, as well as a description of her or his important work.
Like a bespoke global architecture tour, you’ll travel from Manhattan skyscrapers to a Japanese concert hall, from Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona to Lina Bo Bardi’s sports and leisure center in a former factory site in São Paulo. You’ll take in Gio Ponti’s colored geometries, Zaha Hadid’s free-flowing futurism, the luminous interiors of SANAA, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s unique blend of Scottish tradition and elegant japonisme.
The book’s A to Z entries also cover groups, movements, and styles to position these leading individual architects within broader building trends across time and geography, including International Style, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and much more. With illustrations including some of the best architectural photography of the modern era, this is a comprehensive resource for any architecture professional, student, or devotee.
Burton Holmes, the man who brought the world home
It was the Belle Époque, a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes (1870–1958) began a lifelong journey to bring the world home.
From the grand boulevards of Paris to China’s Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama Canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Holmes delighted in finding “the beautiful way around the world” and made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. He coined the term “travelogue” in 1904 to advertise his unique performance and thrilled audiences with two-hour sets of stories timed to projections of multihued, hand-painted glass-lantern slides and some of the first “moving pictures.”
Paris, Beijing, Delhi, Dubrovnik, Moscow, Manila, Jakarta, Jerusalem: Burton Holmes was there. He visited every continent and nearly every country on the planet, shooting over 30,000 photographs and nearly 500,000 feet of film. This book represents the best of the Holmes archive, brimming with brilliant color photographs. A rare window onto the world of 100 years ago, it is also the ultimate inspiration to strike out on a travel adventure of your own.
Domestic Bliss
Innovative, intimate architecture from China to Chile
Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality.
This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson, Richard Meier, Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor. Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.
When marble and clay come alive
While anchoring his practice in the traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) paved the way for modern sculpture. From a very early stage, he was interested in movement, the expression of the body, chance effects, and the incomplete fragment. It was these elements that gave shape, and the impression of life, to such famous works as The Kiss and The Thinker.
Produced in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, this TASCHEN Basic Art introduction examines the formative years of Rodin’s training as well as the key stages of his subsequent career. It retraces the genesis of his sculptures and monuments from both a historical and an aesthetic point of view and illuminates the links between his different works. The reader gains access to the artist’s ideas, as well as to the real material processes in his studio—the modeling in clay, the passage from plaster to bronze or to marble, enlargement, the creation of assemblages, and his deeply sensual erotic drawings.
An inexhaustible source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists, Rodin’s work incorporated innovation and transgression, but above all an unrivaled passion for working in front of the living model and for capturing the truth of human experience and forms. With rich illustration and texts from François Blanchetière, this book invites us to discover—and rediscover—this priceless legacy.
The Pop Star
When art went Whaam!
American painter Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) pioneered a new epoch in American art, bursting onto a scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s New York and defining a new art vocabulary for a new era.
With his groundbreaking use of industrial production techniques and trivial, quotidian imagery such as cartoons, comic strips, and advertising, Lichtenstein joined contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist to reflect and satirize American mass media and consumer culture. Works such as Look, Mickey! (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), and Whaam! (1963) deployed mass production techniques, particularly Ben-Day dots printing, to create a blow-up effect and pixelated “dot” style, with which Lichtenstein has become synonymous.
This book provides an essential overview of Lichtenstein’s career, tracing his earliest Pop statements through to later “brushstroke” retorts to Abstract Expressionism and reinterpretations of modern masterpieces. We look at his leading position in midcentury modernism, and the ways in which his works both critique and chronicle 20th-century America.
The universe of Christo and Jeanne-Claude
The work of the artist couple Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) resists categorization. It is a hybrid of art, urban planning, architecture, and engineering, but above all an aesthetic uniquely their own: surreal and ethereal environmental interventions that have graced monuments, public parks, and centers of power alike.
This compact book spans the complete career of the couple who were born on the very same day, met in Paris, fell in love, and became a creative team like no other. With rich illustration, it spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s earliest projects in the 1950s right through to The Floating Piers, installed at Lake Iseo, Italy, in 2016. The book celebrates all of the couple’s most famous environmental interventions, such as The Gates in New York’s Central Park and the Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, while also featuring early drawings and family photos unknown to the wider public.
Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions.
Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes.
Me, Myself, and I
The history of the self-portrait
The self as a subject is one of the most fascinating and fruitful of artistic enterprises. From the 15th century to today, this collection brings together some of the best examples of self-portraiture to explore the genre’s evolution over the centuries as well as the enduring questions of selfhood and self-representation that have besieged human experience for centuries before social media and the selfie.
Is a self-portrait of an artist a medium of reflection? Or is it merely a black void, the “false mirror,” as the Surrealist René Magritte entitled his 1928 painting of an eye? How much does it impart about contemporary notions of beauty, power, and status? From Albrecht Dürer to Egon Schiele, Fra Filippo Lippi to Frida Kahlo, this far-reaching collection explores the numerous ways in which artists have taken themselves as subjects, the variety of ingenious methods and perspectives they have used, and the intriguing questions they raise.
The man with a modern mission
Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887–1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living.
Le Corbusier’s work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular houses in Switzerland through dazzling white, purist villas to dynamic syntheses of art and architecture such as the chapel at Ronchamp and the civic buildings in Chandigarh, India. A hallmark throughout was his ability to combine functionalist aspirations with a strong sense of expressionism, as well as a broader and empathetic understanding of urban planning. He was a founding member of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM), which championed “architecture as a social art.”
This book presents some of Le Corbusier’s landmark projects to introduce an architect, thinker, and modern pioneer who, even in his unrealized projects, offered discussion and inspiration for generations to come.
Walter Gropius, visionary of the Bauhaus and beyond
Walter Gropius (1883–1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it was a century ago.
In this essential architect introduction, we survey Gropius’ evolution and influence with 20 of his most significant projects, from the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany, to the Chicago Tribune Tower and Harvard University Graduate Center, completed after Gropius’s exodus to the United States in 1937. We explore his role both as an architectural practitioner, and as a writer and educator, not only as a Bauhaus pioneer, but also, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as a leading proponent of the International Style.
Along the way, we see how many of Gropius’s tenets remain benchmarks for architects, designers, and urbanists today. Whether in his emphasis on a functional beauty or his interest in housing and city planning, Gropius astounds in the agility of his thinking as much as in the luminous precision of his work.
They’re not your girls next door
Fashion and fetish in a female fantasyland
Ellen von Unwerth was a supermodel before the term was invented, so she knows a thing or two about photographing beautiful women. Now one of the world’s most original and successful fashion photographers, she pays homage to the world’s most delectable females in Fräulein. This celebration of our era’s sexiest female icons includes Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss, Vanessa Paradis, Britney Spears, Eva Mendes, Lindsay Lohan, Dita von Teese, Adriana Lima, Carla Bruni, Eva Green, Christina Aguilera, Monica Bellucci and dozens more.
Switching effortlessly between color and immaculate black and white, von Unwerth’s photography revels in sexual intrigue, femininity, romance, fetishism, kitsch humor, decadence and sheer joie de vivre. Whether nude or in lingerie and a dazzling smile, her subjects are never objectified. Some flaunt personal fantasies; others are guarded, suggesting that we have stumbled into a secret world. Fashion and fantasy were never so enchantingly combined.
Johannes Vermeer, creator of life from oil paint
Despite numbering at just 35, his works have prompted a New York Times best seller; a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth; record visitor numbers at art institutions from Amsterdam to Washington, DC; and special crowd-control measures at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, where thousands flock to catch a glimpse of the enigmatic and enchanting Girl with a Pearl Earring, also known as the “Dutch Mona Lisa”.
In his lifetime, however, the fame of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) barely extended beyond his native Delft and a small circle of patrons. After his death, his name was largely forgotten, except by a few Dutch art collectors and dealers. Outside of Holland, his works were even misattributed to other artists. It was not until the mid-19th century that Vermeer came to the attention of the international art world, which suddenly looked upon his narrative minutiae, meticulous textural detail, and majestic planes of light, spotted a genius, and never looked back.
This 40th anniversary edition showcases the complete catalog of Vermeer’s work, presenting the calm yet compelling scenes so treasured in galleries across Europe and the United States into one monograph of utmost reproduction quality. Crisp details and essays tracing Vermeer’s career illuminate his remarkable ability not only to bear witness to the trends and trimmings of the Dutch Golden Age but also to encapsulate an entire story in just one transient gesture, expression, or look.
“Sirs” begins the missive from our imaginary correspondent. “It’s not that I don’t love your original Big Penis Book, but that, perhaps, I love it too much. I now become anxious leaving the house without it, and long business trips are simply torture. Couldn’t you make a smaller, less obtrusive edition, still packed with men whose generative members measure over 8 inches, that doesn’t form a suspiciously large bulge in my carry-on luggage? And while you’re at it, could you make it highly affordable, since my pockets are as shallow as this premise?”
Done! The Little Big Penis Book features over 150 massively endowed models from the 1940s through the ’90s, including photos by Bob Mizer of AMG, David Hurles of Old Reliable, Rip Colt of Colt Studio, Craig Calvin Anderson of Sierra Domino, Hal Roth of Filmco, Jim Jaeger of Third World Studios, Falcon Studios, Mike Arlen, Fred Bisonnes, Carlos Quiroz, and Charles Hovland in a compact and inexpensive format.
Photos come not just from the original overstuffed 384-page edition, but from subsequent Big Penis Calendars, meaning that 30% of the content is unique to this edition. Add a reduced text to make more room for the stunning black-and-white and color photos and how could anyone—big, small, or just right—ask for a better deal?
A decade marked by adventures in futurism
Published annually from 1906 until 1980, Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook was dedicated to the latest currents in architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, glassware, textiles, metalware, and ceramics. Since the publications went out of print, the now hard-to-find yearbooks have become highly prized by collectors and dealers.
This volume spotlights the futuristic, experimental aesthetic of the 1970s. After the revolutions of the ’60s, the world of design and architecture became an increasingly exciting and fast-moving hotbed of ideas, rife with vehemently opposing schools and movements. In many ways it was a more extreme era for design than the previous decade.
Experimentalism was everywhere, and many projects, thought not practical, were forward-thinking visions of a new kind of decorative art and design. Various groups advocated returning to natural methods, rejecting style in favor of craft or pushing the logic of industrial living to its concrete, high-rise extreme. Decorative Art 1970s includes the work of the decade’s brightest stars, such as Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Luigi Colani, Achille Castiglioni, Kisho Kurokawa, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, and Theo Crosby.
The Dylan breakthrough portfolio
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.
The Museum Ludwig’s handbook of photography in the 20th century
The history of photography began nearly 200 years ago, but only relatively recently has it been fully recognized as a medium in its own right. Cologne’s Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum’s holdings.
This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection’s rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the 20th century’s most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers’ biographical details, providing a comprehensive and indispensable overview of 20th-century photography.
Paintings’ hidden secrets revealed
This important addition to our understanding of art history’s masterworks puts some of the world's most famous paintings under a magnifying glass to uncover their most small and subtle elements and all they reveal about a bygone time, place, and culture.
Guiding our eye to the minutiae of subject and symbolism, authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen allow even the most familiar of pictures to come alive anew through their intricacies and intrigues. Is the bride pregnant? Why does the man wear a beret? How does the shadow of war hang over a scene of dancing? Along the way, we travel from Ancient Egypt through to modern Europe, from the Renaissance to the Roaring Twenties. We meet Greek heroes and poor German poets and roam from cathedrals to cabaret bars, from the Garden of Eden to a Garden Bench in rural France.
As we pick apart each painting and then reassemble it like a giant jigsaw puzzle, these celebrated canvases captivate not only in their sheer wealth of details but also in the witness they bear to the fashions and trends, people and politics, loves and lifestyles of their time.
A revolutionary spirit in modern art
Diego Rivera (1886–1957) is a loud presence on the art historical stage. With devout political principles and a turbulent romantic history, he was at once husband and paladin of Frida Kahlo, advocate and adversary of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and liberator and traitor of Leon Trotsky.
Vibrant, graphic, and often monumental, Rivera’s paintings carry the same live political and passionate charge as his personal biography. Fusing European influences such as Cubism with a socialist ideology and an exaltation of Mexico’s indigenous and popular heritage, he created a new iconography for art history and for his country. He became one of the most important figures in the Mexican mural movement and won international acclaim for his public wall paintings, in which he presented a utopian yet accessible vision of a post-revolutionary Mexico. In 1931, Rivera was the subject of MoMA’s second ever monographic exhibition.
This book explores the unique blend of influence and ideology which secure Rivera’s place as both a unique and a universal painter, bound to the particular turbulent experience of early 20th century Mexico, and yet preoccupied with subjects such as revolution and class inequity which continue to speak to us today.
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