In June of 1938, Action Comics debuted with a new kind of comic-book character on its cover: a costumed man with two identities, who possessed extraordinary strength and powers—a man able to protect the public when ordinary measures would not do. He was not the first super hero, but the Man of Steel would become the prototype for all super heroes thereafter.
Superman’s story, and those of Batman, Wonder Woman, and hundreds of other DC Comics characters, are all told in The Golden Age of DC Comics. Expanded from the Eisner Award–winning XL book, 75 Years of DC Comics, this edition offers readers the ultimate insight on DC’s first decades, from its pulp origins up to the comic-book burnings of the McCarthy ’50s.
More than 600 pages of covers and interiors, original illustrations, photographs, film stills, and ephemera bring the story lines, the characters, and their creators to vibrant life. Also included is an exclusive interview with legendary artist Joe Kubert.
Sportive gentlemen, lascivious ladies: Since the earliest days of photography, people have been getting up to all manner of rannygazoo in front of the lens. This collection presents the finest highlights from the collection of New Yorker Mark Rotenberg, who began collecting antique smut after finding a stash of vintage erotic pictures in a Brooklyn dumpster and now owns a 95,000 strong collection of archive pornography dating from between 1860 and 1960.
Flick through these pages and witness the fitness of our forebears as they romp, cavort, and frolic with unabashed energy and glee. From early monochromes of daringly dropped drawers and seductively waxed handlebar mustaches, to Kodachromes of cheery, twin-peaked pin-up beauties in the 1950s, this fine collection spans the sublimely sensual and the ridiculous.
Following the success of Jazz Covers, this epic volume of groove assembles over 500 legendary covers from a golden era in African American music. Psychedelia meets Black Power, sexual liberation meets social conscience, and street portraiture meets fantastical cartoon in this dazzling anthology of visualized funk and soul.
Gathering both classic and rare covers, the collection celebrates each artwork’s ability to capture not only a buyer’s interest, but an entire musical mood. Browse through and discover the brilliant, the bold, the outlandish and the sheer beautiful designs that fans rushed to get their hands on as the likes of Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Michael Jackson, and Prince changed the world with their unique and unforgettable sounds.
Featuring interviews with key industry figures, Funk & Soul Covers also provides cultural context and design analysis for many of the chosen record covers.
Michelangelo’s breathtaking drawings
Very few artists can claim such lasting and worldwide fame and importance as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). The nickname il divino (“the divine one”) has been applied to him since the 1530s right through to today: his achievements as a sculptor, painter, and architect remain unparalleled and his creations are among the best-known artworks in the world.
This Bibliotheca Universalis edition is devoted to the artist’s graphic work, a testimony to his masterly command of line, form, and detail, from architectural studies to anatomically perfect figures. The book brings together some of the artist’s finest drawings from museums and collections around the world as well as some of his own notes and revisions, offering stunning proximity not only to the ambition and scope of Michelangelo’s practice but also his working process. A chapter with a compilation of newly attributed and reattributed drawings provides further insights into Michelangelo’s varied graphic oeuvre and the ongoing exploration of his genius.
Now available as part of TASCHEN's Bibliotheca Universalis series, this dazzling catalog of vinyl brings new meaning to the "album art." Produced in collaboration with Colors magazine, it brings together over 500 remarkable records from the collection of Alessandro Benedetti and Peter Bastine.
The book forms a junction between photography, music, and design, celebrating vinyl not only for the integrity of sound recording, but also for its artistic potential as a material form. With featured artists including Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Prince, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi and beyond, it offers compelling insight into the most intricate details of a performer's visual identity, from a flamboyant color to a futuristic mirror effect.
The discs are arranged thematically to span monochrome vinyl; unusual vinyl (including silver, gold or mirror vinyl as well as extremely rare glow-in-the-dark vinyl); multicolored vinyl; etched vinyl (where music is pressed onto only one side); shaped vinyl (cut into forms that are different from the classic round disc); and picture discs (where a photograph or design is stamped onto the surface of the record). Page after page, this kaleidoscopic encyclopedia of game-changing vinyls is a colorful journey through era-defining records and artists.
Celebrating the centennial of a groundbreaking School of Art and Design, this volume marks the founding of the Bauhaus with a visual exploration of its most underrated members. While the institution provided women with new opportunities in education, along the way, they were faced with unreasonable family expectations, the ambiguous attitude of the faculty and administration, outdated social conventions, and, ultimately, the political repression of the Nazi regime.
Unprecedented in current literature, Bauhausmädels presents 87 artists and artisans through texts and photographic portraits, many published for the very first time. Recent archival discoveries revive the biographies of better-known talents. In the 1920s, the title “Bauhaus girl” expressed a silent admiration for the young women who courageously eluded traditional gender roles to build a different, creative future. These include Marianne Brandt, the first woman to be admitted to the Bauhaus metalworking program whose designs are used by Alessi to this day; Gertrud Arndt who, dissuaded by the faculty from studying architecture, instead shone through her photography and rug design; and Lucia Moholy, who photographed the Bauhaus buildings in iconic shots, but spent the rest of her life trying to retrieve the negatives which were withheld from her. Moreover, the volume reminds us of other women artists whose names, nearly forgotten, also stand for early pioneers of gender equality, refusing to follow the beaten tracks society and their families insisted on.
With almost 400 portrait photographs taken between 1919 and 1933, Bauhausmädels creates a visual impression of the women artists who attended the most progressive art school of the 20th century and, departing from there, often changed the world of art, architecture, design, and even politics. Biographical data sheds light on each artist’s individual struggle, persistence in the face of adversity, and incredible accomplishments. In this grand family album, we discover a group of unique trailblazers whose legacy paved the way for women artists after them.
One of the most accomplished human beings who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) remains a quintessential Renaissance genius. The perfect companion to the Leonardo Graphic Work edition, this book is a compact catalogue raisonné of all of the artist’s masterful paintings.
Drawn from our best-selling XXL edition, the book traces the artist’s life and work across 10 chapters, presenting all known paintings and drawing on his letters, contracts, diary entries, and writings to explore the man behind such groundbreaking artworks. From Virgin of the Rocks to Virgin and Child with St. Anne to the ever-beguiling Mona Lisa, you’ll find some of the finest treasures of the Louvre, Prado, and National Gallery, London here, as well as Leonardo works lost to time, but no less startling in their precision and poise.
Though numbering just 35 known works, the oeuvre of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is hailed as one of the most important and inspiring portfolios in art history. His paintings have prompted a New York Times best seller, a film starring Scarlett Johansson, and record visitor numbers at art institutions from Amsterdam to Washington.
Vermeer's subjects focus on daily domestic activities, from letter writing to music playing to preparations in the kitchen. The scenes astound with their meticulous detail, majestic planes of light, and with Vermeer's extraordinary ability to draw out narrative intrigues. In such beloved paintings as Lady Standing at a Virginal, A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid and, most famously, the enigmatic, wide-eyed, and enchanting Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer evokes not only the effects of substance and texture, but also the many stories and secrets that reside beneath the surface.
Featuring all Vermeer's known works and succinct, accessible texts, this essential introduction explores Vermeer's leading place in art history and his unique ability to transform oil paint into a living, breathing scene of human life.
Today, the works of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) are among the most well known and celebrated in the world. In Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and many paintings and drawings beyond, we recognize an artist uniquely dexterous in the portrayal of mood and place through paint, pencil, charcoal, or chalk.
Yet as he was deploying the lurid colors, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms that would subsequently make his name, van Gogh battled not only the disinterest of his contemporary audience but also devastating bouts of mental illness. His episodes of depression and anxiety would eventually claim his life, when, in 1890, he committed suicide shortly after his 37th birthday.
This richly illustrated introduction follows Vincent van Gogh's story from his earliest pictures of peasants and rural workers, through his bright Parisian period, to his final, feverish burst of creative energy in the South of France during the last two and a half years of his life.
Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork.
Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from Hollywood's most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop Art also deployed methods of mass-production, reducing the role of the individual artist with mechanized techniques such as screen printing.
With featured artists including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, this book introduces the full reach and influence of a defining modernist movement.
Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general.
Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dalí himself explained, he painted with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.”
Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dalí also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall.
This book explores both the painting and the personality of Dalí, introducing his technical skill as well as his provocative compositions and challenging themes of death, decay, and eroticism.
The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/31-1569) was an astoundingly inventive painter and draftsman, who made his art historical mark with beautiful, evocative landscapes as well as religious subjects, both notable for their vernacular language and attention to everyday, contemporary life.
Immersing himself in rural or small-town communities, Bruegel is particularly notable for his depiction of peasant experience and folk culture, earning the artist nickname "Peasant Bruegel." Whether hunters shivering in the snow or a boisterous country fair, Bruegel raised the farming, festivals, gatherings, and games of peasant culture to the status of high art. Bruegel's imposing religious and moral subjects, meanwhile, such as The Triumph of Death and The Tower of Babel are as awestriking and influential today as they were in the 16th century, inspiring contemporary culture from The Lord of the Rings cinematic battle scenes to Don DeLillo's novel Underworld.
From the corn harvest to the conversion of Saul, from quaint wedding processions to Christ's road to Calvary, this book brings together the rich range of Bruegel's subjects to introduce his powerful compositions of both biblical and earthly tableaux.
Photographer, writer, publisher, and curator Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a visionary far ahead of his time. Around the turn of the 20th century, he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together all photographs from the journal's 50 issues.
Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities is one of the 18th century’s greatest natural history achievements and remains one of the most prized natural history books of all time.
Though it was common for men of his profession to collect natural specimens for research purposes, Amsterdam-based pharmacist Seba (1665–1736) had a passion that led him far beyond the call of duty. His amazing, unprecedented collection of animals, plants, and insects from all around the world gained international fame.
In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalogue detailing his entire collection—from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies, and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon.
This superb, complete reproduction is taken from a rare hand-colored original. The introduction offers background information about the fascinating tradition of the cabinet of curiosities to which Seba belonged and an additional annex, written by contemporary biologists, provides descriptions of the marvelous and myriad specimens.
Before reaching the tender age of 30, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) had already sculpted Pieta and David, two of the most famous sculptures in the entire history of art. As a sculptor, painter, draftsman, and architect, the achievements of this Italian master are unique-no artist before or after him has ever produced such a vast, multifaceted, and wide-ranging oeuvre.
This fresh TASCHEN edition traces Michelangelo's ascent to the cultural elite of the Renaissance. Ten richly illustrated chapters cover the artist's paintings, sculptures, and architecture, including a close analysis of the artist's tour de force frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.Full-page reproductions and enlarged details allow readers to appreciate the finest details in the artist's repertoire, while the book's biographical essay considers Michelangelo's more personal traits and circumstances, such as his solitary nature, his thirst for money and commissions, his immense wealth, and his skill as a property investor.
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