It was an age of mighty heroes, misunderstood monsters, and complex villains. With the publication of Fantastic Four No. 1 in November 1961, comics giant Marvel inaugurated a transformative era in pop culture. Through the next two decades, the iconic Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the X-Men leapt, darted, and towered through its pages. Captain America was resurrected from his 1940s deep-freeze and the Avengers became the World’s Greatest Super Heroes. Daredevil, Doctor Strange, and dozens more were added to the pantheon, each with their own rogues’ gallery of malevolent counterparts. Nearly 60 years later, these thrilling characters from the 1960s and ’70s are more popular than ever, fighting the good fight in comics, toy aisles, and blockbuster movies around the world.
In The Marvel Age of Comics 1961–1978, legendary writer and editor Roy Thomas takes you to the heart of this seminal segment in comic history—an age of triumphant character and narrative innovation that reinvented the super hero genre. With more than 500 images and insider insights, the book traces the birth of champions who were both epic in their powers and grounded in a world that readers recognized as close to their own; relatable heroes with the same problems, struggles, and shortcomings as everyone else. By the ’70s, we see how the House of Ideas also elevated horror, sword and sorcery, and martial arts in its stable of titanic demigods, introducing iconic characters like Man-Thing, Conan, and Shang-Chi and proving that their brand of storytelling could succeed and flourish outside of the capes and tights.
Behind it all, we get to know the extraordinary Marvel architects whose names are almost as familiar as the mortals (and immortals!) they brought to life—Stan “The Man” Lee, Jack “King” Kirby, and Steve Ditko, along with a roster of greats like John Romita, John Buscema, Marie Severin, Jim Steranko, and countless others. The result is a behind-the-scenes treasure trove and a jewel for any comic fan’s library, brimming with the innovation and energy of an invincible era for Marvel and its heroes alike.
Buried in the 14th century BC but unearthed by Howard Carter in 1922, the objects entombed with Tutankhamun are an invaluable window into a long-extinct belief system. Seen today, they create an intricate picture of how the ancient Egyptian people viewed the perilous journey to paradise, a utopian Egypt that could only be entered following the final judgment.
When acclaimed photographer Sandro Vannini started his work in Egypt in the late ’90s, a technological revolution was about to unfold. Emerging technologies enabled him to document murals, tombs, and artifacts in unprecedented detail. Using the time-consuming and strenuous multi-shot technique, Vannini produced complete photographic reproductions that revealed colors in their original tones with vivid intensity. Through these extraordinary images, we discover the objects’ quintessential features alongside the sophisticated and cleverly hidden details.
This comprehensive guide marks the centenary of Carter’s first excavations in the Valley of the Kings. These inestimable works endure through Vannini's photographs in their full, timeless splendor. From offerings and rituals to Osiris and eternal life, Vannini’s portfolio covers all facets of ancient Egyptian culture—but it is Tutankhamun’s unique legacy that dominates these images. With texts by the photographer, captions by specialist Mohamed Megahed, and chapter introductions from scholars in the field, King Tut. The Journey through the Underworld puts much-debated mysteries to rest. The learned yet accessible forewords come from distinguished Egyptologists including Salima Ikram and David P. Silverman. Insightful narratives, resplendent images, and a contemporary standpoint make this title a fitting tribute to the Boy King’s odyssey, illuminating an epoch that spanned an unimaginable 4,000 years.
To explore the Tarot is to explore ourselves, to be reminded of the universality of our longing for meaning, for purpose and for a connection to the divine. This 600-year-old tradition reflects not only a history of seekers, but our journey of artistic expression and the ways we communicate our collective human story.
For many in the West, Tarot exists in the shadow place of our cultural consciousness, a metaphysical tradition assigned to the dusty glass cabinets of the arcane. Its history, long and obscure, has been passed down through secret writing, oral tradition, and the scholarly tomes of philosophers and sages. Hundreds of years and hundreds of creative hands—mystics and artists often working in collaboration—have transformed what was essentially a parlor game into a source of divination and system of self-exploration, as each new generation has sought to evolve the form and reinterpret the medium.
Author Jessica Hundley traces this fascinating history in Tarot, the debut volume in TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica series. The book explores the symbolic meaning behind more than 500 cards and works of original art, two thirds of which have never been published outside of the decks themselves. It's the first ever visual compendium of its kind, spanning from Medieval to modern, and artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the 78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana. It explores the powerful influence of Tarot as muse to artists like Salvador Dalí and Niki de Saint Phalle and includes the decks of nearly 100 diverse contemporary artists from around the world, all of whom have embraced the medium for its capacity to push cultural identity forward. Rounding out the volume are excerpts from thinkers such as Éliphas Lévi, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell; a foreword by artist Penny Slinger; a guide to reading the cards by Johannes Fiebig; and an essay on oracle decks by Marcella Kroll.
Album art is indelibly linked to our collective musical memories; when you think of your favorite albums, you picture the covers. Many photographers, illustrators, and art directors have become celebrities from their album artworks—the best examples of which will go down in history as permanent fixtures in popular culture.
Paying tribute to this art form, Rock Covers brings you a compilation of more than 750 remarkable album covers, from legendary to rare record releases. Artists as varied as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Iron Maiden, and Sonic Youth are gathered together in celebration of the cover art that defined their albums and their cult status. Each cover is accompanied by a fact sheet listing the art director, photographer or illustrator, year, label, and more, while nearly 250 records that marked particular turning points for a band, an artist, or the music genre, are highlighted with short descriptions.
This far-reaching catalog of visualized rock is contextualized with insider interviews with professionals who shaped the history of rock, and by top-10 record lists from ten leading rock collectors.
One of the most creative minds of the 20th century, Walt Disney created a unique and unrivaled imaginative universe. Like scarcely any other classics of cinema, his astonishing collection of animated cartoons revolutionized storytelling on screen and enchant to this day across geographies and generations.
This expansively illustrated publication on Disney animation gathers hundreds of images as well as essays by Disney experts, taking us to the beating heart of the studio’s “Golden Age of Animation.” We trace Disney’s complete animation journey from the silent film era, through his first full-length feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Fantasia (1940), right up to his last masterpieces Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) and The Jungle Book (1967).
With extensive research conducted through the historical collections of the Walt Disney Company, as well as private collections, editor Daniel Kothenschulte curates some of the most precious concept paintings and storyboards to reveal just how these animation triumphs came to life. Masterful cel setups provide highly detailed illustrations of famous film scenes while rare pictures taken by Disney photographers bring a privileged insider’s view to the studio’s creative process.
Each of the major animated features that were made during Walt’s lifetime—including Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians—is given its own focus chapter, without forgetting less-familiar gems such as the experimental short films of the Silly Symphonies series and under-appreciated episodic musical films such as Make Mine Music and Melody Time.
Realizing the Disney style was a collective project and, as much as the master himself, The Walt Disney Film Archives acknowledges the outstanding animators and designers who influenced the style of the studio, among them Albert Hurter, Gustaf Tenggren, Kay Nielsen, Mary Blair, Sylvia Holland, Tyrus Wong, Ken Anderson, Eyvind Earle, and Walt Peregoy.
The life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/30–1569) were marked by stark cultural conflict. He witnessed religious wars, the Duke of Alba’s brutal rule as governor of the Netherlands, and the palpable effects of the Inquisition. To this day, the Flemish artist remains shrouded in mystery. We know neither where nor exactly when he was born. But while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content.
Starting out as a print designer for publisher Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe. These depicted vices and virtues alongside jolly peasant festivals and sweeping landscape panoramas. He then increasingly turned to painting, working for the cultural elite of Antwerp and Brussels. Rather than idealizing reality, he bravely confronted the issues of his day, addressing the horrors of religious warfare and taking a critical stand against the institution of the Church. To this end, Bruegel developed his own pictorial language of dissidence, lacing innocuous everyday scenes with subliminal statements in order to escape repercussions.
This book is derived from our XXL monograph, which saw TASCHEN undertake a comprehensive photographic survey of the artist’s oeuvre. The result boasts exceptional details and reproductions, unveiling Bruegel’s larger-than-life universe with unprecedented clarity. This volume, in celebration of our 40th anniversary, presents all 40 paintings, accompanied by enlarged details and accessible, immersive texts.
Polaroids occupy a special place in the hearts of many photo enthusiasts who remember a time when “instant photography” meant one-of-a-kind prints that developed within minutes of clicking the shutter. What was once a crucial tool for photographers to test their shots before shooting on film has now become obsolete in the face of digital photography. Luckily for us, legendary photographer Helmut Newton saved his test Polaroids, allowing a privileged and rare chance to see the tests from a selection of his greatest shoots over a period of decades, including many from the TASCHEN titles SUMO, A Gun for Hire, and Work. Selected by his widow, June Newton, from over 300 photos featured at the 2011 exhibition “Helmut Newton Polaroids” at the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin, this collection captures the magic of Helmut Newton photo shoots as only Polaroids can.
The artist
Helmut Newton (1920–2004) was one of the most influential photographers of all time. He first achieved international fame in the 1970s while working principally for French Vogue, he became celebrated for his controversial scenarios. Most striking was his ability to make a throughly planned photograph seem fresh and dynamic. His many titles and awards included Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Meet the artist whose majestic breaking wave sent ripples across the world. Hokusai (1760–1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also a founding father of Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond forms one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of japonisme. His influence spread through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and beyond, enrapturing the likes of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh.
Hokusai was always a man on the move. He changed domicile more than 90 times during his lifetime and changed his own name through over 30 pseudonyms. In his art, he adopted the same restlessness, covering the complete spectrum of Japanese ukiyo-e,“pictures of the floating world”, from single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors to erotic books. In addition, he created album prints, illustrations for verse anthologies and historical novels, and surimono, which were privately issued prints for special occasions.
Hokusai’s print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published between c. 1830 and 1834 is the artist’s most renowned work and, with its soaring peak through different seasons and from different vantage points, marked the towering summit of the Japanese landscape print. The series’ Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known simply as The Great Wave, is one of the most recognized images of Japanese art in the world.
In endless odes to the female form, Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) traced elongated bodies, almond eyes, and his own name into art history. His languid female subjects are as instantly recognizable as they are startling, sensual, and swan-necked.
Modigliani's unique figuration corresponded to his own personal idea of beauty, but drew upon a rich variety of visual influences, including contemporary Cubism, African carvings, Cambodian sculptures, and 13th-century painting from his native Italy. Although most renowned for his nude females, he applied similar stylistic techniques to portraits of male artistic contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Chaïm Soutine.
With key works from his highly individualistic repertoire, this book introduces Modigliani's brief but revered career at the heart of Paris’s early modernist hotbed.
In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.
As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a “total” work of art across different practices and media.
This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is something of an American success story, if only his success had come swifter. At the age of 40, he was a failing artist who struggled to sell a single painting. As he approached 80, Time magazine featured him on its cover. Today, half a century after his death, Hopper is considered a giant of modern expression, with an uncanny, unforgettable, and utterly distinct sense for mood and place.
Much of Hopper's work excavates modern city experience. In canvas after canvas, he depicts diners, cafes, shopfronts, street lights, gas stations, rail stations, and hotel rooms. The scenes are marked by vivid color juxtapositions and stark, theatrical lighting, as well as by harshly contoured figures, who appear at once part of, and alien to, their surroundings. The ambiance throughout his repertoire is of an eerie disquiet, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension, although his rural or coastal scenes can offer a counterpoint of tranquility or optimism.
This book presents key works from Hopper's œuvre to introduce a key player not only in American art history but also in the American psyche.
Get ready to quake in fear with this revised and expanded edition of our history of horror cinema. This chilling volume packs 640 pages full with the finest slashers, ghosts, zombies, cannibals, and more, curating the very creepiest screen creations from the flickering spooks of the 1920s to the special-effect terrors of the 21st century.
Across 10 illustrated chapters, the compendium gets under the skin of some of horror’s favorite figures and themes, whether the vampire, the haunted house, the female killer, or the werewolf. Each classic device is explored in aesthetic and historical terms, probing horror’s manipulation of archetypal human fears as much as socially and culturally specific anxieties.
A subsequent Top 50 movies section brings readers up close and trembling with 50 horror showpieces, from black-and-white classics like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Godzilla to Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, and much, much more. Throughout, the book’s featured images include movie posters, set designs, film stills, and on-set shots.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run.
Though famed for his dramatic use of color, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio's boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualised languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge.
This book brings together Caravaggio's most famous and revolutionary works to explain why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did.
An icon of 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) first made his name under the graffiti tag "SAMO," before establishing his studio practice and catapulting to fast fame at the age of 20. Although his career lasted barely a decade, he remains a cult figure of artistic social commentary, and a trailblazer in the mediation of graffiti and gallery art. Basquiat's work drew upon diverse sources and media to create an original and urgent artistic vocabulary, biting with critique against structures of power and racism. His practice merged abstraction and figuration, poetry and painting, while his influences spanned Greek, Roman, and African art, French poetry, jazz,and the work of artistic contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. The results are vivid, visceral mixtures of words, African emblems, cartoonish figures, daubs of bold color, and beyond. This book presents Basquiat's short but prolific career, his unique style, and his profound engagement with ever-relevant issues of integration and segregation, poverty and wealth.
Clothes define people. A person’s attire, whether it’s a sari, kimono, or business suit, is an essential code to his or her culture, class, personality, even faith. Founded in 1978, the Kyoto Costume Institute recognizes the importance of understanding clothes from sociological, historical, and artistic perspectives. With one of the world’s most extensive clothing collections, the KCI has amassed a wide range of historical garments, underwear, shoes, and fashion accessories dating from the 18th century to the present day.
Showcasing the Institute’s vast collection, Fashion History is a fascinating excursion through the last three centuries of clothing trends. Featuring impeccable photography of clothing expertly displayed and arranged on custom-made mannequins, it is a testimony to attire as “an essential manifestation of our very being” and to the Institute's passion for fashion as a complex and intricate art form.
The life of Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) was full of complexity and contradictions. As a young man he joined the Catalonian nationalist movement and was critical of the church; toward the end of his life he devoted himself completely to the construction of one single spectacular church, La Sagrada Familia. In his youth, he courted a glamorous social life and the demeanor of a dandy. By the time of his death in a tram accident on the streets of Barcelona his clothes were so shabby passersby assumed he was a beggar.
Gaudí’s incomparable architecture channels much of this multifaceted intricacy. From the shimmering textures and skeletal forms of Casa Batlló to the Hispano-Arabic matrix of Casa Vicens, his work merged the influences of Orientalism, natural forms, new materials, and religious faith into a unique Modernista aesthetic. Today, his unique aesthetic enjoys global popularity and acclaim. His magnum opus, the Sagrada Familia, is the most-visited monument in Spain, and seven of his works are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Through brand-new photography, plans and drawings by Gaudí himself, historical photos, as well as an appendix detailing all his works—from buildings to furniture, decor to unfinished projects—this book presents Gaudí’s universe like never before. Like a personal tour through Barcelona, we discover how the “Dante of architecture” was a builder in the truest sense of the word, crafting extraordinary constructions out of minute and mesmerizing details, and transforming fantastical visions into realities on the city streets.
Over the course of his artistic career, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) transformed not only his own style, but the course of art history. From early figurative and landscape painting, he went on to pioneer a spiritual, emotive, rhythmic use of color and line and is today credited with creating the first purely abstract work.
As much a teacher and theorist as he was a practicing artist, Kandinsky’s interests in music, theater, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, myth, and the occult, were all essential components to his painting and engraving. He was involved with both the influential Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus groups and left a legacy not only of dazzling visual work, but also of highly influential treatises such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Key tenets included the connections between painting, music and mystical experience, and the purification of art away from material realism and towards an emotional expression, condensed in particular by color.
This book presents key Kandinsky works to introduce his repertoire of vivid colors, forms, and feelings. Tracing the artist’s radical stylistic development, it shows how one painter’s progression paved the way for generations of abstract expression to come.
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