Peter Lindbergh and Azzedine Alaia, the photographer and the couturier, were united by their love of black, a love that they would cultivate alike in silver print and solid color garments. Lindbergh ceaselessly turned to black and white to signify his search for authenticity in the faces he brought to light. Alaia drew on the monochrome of timeless clothes to create veritable sculptures for the body.
A Revolution in Painting
The mysterious genius who transformed European art
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. Today, he is considered one of the greatest influences in all art history.
This edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist’s ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio’s career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases.
So Much For So Little!
Big busts + small package = major savings
The Little Big Book of Breasts features over 150 celebrated big breast models from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, including Michelle Angelo, Virginia Bell, Roxanne Brewer, Joan Brinkman, Lorraine Burnett, Lisa DeLeeuw, Uschi Digard, Sylvia McFarland, Chesty Morgan, Roberta Pedon, Rosina Revelle, Janie Reynolds, Candy Samples, Tempest Storm, Mary Waters, June Wilkinson, and Julie Wills, plus Guinness Book of World Records bra-buster Norma Stitz in a compact and inexpensive format.
Photos come not just from the original 398-page edition, but from subsequent Big Breast Calendars, meaning that 40% of the content is unique to this edition. Add reduced text to make more room for the stunning black-and-white and color photos and how could anyone—big, small, or in-between—ask for a better deal?
The world’s most beloved pet photographer turns his lens on our canine companions
The world appears to be divided into cat and dog lovers, but fortunately Walter Chandoha, the 20th century’s greatest pet photographer found himself happily in the middle. He loved these intriguing creatures equally for their unique beauty and individualism, and as subjects to photograph in a career spanning over 70 years. While working on his critically acclaimed TASCHEN book Cats, Chandoha handpicked his favorite dog photos for a potential follow-up title, putting into carefully marked boxes hundreds of contact sheets, prints, and color transparencies, many unseen for at least 50 years, and some totally unseen.
Chandoha sadly passed away in 2019 at the age of 98, but his legacy lives on in this dashing sequel dedicated to man’s best friend. “Walter Chandoha’s photographs of dogs are compelling not just because dogs have an inherent charm, but because the person behind the camera was a master of his craft,” writes the photography critic Jean Dykstra in the book’s introduction.
We see terriers, collies, beagles, bloodhounds, poodles, small dogs, big dogs, show dogs, working dogs, and many more, featuring over 60 breeds photographed in both black-and-white and glorious Kodachrome.
Spanning a 50-year period, the book is divided into six sections, and each chapter reveals Chandoha’s exceptional combination of technique, versatility, and soul. The opening chapter “In the Studio” focuses on formal portraiture; next it’s “Strike a Pose” where our canine companions ham it up for the camera; in “Out and About” they get to roam and play, often photographed with Chandoha’s own children; next it’s “Best in Show” with Chandoha using his reportage skills to capture vintage dog shows from the Mad Men era; in “Tails from the City,” the dogs are hitting the streets of mid-century New York; and in the closing chapter “Country Dogs,” it’s back to nature, the fields, and the beaches. Dogs is an unleashed photographic tribute to these lovable and loyal creatures.
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.
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.
Allegory and beauty in Florence
With the patronage of the powerful Medici family, a canon of secular and religious work, and contributions to the celebrated Sistine Chapel, Sandro Botticelli (1444/45–1510) was well placed for fame. After his death, however, his work was eclipsed for some four hundred years. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the painter began to gain major art-historical recognition.
Today, Botticelli is hailed as a towering figure of the Florentine Early Renaissance. His secular works The Birth of Venus and Primavera, mostly read as an allegory of Spring, are among the most recognized paintings in the world, resplendent in their delicate details, graceful lines, and compositional balance. His arrangements are fluid yet poised, his figures serene yet sensual. Venus, in particular, is held up as art-historical icon of beauty: pale-skinned, delicately featured, soft with fecund promise.
This essential introduction presents key works from Botticelli’s oeuvre to understand the making of a Renaissance legend. Through the painter’s most famous mythological and allegorical scenes, as well as his radiant religious works, we explore a mastery of figuration, movement, and line, which has gone on to inspire artists from Edgar Degas to Andy Warhol, René Magritte to Cindy Sherman.
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.
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.
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.
Enter a world of haunting power and dark psychedelia with this tribute to the biomechanic visions of HR Giger. The anniversary edition spans the artist’s painting, sculpture, film design, iconic album covers, and unique artist’s museum, with an essay by Andreas J. Hirsch, and an extensive biography based on contemporary quotes and Giger’s own statements.
An unprecedented collection of artists’ record covers from the 1950s to today
Since the dawn of modernism, visual and music production have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1925 double-sided discs Rotoreliefs, the 20th century saw ever more fertile exchange between sounds and shapes, marks and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance.
In Francesco Spampinato’s unique anthology of artists’ record covers, we discover the rhythm of this particular cultural history. The book presents 450 covers and records by visual artists from the 1950s through to today, exploring how modernism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, postmodernism, and various forms of contemporary art practice have all informed this collateral field of visual production and supported the mass distribution of music with defining imagery that swiftly and suggestively evokes an aural encounter.
Along the way, we find Jean-Michel Basquiat’s urban hieroglyphs for his own Tartown record label, Banksy’s stenciled graffiti for Blur, and a skewered Salvador Dalí butterfly on Jackie Gleason’s Lonesome Echo. There are insightful analyses and fact sheets alongside the covers listing the artist, performer, album name, label, year of release, and information on the original artwork. Interviews with Tauba Auerbach, Shepard Fairey, Kim Gordon, Christian Marclay, Albert Oehlen, and Raymond Pettibon add personal accounts on the collaborative relationship between artists and musicians.
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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?
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