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.
Immerse yourself in the rich shades and textures of Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1490–1576), commonly known as Titian, and the figurehead of 16th-century Venetian painting. With his bold approach to form and startling, opulent colors, Titian worked with a number of prestigious commissions and left behind an astonishing repertoire of portraits, mythological scenes, altarpieces, and landscapes that remains one of the most important legacies of Renaissance art.
This dependable artist introduction traces Titian’s complete career and its trailblazing influence on successive generations of artists, from Diego Velázquez to van Dyck. From the rippling sensuality of Venus of Urbino (c. 1538) to the airborne dynamism of Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523), all the major works are here, charting the artist’s stylistic experimentation over time as well as his consistent and unique ability to work across genres and to bring a defining new level of emotional and spiritual aspect to his subjects.
Divine forms: The heavenly grace and human grandeur of a supreme Renaissance master In art history, we tend to be on first name terms only with the most revered of masters. The Renaissance painter and architect Raphael Santi(1483 1520) is one such star. The man we call simply Raphael has for centuries been hailed as a supreme Renaissance artist. For some, he even outstrips his equally famous, equally first-named, contemporaries, Leonardo and Michelangelo.From 1500 to 1508, Raphael worked throughout central Italy, particularly in Florence where he secured his reputation as a painter of portraits and beautifully rendered Madonnas, archetypical icons within the Catholic faith. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II and later embarked on an ambitious mural scheme for theStanza della Segnaturain the Vatican. Within this room, Raphael sThe School of Athensis considereda paradigm of the High Renaissance, merging Classical philosophy with perfected perspectival space, animated figures, and a composition of majestic balance.This essential introduction explores how in just two decades of work, Raphael painted his way to legendary greatness. With highlights from his prolific output, it presents the mastery of figures and forms that secured his place not only in the trinity of Renaissance luminaries but also among the most esteemed artists of all time. About the series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions
Hailed the “Prince of the Impressionists”, Claude Monet (1840-1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working “en plein air” with rapid, impetuous brushstrokes, he interrogated the play of light on the hues, patterns, and contours and the way in which these visual impressions fall upon the eye.
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.
Whether you’re thinking of getting a tattoo or just want to see to what lengths others have gone in decorating their bodies, this is the book to check out. This edition of 1000 Tattoos explores the history of the art worldwide via designs and photos—from 19th-century engravings to tribal body art, from circus ladies of the ‘20s to classic biker designs—giving a fascinating insight into the art of tattooing.
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.
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.
No other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cezanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting directly from the object.
It could be said that Monet reinvented the possibilities of color. Whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time as a conscript in the dazzling light of Algeria, or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 19th century, the work Monet produced throughout his long life would change forever the way we perceive both the natural world and its attendant phenomena. The high point of his explorations was the late series of water lilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, which, in their approach toward almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art.
This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential artist, and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary.
A good logo can glamorize just about anything. Now available in our popular Klotz format, this sweeping compendium gathers diverse brand markers from around the world to explore the irrepressible power of graphic representation. Organized into chapters by theme, the catalogue explores how text, image, and ideas distill into a logo across events, fashion, media, music, and retailers.
Featuring work from both star names and lesser-known mavericks, this is an excellent reference for students and professionals in design and marketing, as well as for anyone interested in the visuals and philosophy behind brand identity.
George Eastman's career developed in a particularly American way. The founder of Kodak progressed from a delivery boy to one of the most important industrialists in American history, and a crucial innovator in photographic history.
Eastman died in 1932, and left his house to the University of Rochester. Since 1949 the site has operated as an international museum of photography and film, and today holds the largest collection of its kind in the world, containing over 400,000 images and negatives-among them the work of such masters as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams.
Home also to 23,000 cinema films, five million film stills, one of the most important silent film collections, technical equipment and a library with 40,000 books on photography and film, the George Eastman House is a pilgrimage site for researchers, photographers, and collectors from all over the world. This volume curates the most impressive images from the collection in chronological order to offer an incomparable overview of photographic history.
While the female nude has long played a conspicuous role in western iconography, the male nude has not always enjoyed such attention, or acceptance. This ode to the male physique celebrates the evolving, at one time illicit, art form from anonymous 19th century erotica through to contemporary work from David Hockney and Duane Michaels.
Through the classic, the playful, and the provocative, it explores the compositions, postures, and role-playing of this often under-explored genre. Esteemed masters such as Herbert List, George Platt Lynes or Robert Mapplethorpe are all there, alongside Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, famed for his homoerotic images of nude youths in classical postures in Sicily. Further highlights include illustrations from Physique Pictorial, the leading organ of the mid-50s gay scene and a pioneer in gay publishing.
Up close and suspenseful with Alfred Hitchcock
The name Alfred Hitchcock is synonymous with suspense—that is to say, masterful, spine-tingling, thrilling, shocking, excruciating, eye-boggling suspense. With triumphs such as Rebecca, Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho, Hitchcock (1899–1980) fashioned a new level of cinematic intrigue and fear through careful pacing, subtlety, and suggestiveness.
This complete guide traces Hitchcock’s life and career from his earliest silent films right through to his last picture in 1976, Family Plot. Updated with fresh images, the book combines detailed entries for each of Hitchcock’s 53 films, an incisive essay that sheds light on his fear-inducing devices, photos of the master at work, and an illustrated list of each of his cameos, together adding up to a movie buff’s dream.
Until his death at age 104, Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) was something of an unstoppable architectural force. Over seven decades of work, he designed approximately 600 buildings, transforming skylines from Bab-Ezzouar, Algeria, to his homeland masterpiece Brasília.
Niemeyer’s work took the reduced forms of modernism and infused them with free-flowing grace. In place of pared-down starkness, his structures rippled with sinuous and seductive lines. In buildings such as the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Edifício Copan, or the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasília, he brought curvaceousness to the concrete jungle. In the futuristic federal capital of Brasília, he designed almost all public buildings, and thus became integral to the global image of Brazil.
With rich illustrations documenting highlights from his prolific career, this book introduces Niemeyer’s unique vision and its transformative influence on buildings of business, faith, culture, and the public imagination of Brazil.
In 1968, when Stanley Kubrick was asked to comment on the metaphysical significance of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he replied: “It’s not a message I ever intended to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience… I tried to create a visual experience, one that directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content.”
Now available as part of our Bibliotheca Universalis series, The Stanley Kubrick Archives borrows from the director’s philosophy. From the opening sequence of Killer’s Kiss to the final frames of Eyes Wide Shut, it allows the masterful visuals of Kubrick’s films to impress through a sequence of compelling, mesmerizing stills. We uncover Kubrick’s creative process through fascinating archival material, including set designs, sketches, correspondence, documents, screenplays, drafts, notes, and shooting schedules.
Accompanying the visual and archival material are essays by noted Kubrick scholars, articles written by and about Kubrick, and a selection of Kubrick’s best interviews. The result is a visual, archival, and scholarly journey through masterworks of 20th-century cinema and the meticulous mind of the director behind them.
“What is it about a dull yellow metal that drives men to abandon their homes, sell their belongings and cross a continent in order to risk life, limbs and sanity for a dream?” – Sebastião Salgado
When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-clothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated.
After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs.
Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”
Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.
This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.
Helmut Newton (1920–2004) always showed a healthy disdain for the easy or predictable, so it’s no surprise that the SUMO was an irresistible project. The idea of a book the size of a private exhibition, with spectacular images reproduced to state-of-the-art origination and printing standards, emerged from an open, experimental dialogue between photographer and publisher. With the SUMO weighing in—boxed and shrink-wrapped—at 35.4 kg (just under 80 pounds), Newton created a landmark book that stood head and shoulders above anything previously attempted, both in terms of conceptual extravagance and technical specifications.
Published in an edition of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, the SUMO sold out soon after publication and quickly multiplied its value. It now features in numerous collections around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The legendary copy number one, signed by more than 100 of the book’s featured celebrities, broke the record for the most expensive book published in the 20th century, sold at an auction in Berlin on April 6, 2000 for 620,000 German marks—about 317,000 euros.
Now, this XL edition celebrates 20 years of SUMO, the result of a project conceived by Helmut Newton some years ago. Revised by his wife June, the volume gathers 464 images and a new booklet that takes us through the making-of this publishing venture—a spectacular tribute to the larger-than-life Helmut Newton, now in a friendly format.
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