Showing titles in Artists, Architects & Photographers

Vincent van Gogh’s paintings look utterly unique - his vivid palette and boldly interpretive portraits are unmistakably his. Yet however revolutionary his style may have been, it was actually built on a strong foundation of paintings by other artists, both his contemporaries and those who came before him. Now, drawing on Van Gogh’s own thoughtful and often profound comments about the painters he venerated, Steven Naifeh gives a gripping account of the artist’s deep engagement with their work.

In 1900, an 18-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso made his first trip to Paris. It was in this glittering capital of the international art world that, after suffering years of poverty and neglect, he emerged as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Fueled by opium and alcohol, inspired by raucous late-night conversations at the Lapin Agile cabaret, Picasso and his friends resolved to shake up the world.

Prodigy Akiane Kramarik shares her artwork, poetry, and the fascinating story surrounding her talent. Growing up in a home with an atheistic mother and a non-participating Catholic father did not stop four-year-old Akiane Kramarik from finding God. This girl's dreams began a conversation in the home that has eventually brought them all to Christianity and the world's attention. Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry is a collection of the best of Akiane's full-color paintings and poetry created from ages 4 to 10.

Madonna. Andy Warhol. Keith Haring. Fab 5 Freddie. Debbie Harry. Julian Schnabel. Jean-Michel Basquiat's transition from the subways to the chic gallery spaces of Manhattan brought the artist into the company of many of New York's established and aspiring stars. Unable to deal with the demands that his new fame brought, in 1987, at the age of 27, Basquiat, the most successful black visual artist in history, died from a heroin overdose.

(Vinci, Toscana, 1452-Amboise, Turena, 1519). Artista, pensador e investigador italiano que, por su insaciable curiosidad y su genio polifacético, representa el modelo más acabado del hombre del Renacimiento. Era hijo ilegítimo de un abogado florentino, quien no lo alejó de su madre, una modesta campesina. Leonardo se formó como artista en Florencia, en el taller de Andrea Verrochio; pero gran parte de su carrera se desarrolló en otras ciudades italianas como Milán (bajo el mecenazgo del duque Ludovico Sforza) o Roma (donde trabajó para Julio de Médicis).

The definitive, fascinating, all-reaching biography of Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. The silly, simple rhymes are a bottomless well of magic, his illustrations timeless favorites because, quite simply, he makes us laugh. The Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, Horton, and so many more are his troupe of beloved and uniquely Seussian creations.

Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others. Letters to Gwen John is Paul's imagined correspondence with Gwen John, whose life and work have loomed so large in hers.

Keith Haring is synonymous with the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s. His artwork - with its simple, bold lines and dynamic figures in motion - filtered in to the world's consciousness and is still instantly recognizable, 20 years after his death.

In Cubed Rubik covers more than just his journey to inventing his eponymous cube. He makes a case for always being an amateur (which he considers himself). He discusses the inevitability of problems during any act of invention. He reveals what it was like to experience the astonishing worldwide success of an object he made purely for his own amusement. And he offers what he thinks it means to be a true creator (hint: persistence). Steeped in the wisdom and also the humility of a born inventor, Cubed offers a unique look at the imperfect science of creation.

Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance”.

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies he encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the world of the Henrician court, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius.

The remarkable and inspiring story of how London was transformed after the Great Fire of 1666 into the most powerful city in the world, and the men who were responsible for that achievement. Opening in the 1640s, as the city was gripped in tumult leading up to the English Civil War, The Phoenix charts the lives and works of five extraordinary men who would grow up in the chaos of a world turned upside down: the architect, Sir Christopher Wren; gardener and virtuosi, John Evelyn; the scientist, Robert Hooke; the radical philosopher, John Locke; and the builder, Nicholas Barbon.

In Look Again, Bailey describes growing up in working-class East London, where his dyslexia led to him being written off as stupid at school but his drive and ambition led to his meteoric rise as a photographer. He writes about life in '60s London and New York, his friendship with photographers Donovan and Duffy and annoying his rival Lord Snowdon. His love-life was always headline-worthy. He propelled his girlfriend, model Jean Shrimpton, to stardom - and was threatened with a shotgun by her father. When he married Catherine Deneuve, Mick Jagger was his best man.

In the Hide is Gordon's emotionally honest and raw account of a brutal childhood in Glasgow and Mull, and the escape and solace he found – and continues to find – in the natural world around him. An intimate and inspiring account of resilience in the face of hardship, In the Hide marks the arrival of a bold new voice in nature writing.

You’re falling through time so all I can do is fall with you. The numbness had set in long before I sat at your bedside. But even with senses impaired as the flight touches down at Belfast City I can somehow still feel the screeching of wheels on tarmac scorching something deep into me. So begins Gary Lightbody's phenomenal companion book to the latest, Snow Patrol’s number one album of the same name. While you don’t have to read it to understand the album, you may want to give the album a wee listen for some parts of the book to make sense.

Who is Elmyr? Simply put, Elmyr de Hory is known by many as the most notorious art forger of all time. He believed that if a forgery hangs in a museum for long enough - as he claimed many of his works did - it eventually becomes real. Yet, as with many fraudsters, much of the myth is exaggeration or invention.

In the 1980s, the subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces. These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of these drawings was done by Keith Haring.

Alessandro Barbero segue Dante nella sua adolescenza di figlio d'un usuraio che sogna di appartenere al mondo dei nobili e dei letterati; nei corridoi oscuri della politica, dove gli ideali si infrangono davanti alla realtà meschina degli odi di partito e della corruzione dilagante; nei vagabondaggi dell'esiliato che scopre l'incredibile varietà dell'Italia del Trecento, fra metropoli commerciali e corti cavalleresche.

During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe’s geometry.

Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community. Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling.