The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren
by Jonathan Lopez
from Harcourt
Chanel: A Woman of her Own
by Axel Madsen
from Holt Paperbacks
Chanel and Her World
by Edmonde Charles-Roux
from Vendome Press
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971) is a fashion icon unlike any other. She invented modern clothing for women: at the height of the Belle Époque, she stripped women of their corsets and feathers, bobbed their hair, put them in bathing suits, and sent them out to get tanned in the sun. She introduced slacks, costume jewelry, and the exquisitely comfortable suit. She made the first couture perfume-No. 5-which remains the most popular scent ever created.
In this beautiful volume, the glorious life of the incomparable Coco Chanel shines again through hundreds of illustrations and the lively prose of Edmonde Charles-Roux, her official biographer and close friend. Chanel knew and collaborated with the likes of Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Jean Renoir, and Visconti-even as she matched their modernist innovations by liberating women from the prison of 19th-century fashion and introducing a whole new concept of elegance. The staggering collection of photographs amassed by the over decades of friendship with Chanel sheds new light on one of the great stories of the modern age. AUTHOR BIO: Edmonde Charles-Roux began her journalistic career at Elle and ultimately became editor-in-chief of French Vogue. She has published three novels, among them To Forget Palermo (Oublier Palerme), which won the Prix Goncourt in 1966.
Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders
by William R. Drennan
from University of Wisconsin Press
The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo
by Irving Stone
from NAL Trade
Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo's David, New American Library releases a special edition of Irving Stone's classic biographical novel-in which both the artist and the man are brought to life in full. A masterpiece in its own right, this novel offers a compelling portrait of Michelangelo's dangerous, impassioned loves, and the God-driven fury from which he wrested the greatest art the world has ever known.
Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (Whitney Museum of American Art Book)
by K. Michael Hays
from Yale University Press
From his geodesic dome to books popularizing the terms “spaceship earth” and “synergetics,” the life mission of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was to create living environments that minimized consumption of the earth’s resources while maximizing interconnections with global systems of information and transportation. This book explores Fuller's extraordinary body of work focusing on his wide-ranging and sometimes controversial role within the worlds of art, architecture, and utopian thought.
The book chronicles Fuller’s profound, often prophetic contributions, including his environmentally sensitive building designs. The essays illuminate the underappreciated thematic interactions of many sculptors, painters, musicians, and architects with this self-described “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” including contemporary artists wrestling with Fuller’s legacy today.
Reproductions of original drawings and models—including those for Fuller’s 4D house, Wichita House, the Montreal Expo dome, and the sole extant Dymaxion car—plus a reprinted 1966 New Yorker profile on Fuller by Calvin Tomkins, complete the fascinating tribute.
The Art of Looking Sideways
by Alan Fletcher
from Phaidon Press
Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways is an absolutely extraordinary and inexhaustible "guide to visual awareness," a virtually indescribable concoction of anecdotes, quotes, images, and bizarre facts that offers a wonderfully twisted vision of the chaos of modern life. Fletcher is a renowned designer and art director, and the joy of The Art of Looking Sideways lies in its beautiful design. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters with titles like "Colour," "Noise," "Chance," "Camouflage," and "Handedness," Fletcher's book, which he describes as "a journey without a destination," is "a collection of shards" that captures the sensory overload of a world that simply contains too much information. In one typical section, entitled "Civilization," the reader encounters six Polish flags designed to represent the world, a photograph of an anthropomorphic handbag, Buzz Aldrin's boot print on the moon, drawings of Stone Age pebbles, a painting of "Ireland--as seen from Wales," and a dizzying array of quotations and snippets of information, including the wise words of Marcus Aurelius, Stephen Jay, and Gandhi's comment, "Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea." Fletcher's mastery of design mixes type, space, fonts, alphabets, color, and layout combined with a "jackdaw" eye for the strange and profound to produce a stunning book that cannot be read, but only experienced. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk
The ultimate guide to visual awareness. Compiled over decades by one of today's most brilliant graphic designers, this is a panoply of curious facts, visual puns, anecdotes, serious science, insights, images, jokes, memories and reflections, with 700 illustrations and quotes from over 1000+ writers.
The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes, memories all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 'chapters', all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, colour and imagery.
This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insights collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a 'visual jackdaw', master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.
The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.
Kirby: King of Comics
by Mark Evanier
from Abrams
“I don’t think it’s any accident that . . . the entire Marvel universe and the entire DC universe are all pinned or rooted on Kirby’s concepts.” —Michael Chabon
The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon
by Dan Eldon
from Chronicle Books
Dan Eldon, who was only 22 when he was chased down and killed by an angry mob in Somalia, was one of the youngest photographic stringers in Africa. But his journalistic work, which had appeared in Time and Newsweek, showed only a small part of his talent. Eldon excelled as an artist in his collages, which combined his photographs of Africa with paint, pastiche, pop culture images, advertising, and official documents. The Journey Is the Destination collects pages from the 17 scrapbooks that held his art. Chronicling his work from age 14 through his death at 22, this volume is startling not only in the intensity and thoughtfulness of the pages, but also in the fact that someone so young could have this kind of artistic depth and insight.
By the time he was twenty-two, Dan Eldon had led a relief mission across Africa; worked as a graphic designer in New York; studied (intermittently) at four colleges; traveled through Europe, Africa, Japan, and the US; founded a charity for Mozambiquan refugees; directed a film; written a book; started up his own photography business; and become a photojournalist for Reuters news agency, covering the famine and civil war in Somalia. There, in 1993, he was killed in an eruption of mob violence while on assignment. In a world of rules and regularity, Eldon was a renegade, a risk-taker, and an adventurer. But, despite all his travels, he knew that the interior landscape is the only one truly worth exploring, and this is the journey he dedicated himself to recording. His is no ordinary journal; it is an astonishing seventeen-volume collage of photos, drawings, words, maps, clippings, paint, scraps, shards, and trash that reveals his strange and vivid life. The Journey is the Destination offers a selection of pages from these extraordinary journals, at once the vision of an artist in his prime and the unrestrained outpourings of a young man just beginning to live.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol : (From A to B and Back Again)
by Andy Warhol
from Harvest Books
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