Showing titles in Artists, Architects & Photographers

In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.

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.

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him.

Award-winning architectural critic and biographer Mark Lamster's The Man in the Glass House lifts the veil on Johnson's controversial and endlessly contradictory life to tell the story of a charming yet deeply flawed man. A roller-coaster tale of the perils of wealth, privilege, and ambition, this book probes the dynamics of American culture that made him so powerful and tells the story of the built environment in modern America.

In 1529, Michelangelo was in Venice when he first met Titian, Venice's famed painter of princes, gods, and goddesses. Coming face-to-face with Titian's drama-infused, richly colored works, the creator of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling realized he had met a worthy opponent. Twenty-five years later, Titian came to Rome to paint the pope, and the two met again. Painting in the Vatican, Titian experienced the full power of Michelangelo's work and vowed to surpass the achievements of his older contemporary.

*BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week* *Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016* "The Vanishing Man is a riveting detective story and a brilliant reconstruction of an art controversy, but it is also a homage to the art of Velázquez, written by a critic who remains spellbound by his genius, as...

Joe Tucker's Uncle Eric was a beloved yet unconventional figure throughout Joe's life. A shambolically dressed man who lived with his mother for almost eighty years, he had an almost compulsive need to charm strangers with working men's club comedy routines, and appeared to exist only for daily trips to the bookie - and yet had also amassed over five hundred of his own remarkable paintings without anyone ever realising his achievements.

One of the most influential, admired, and colorful women of our time: fashion designer and philanthropist Diane von Furstenberg tells the most personal stories from her life, about family, love, beauty and business: “It’s so good, you’ll want to take notes” (People). Diane von...

An exuberant biography of the life of the iconic photographer and naturalist Peter Beard, whose life and work captured the cultural imagination Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist, wildlife photographer, and bon vivant enthralled and inspired both because of his work and his...

Cecil Beaton was a portrait and fashion photographer, as well as a diarist and Oscar-winning designer. Here he discusses his life and achievements in a series of interviews from the BBC radio and TV archive: At Home: Cecil Beaton, broadcast on BBC Radio, 7th May 1957 (featuring Hywel Davies); Face to Face, broadcast on BBC Television, 18th February 1962 (featuring John Freeman); Late Night Line-Up, broadcast on BBC Television, 9th May 1968 (featuring Sheridan Morley); Desert Island Discs, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 26th January 1980 (featuring Roy Plomley).

Das abenteuerliche Leben der Sehnsuchtsbilder von Caspar David Friedrich – mitreißend erzählt von Florian Illies. Kein deutscher Maler löst solche Emotionen aus wie Caspar David Friedrich: Seine abendlichen Himmel sind bis heute Ikonen der Sehnsucht, er inspirierte Samuel Beckett zu "Warten auf Godot" und Walt Disney zu "Bambi" – Goethe jedoch machte die rätselhafte Melancholie seiner Bilder so wütend, dass er sie auf der Tischkante zerschlagen wollte.

In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began what would become one of history’s most influential works of art—The Last Supper. After a decade at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point: at forty-three, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise. His latest failure was a giant bronze horse to honor Sforza’s father, made with material expropriated by the military.

Halfway into the 19th century, Spain's Catalonia underwent a sweeping transformation when it was thrust into not one, but two golden eras - the Renaixença and the Industrial Revolution. It was during this explosive period of creativity, thriving prosperity, and invigorated patriotism that a steadfastly nonconforming and fascinatingly eccentric icon was born, one that was about to take Catalonia by storm with his brilliant eye for unorthodox art and his legendary - or as some would say, notoriously - out-of-the-box ideas.

Vivienne Westwood is one of the icons of our age. Fashion designer, activist, co-creator of punk, global brand and grandmother; a true legend. Her career successfully spanned five decades and her work has influenced millions of people across the world. For the first and only time, Vivienne...

Harvey Kurtzman created Mad, and Mad revolutionized humor in America. Kurtzman was the original editor, artist, and sole writer of Mad, one of the greatest publishing successes of the twentieth century. But how did Kurtzman invent Mad, and why did he leave it shortly after it burst, nova-like, onto the American scene? For this heavily researched biography, Bill Schelly conducted new interviews with Kurtzman’s colleagues, friends, and family, including Hugh Hefner, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, and many others, and examined Kurtzman’s personal archives.

Perfect for old and new fans alike, Dancing on the Edge is an intimate and powerful story about the singular life of one of our most gifted storytellers, artists, and stars of the silver screen.

In the 1960s and '70s, Frank Yandolino rode the hippie counterculture movement alongside visionaries like Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, and he helped put together the Woodstock Festival of 1969, the era's emblem of love and peace. From then on (and even before that), Yandolino, a beguiling fast-talker, charmer, and gifted storyteller, took charge of his life according to those ideals, grabbing and embracing all opportunities that were thrown his way.

Read by the author, Rose Boyt. ‘Towards the end of the summer of 2016 I found an old diary in a cardboard box, hundreds of typed pages, the first dated 9 September 1989. I put the diary away without reading it; I had lost my father, my mother had died only three months earlier, and it was not...

A visit to a museum can be overwhelming, exhausting, and unrewarding. Lincoln Perry wants to change that. In eleven essays—each framed around a specific theme—he provides new ways of seeing and appreciating art. Perry is a disarmingly charming tour guide to museums large or small. He makes even all art approachable and accessible. Along the way, he weaves in personal stories, from his own artistic journey as a painter to the days when he could sleep in his beaten-up VW Bus in the Louvre’s parking lot.

This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Ruth Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist.