Showing titles in Artists, Architects & Photographers

Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.

As America was stepping into the modern era, one great beauty became the artist's model of choice. Her perfect form became the emblem of the Gilded Age and appears on the greatest monuments of New York and the nation. Supermodel, actress, icon - her beauty paved the way for a life of glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy. Her name is Audrey Munson.

Using previously undiscovered material, Surreal tells the riveting story of Gala Dalí, (1894-1982) who broke away from her cultured but penurious background in pre-Revolutionary Russia to live in Paris with both France’s most famous poet Paul Éluard and Max Ernst. By the time she met the budding artist Salvador Dalí in 1929, Gala was known as the Mother of Surrealism. She rapidly became his mentor and protector, marrying him in 1934 and subsequently engineering their vast fortune.

Carolyn Burke reveals Miller as a multifaceted woman: both model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and mother, and, in later years, gourmet cook - the last of the many dramatic transformations she underwent during her lifetime. A sleek blond bombshell, Miller was part of a glamorous circle in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as a leading Vogue model, close to Edward Steichen, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso. Then, during World War II, she became a war correspondent - one of the first women to do so.

War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.

In 1654, the Thunderclap—an enormous explosion at a gunpowder store—devasted the city of Delft, killing hundreds of people, including the extraordinary painter Carel Fabritius, and injuring thousands more. Framing the story around the life of Fabritius, Cumming illuminates this extraordinary moment in art history while also writing about her own father, a painter. Like Dutch art, the story gradually links country, city, town, street, house, interior—all the way to the bird on its perch, the blue and white tile, the smallest seed in a loaf of bread.

A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. In The Grand Affair, scholar Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

The art world is a much dirtier, nastier business than you might expect. Tony Tetro, one of the most renowned art forgers in history, will make you question every masterpiece you’ve ever seen in a museum, gallery, or private collection. Tetro’s “Rembrandts,” “Caravaggios,” “Miros,” and hundreds of other works now hang on walls around the globe.

Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture. She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters. In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than 2,000 people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.

In the tradition of John Richardson's Picasso, a commanding new biography of the Italian master's tumultuous life and mysterious death. For four hundred years Caravaggio's (1571-1610) staggering artistic achievements have thrilled viewers, yet his volatile personal trajectory - the murder of Ranuccio Tomasini, the doubt surrounding Caravaggio's sexuality, the chain of events that began with his imprisonment on Malta and ended with his premature death - has long confounded historians.

Hailed by readers/listeners and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party.

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years painted his death portrait. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness.

One of the most influential, admired, and innovative women of our time: fashion designer, philanthropist, wife, mother, and grandmother, Diane von Furstenberg shares stories about becoming the woman she wanted to be. Diane von Furstenberg started out with a suitcase full of jersey dresses and an idea of who she wanted to be - in her words, "the kind of woman who is independent and who doesn’t rely on a man to pay her bills."

Master Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for his magnificent autobiography. In this work, which was actually begun in 1558 but not published until 1730, Cellini beautifully chronicles his flamboyant times. He tells of his adventures in Italy and France, and his relations with popes, kings, and fellow artists.

We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. They are in museums all over the world and are among the most beloved works of art of the past century. Yet, ironically, these soothing images were created amid terrible personal turmoil and sadness.

Charles Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the most misunderstood figures in American culture. Now, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us the first full-length biography of Schulz: at once a creation story, a portrait of a hidden American genius, and a chronicle contrasting the private man with the central role he played in shaping the national imagination.

This landmark biography penetrates the barriers of legend to bring to full and intimate life a man whose burning passions - for painting, women, and ideas - were matched by a compulsion to invent reality in his life no less than in his art. Here is the tragic story of a man who, from his teenage passion for a gypsy boy to the chilling bitterness and betrayals of his old age, was unable to love and was driven to dominate and humiliate the women - and men - who fell under his hypnotic spell.

The celebrated painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) occupied a central place in the artistic scene of his time: a founding member of the new school of French painting, he was a close friend of Monet, a longtime associate in Degas's and Mary Cassatt's experimental work, a support to Cezanne and Gauguin, and a comfort to Van Gogh, and was backed by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel throughout his career. Nevertheless, he felt a persistent sense of being set apart, different, and hard to classify.

Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering.

With unprecedented access to newly discovered sources, Donna M. Lucey illuminates the lives of four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny clairvoyance, Sargent's portraits hint at the mysteries, passions, and tragedies that unfolded in his subjects' lives.