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America sees the cowboys of yesteryear as native heroes. Cowboys were seen to represent American character and to stand for freedom in rugged big sky lands. Cowboys were tough, self-reliant, courageous, modest, and only turned to violence when absolutely necessary. With a reputation like that, it is no wonder that since the very first reel was created, the Western has been the single most popular movie genre. In this comprehensive guide, readers will find over 2000 Western movie star’s photos and signatures from the 1920s to the 1970s. Also included are values for all those signed images and every star presented is identified. Among the cowboy heroes and heroines covered are the stars of the 1920s silent Westerns, the “A” and “B” movie stars of the 1930s through the 1960s, singing cowboys, sidekicks, heavies, Indians, women, veteran actors, supporting actors, and, of course, John Wayne. Enjoy this nostalgic ride through American cinema history.

Did the Greek gods play tennis? What is the ambassador from the land of Alchemy telling us? What secrets are being told on the shores of the Island of Venus? What is a monk doing on the Ship of Fools?

What Great Paintings Say has the answers to these and many other burning questions asked about the most important and famous paintings of all time. In two volumes, a selection of history`s greatest masterpieces is presented chronologically, including works by Botticelli, Breughel, Chagall, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Dürer, Goya, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Tiepolo, Titian, and many others. Each chapter focuses on one painting, with enlarged details and in-depth texts describing their significance.

Taking apart each painting and then reassembling it again like a huge jigsaw puzzle, the authors reveal the history of art as a lively panorama of forgotten worlds.

Byzantine empresses, French revolutionaries, and Spanish generals: history’s most impressive figures stare boldly out of the canvases in this collection of formidable paintings. Each individual represented in these images radiates with strength and splendour; be they an aristocratic widow in mourning, a murdered politician, or a jovial group of Ukrainian rebels.

Authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen tease out the stories and secrets of 13 masterpieces by artists including Goya, Titian, Velázquez, and Ilya Repin. Regal, holy, and wise, the men and women in these works will inspire you with their conquests and resilience.TASCHEN reproduces these masterworks in stunning quality, working in collaboration with esteemed art collections all over the world, including in Brussels, St. Petersburg, New York, and Naples. Combining astute analysis with magnified painting details, this book is a unique historical investigation in tribute to the movers and shakers of the past.

About the series:

- Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre series features:
- approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions
- a detailed illustrated introduction plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural, and social events that took place during that period
- a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Surreptitious messages, concealed myths, and historical truths lie hidden in the great works of the Italian Renaissance, behind heavy gold leaf and religious symbology.

Although often obscured by the archaic language of historical painting, careful analysis and expert interpretation bring these images to life. Discover masterpieces of the most beloved creative epoch in this fascinating art historical inquiry. Images of war, romance, birth, and knowledge, works of the Italian Renaissance have much to say when given a voice. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen do just that-pulling apart each of the 12 featured paintings with all the talent of true detectives to offer an illuminating portal to the past.

From Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam to Ucello's The Battle of San Romano, from Antonello da Messina's St. Jerome in His Study to Pinturicchio's Penelope with the Suitors, the artworks under investigation are a diverse representation of the period's innovation and brilliance, sourced directly from some of the most impressive collections in the world, including the Uffizi, Prado, and National Gallery London.

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

How long is it since you last went to an exhibition or an event of any sort? What information or amusement did you get from it? Did you enjoy it?

We present our latest title When Space Meets Art / When Art Meets Space which offers a comprehensive taste and feel of what goes on in all sorts of events.

The result of painstaking research by Lea Vergine, this volume explores the meaning of the trash phenomenon in contemporary art from the early 20th century (Boccioni, Carrà, Depero, Picabia, Schwitters), through the Sixties and Seventies (Burri, Kounellis, Fontana, Vautier, Rotella, César, Arman, Manzoni, Pistoletto, Beuys, Spoerri), and up to the present (Cragg, Parmiggiani, Boltanski, Sherman, Bourgeois, Serrano, Cattelan). It examines the challenge launched by these artists, who use waste as a material for creating art. In an era marked by great concern about the environment, the artistic use of the discarded object expresses the alienation and distress that appear to be eroding the wantonly consumeristic social model represented by the West. Recovering and preserving refuse is a means of trying to hold on to it, of making it survive by saving it from a void, from being nothing, from the dissolution to which it is destined; it is about the desire to leave a mark, a trace, a clue for those who remain, hence touching a dimension that is psychological as well as political.

More than two hundred spectacular photographs, sensual, luminous, frenzied, true, from 1955 to the present, that catch and define the energy, intoxication, rebellion, and magic of rock and roll; the first book to explore the photographs and the photographers who captured rock’s message of freedom and personal reinvention—and to examine the effect of their pictures on the musicians, the fans, and the culture itself.

The only music photographers whose names are well known are those who themselves have become celebrities. But many of the images that have shaped our consciousness and desire were made by photographers whose names are unfamiliar. Here are Elvis in 1956—not yet mythic but beautiful, tender, vulnerable, sexy, photographed by Alfred Wertheimer . . . Bob Dylan and his girlfriend on a snowy Greenwich Village street, by Don Hunstein . . . John Lennon in a sleeveless New York City T-shirt, by Bob Gruen . . . Jimi Hendrix, by Gered Mankowitz, a photograph that became a poster and was hung on the walls of millions of bedrooms and college dorms . . .

For the first time, the work of these talented men and women is brought into the pantheon; we see the musicians they photographed and how the images gave rock and roll its visual identity.

To bring together these images, Gail Buckland, acclaimed photographic editor, curator, and scholar, looked through the archives of one hundred photographers, selecting pictures not on the basis of the usual suspects, but on the power of the images themselves, often picking an image a photographer didn’t even remember he or she had taken.

Buckland writes about the photographers, their influences, their relationships with their subjects, how they took the images, how they saw what they saw and captured what they captured: the spirit and essence of rock.

A revelation of an art form whose iconic images changed the world as we knew it.

Now available in paperback, this all-star tribute to one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands ever features glorious concert and behind-the-scenes photography from top names in rock photography, from their first 1968 show as Led Zeppelin through the 2007 reunion.

Also included are more than 200 rare concert posters, backstage passes, tickets, LPs and singles, T-shirts, buttons, and more from the United States, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan, all comprising a book as epic as the band it honors. And if that’s not enough, top American and English rock journalists from Rolling Stone, Creem, Billboard, cover every Zeppelin LP in depth, while some of rock’s top performers reflect on the band’s legacy.

An appendix features the complete discography.

They were the heaviest band ever, creating the blueprint for an entire musical genre and becoming a touchstone for an entire generation and their children. Now, to celebrate their fortieth anniversary and December 2007 reunion, here’s the first-ever complete illustrated history of Led Zeppelin.

This all-star tribute to one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands of all time features many of today’s top American and English rock journalists from Rolling Stone, Creem, Billboard and more, as well as reflections on the band’s inspiration from some of rock’s top performers, including Aerosmith, Heart, the Minutemen, the Hold Steady, and others. An appendix features the complete discography.

Glorious concert and behind-the-scenes photography from some of the top names in rock photography covers the band from their first 1968 show as Led Zeppelin through the 2007 reunion. Also included are more than 200 rare concert posters, backstage passes, tickets, LPs and singles, T-shirts, buttons, and more from the United States, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan, all comprising a book as epic as the band it honors.

Created from the ashes of the Yardbirds by guitarist and session wizard Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin featured virtuoso bass player John Paul Jones, gonzo drummer John Bonham, and Robert Plant, a vocalist like no other before him. The band singlehandedly defined what rock ’n’ roll could be, leaving in their wake a trail of tales as tall or as a real as we wanted them to be.

The Wiener Werkstatte ("Vienna Workshop") bears many hallmarks of a modern creative movement.

Founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Fritz Waerndorfer, this progressive alliance of artists and designers was particularly interested in challenging industrialised society with individual handcraftsmanship, and in bringing different facets of life into one unified, elegant artwork. The workshop began life in three small rooms but soon expanded to fill a three-storey building with special departments for metalwork, leatherwork, and woodwork, as well as a bookbinder and a paint shop. Artists experimented with various materials such as gold, precious stones, and papier-mache and applied their simple, often geometric, designs across ceramics, textiles, typography, interior design, furniture, and fashion.

In architectural commissions such as the Purkersdorf Sanatorium and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, the group was able to realize its ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork"), in which every detail of an environment was designed as an integral part of a coordinated whole.

Though the workshop lasted only 30 years, it enjoyed major commercial success, with outlets in Karlsbad, Marienbad, Zurich, New York, and Berlin. It also garnered designs from many of the leading artists of the epoch, including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. Today, the Vienna Workshop is recognized for its comprehensive approach to artistic practice and its stylistic influence on Art Deco and Bauhaus.

The leader of the abstract expressionists

"If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today." — Willem de Kooning

Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) was a leader of the abstract expressionist movement. Inspired by Arshile Gorky to abandon the realist style that had dominated his work in the 1930s, he began experimenting with abstraction in the 1940s and quickly gained critical success. His monumental Woman series of the 1950s — characterized by wild colour and aggressive overtones— was received with both controversy and acclaim. He continued to paint until the late 1980s, leaving behind a vast and impressive body of work.

About the Series:

Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography

A leasing figure in the emergence of abstract expressionist painting in New York, Willem de Kooning arrived in the United States in 1926 as a twenty two years old stowaway from Holland. During the Depression years, he was a dedicated visitor to the museums and galleries of Manhattan, and did a brief stint as a WPA painter, which was curtailed because he was not a citizen. With resolute determination, de Kooning ventured beyond the radical departures of cubism toward the visceral physicality of the abstractions that comprised his first one person exhibition, in 1948. Five years later, an exhibition of women painted in agressive, lashing gestures stunned contemporaries not only for the vehemence of the artist s attack but also for the evident reversal of direction . Yet across six decades, the alternation and intertwining of abstraction and figuration remained fundamental to de Kooning's work.

The first comprehensive overview of the most significant paintings by de Kooning, the celebrated master of post-war American modernism.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) is regarded as a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism and celebrated in the U.S. as one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century painting. Yet in Europe, the artist has yet to be fully recognized as the important figure he was. That applies in particular to his work of the sixties and seventies, his years of retreat from urban life to live and work on Long Island. This part of his oeuvre bears the imprint of a fundamental experience of landscape, and it is here that he developed a style of figuration (which de Kooning never really abandoned) characterized by a new sense of color and energetic gesture.
This period of vigorous, pioneering creativity in the art of Willem de Kooning is explicitly illuminated for the first time in this book. Featuring a concentrated selection of painting in large formats, it shows how his works - although recognizable as landscapes - grew abstract under the influence of his intense experience of nature while his brushwork literally liberated itself from all bonds.

Erster prägnanter Überblick über die zentralen Gemälde der 1960er und 1970er Jahre de Koonings, des gefeierten Meisters der amerikanischen Nachkriegsmoderne.

Willem de Kooning gilt als führender Vertreter des Abstrakten Expressionismus und wird in den USA als zentrale Figur der Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts gefeiert. In Europa hingegen ist der 1904 in Rotterdam geborene, 1997 in New York verstorbene Künstler noch immer in seiner vollen Bedeutung zu entdecken. Dies gilt insbesondere für sein Werk der 1960er und 1970er Jahre, in denen er - zurückgezogen vom Großstadtleben - auf Long Island lebt und arbeitet. Hier wird sein Werk durch die elementare Erfahrung der Landschaft geprägt, hier entwickelt sich die Figuration, die de Kooning nie wirklich verlässt, zu neuer Farbigkeit und durchpulster Gestik.
Erstmals wird diese fulminante und wegweisende Werkperiode Willem de Koonings im vorliegenden Band explizit beleuchtet. Anhand einer konzentrierten Auswahl von großformatigen Gemälden wird veranschaulicht, wie de Koonings Werke sich - obwohl Landschaftsbilder - aufgrund des intensiven Naturerlebnisses abstrahieren und die Pinselhandschrift sich geradezu entfesselt. Dabei werden auch die berühmten »Women«-Bilder des niederländisch-amerikanischen Künstlers einbezogen.

A major figure of the Romantic Movement, the British artist William Blake (1757-1827) was at once a painter, designer, engraver and poet. He devoted himself to the illustration of his literary works, and his texts developed following the lines of his engravings and fantastic drawings, becoming veritable illuminated manuscripts. Inspired by biblical and prophetical themes (Proverbs of Hell, The Everlasting Gospel and The Gates of Paradise), Blake’s art subtly combines the modernity of his time and of the Romantic Revolution with the classicism of the themes that he explored.

Gifted with unequalled imagination and originality, the artist played with the diversity of his media in order to better externalise the demons that haunted him, as well as to plunge the viewer or reader into a profound melancholy.
In this monograph, Osbert Burdett sheds light on the art and life of this extraordinary artist.

About the author:

The art critic Osbert Burdett is a specialist in British art of the end of the nineteenth century, in particular that of William Blake. His writings such as The Beardsley Period: an Essay in Perspective and William Blake offers the reader the chance to rediscover the remarkable creations of these artists and the huge impact of their audacity and modernity on English art.

Rich and delicate, ethereal and muscular, the art of William Blake is as fascinating as the philosophies threading through his poetry and prophetic works. 

Presented here in this magnificent new collection, his vivid paintings and gently weaving illustrations are imprinted in the consciousness of Romantic art, but their impact on Gothic literature remains as strong and quixotic as the artist himself.