Showing titles in Artists, Architects & Photographers

*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...

Hugo Vickers's adventures in the world of Cecil Beaton: an unputdownable portrait of a vanishing age, featuring untold anecdotes and thrilling titbits of royal gossip 'A fascinating document, a window on to a lost world of glamour, grandeur and snobbery . . . an elegy, sad and comical, to a...

William Morris was a giant of the Victorian age, and his beautiful creations and provocative philosophies are still with us today: but his wife, Jane, is too often relegated to a footnote. In truth, Jane and William's personal and creative partnership was the central collaboration of both their lives. The homes they made together were works of art in themselves, and the great labour of their lives was life itself: through their houses and the objects they filled them with, they explored how we all might live a life more focused on beauty and fulfilment.

Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother's recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father's confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger—a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision.

"Through her art, Herrera writes, Kahlo made of herself both performer and icon. Through this long overdue biography, Kahlo has also, finally, been made fully human." — San Francisco Chronicle Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida...

Brought to you by Penguin. **THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** **WINNER OF THE 2010 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Walk Through Walls written and read by Marina Abramovic. This memoir spans Marina Abramovic's five decade career, and tells a life story that is almost as exhilarating and extraordinary as her groundbreaking performance art...

Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.

A kaleidoscopic memoir by acclaimed filmmaker Abel Ferrara, director of the cult classic films Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, and Dangerous Game, offering an unflinching look at his life, career, and the gritty world of independent cinema. Throughout his five-decade career, film director Abel...

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. 

These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term "Renaissance", was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael.

SOON TO BE A TV SERIES WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ANDREW HAIGH New York Times Book Critics Favorite Book of the Year · Washington Post Notable Book of the Year “It’s all here: the grade school Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss; the adolescent acid trips; the fondness for Post-it notes and flying...

Self-Portrait reveals a life truly lived through art. In this intimate short smemoir, Celia Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves. From her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at 16, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practises of her present-day studio, she meticulously assembles the surprising, beautiful, haunting scenes of a life. Paul brings to her prose the same qualities that she brings to her art.

An Italian Mannerist architect and painter, Giorgio Vasari was acquainted with many of the most famous artists of his day. He is best-known today for his biographies of artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and Giotto. This recording is read with clarity and authority by Neville Jason.

Tracey Emin is an internationally renowned artist. Here she discusses her life and achievements in a series of interviews from the BBC radio and TV archives.

Eye-opening and candid, David Bailey's Look Again is a fantastically entertaining memoir by a true icon. 'Rollicking . . . with roguish tales as vivid as his era-defining photos' – Daily Mail 'Brilliant' – Telegraph David Bailey burst onto the scene in 1960 with his revolutionary photographs...

Will a computer ever compose a symphony, write a prize-winning novel, or paint a masterpiece? And if so, would we be able to tell the difference? As humans, we have an extraordinary ability to create works of art that elevate, expand and transform what it means to be alive. Yet in many other...

Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker. ‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ Olivia Laing ‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant ‘A life-changing book’ Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times ‘Fabulously...

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.

'I couldn't stop reading it . . . a classic of true crime' - Lissa Evans, author of Small Bomb at Dimperley 'A fascinating true crime case study . . . deeply moving' The Times A gripping, explosive murder mystery by acclaimed true crime writer Susannah Stapleton. In April 1929, the body of...