Showing titles in Artists, Architects & Photographers

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school - in her 60s - to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful, demands of a life fully lived.

A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.

Modern Man is a penetrating psychological portrait of a true genius and constant self-inventor, as well as a sweeping tale filled with exotic locales, sex and celebrity (he was a lover of Josephine Baker), and high-stakes projects. In Flint's telling, Corbusier isn't just the grandfather of modern architecture but a man who sought to remake the world according to his vision, dispelling the Victorian style and replacing it with something never seen before.

Diane Arbus brings to life the full story of one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century, a visionary who revolutionized photography and altered the course of contemporary art with her striking, now iconic images. Arbus comes startlingly to life here, a strong-minded child of unnerving originality who grew into a formidable artist. Arresting, unsettling, and poignant, her photographs stick in our minds. Why did these people fascinate her? And what was it about her that captivated them?

Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me was first published in 2000 and was a top-10 best-seller a year later. It tells the biographies of two remarkable men. Salvador Dali, one of the 20th century's greatest painters, and his long-term muse - the Colombian dancer Carlos Lozano. Dali was famously a voyeur, and in this extraordinary audiobook, we are witnesses to the bizarre sexual fantasies he lived out among celebrities, aristocrats, enemies, and the plain crazy.

In the 1980s, the subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces. These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of these drawings was done by Keith Haring.

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.

Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by civil war, six people meet and find their lives changed forever.

Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the visionary philosophy and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Pilloried by Tom Wolfe as inventor of the monolithic high-rise, Gropius is better remembered as inventor of a form of art education that influenced schools worldwide. He viewed argument as intrinsic to creativity. Unusually for one in his position, Gropius encouraged women's artistic endeavors and sought equal romantic partners.

As one of America's most fabled communities - long a magnet for artists, celebrities, the very rich, and their respective hangers-on - the Hamptons have been a scene of constant collision among the established old guard, New Money, and the local families who farmed and fished the region for generations. In serving up three centuries of Hamptons history, Steven Gaines introduces a host of colorful characters including Jackson Pollock, Ron Perelman, Lauren Bacall, and the Bouvier Beales of Grey Gardens infamy.

Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science. The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who painted spectacular portraits of birds. But although his images were beautiful, creating art was not his main goal. Instead, he aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible.

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.

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.

Born to a Jewish family in Estonia in 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia; by the time of his death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last 15 years of his life.

Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life - and for poetry - than anyone else I've known." This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters - a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life.

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.

G. Eric Kuskey, former colleague of Thomas Kinkade and close friend until the artist's death in 2012, tells Kinkade's story for the first time, from his art's humble beginnings on a sidewalk in Carmel, California, to his five-house compound in Monte Sereno. It's a tale of addiction and grief, of losing control, and ultimately, of the price of our dreams.

Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, "the only person I met in my life that transcended everything." In Cosmic Scholar, John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century's most overlooked cultural figures.

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world.

When Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of O’Keeffe was first published in 1989, it received rave reviews and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This new edition features a new foreword by the author, setting O’Keefe in an artistic context over the last thirty years since the book was first published, as well as previously unpublished letters of the young O’Keeffe to her lover, Arthur MacMahon. This book also relates the story of Robinson’s own encounter with the artist.