Artist Architect

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.

In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat.

The Post-Impressionist artist and writer Paul Gauguin led an extraordinary, troubled and restlessly itinerant life; he came late to painting and spent most of his last decade in the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he produced paintings loosely based on Polynesian tradition that heralded the emergence of primitivism and would exert a profound influence on modernist artists from Picasso and Matisse to Jackson Pollock. But his art, despite its growing popularity following Gauguin’s death in 1903, has provoked mixed responses.

Orlandito "Dito" Montiel grew up wild in the streets of Astoria, Queens, pulling pranks for Greek and Italian gangsters and confessing at the church of the Immaculate Conception, gobbling hits of purple mescaline and Old English, sneaking into Times Square whore houses, and at times getting near much graver trouble. Entering adulthood in the 80s, he escapes into the underground and punk cultures of Manhattan.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes comes the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.

Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed - street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged - was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, makes him an artist who speaks across the centuries to our own time.

Jean Renoir's career almost spans the history years of cinema - from the early silent movies, to the naturalism of the talkies, committed cinema, film noir, Hollywood studio productions, the Technicolor-period comedies and fast television techniques. His film The Grand Illusion remains one of the greatest movies about the effects of war.

Dutch painter and printmaker Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is considered one of the greatest artists of all time. As a painter, he never considered glamorizing what he saw, and he was a master of creating extraordinary scenes with light and shadows. His paintings were unique for their ability to depict action and moods. Sadly, having a mistress and spending recklessly went far to ruin his reputation during his lifetime. Rembrandt died penniless and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Virtually everyone would agree that Leonardo da Vinci was the most important artist of the High Renaissance. It was Leonardo who singlehandedly created the defining features of Western art: a realism based on subtle shading; depth using atmospheric effects; and dramatic contrasts between light and dark.

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.

In Drawn Testimony, Rosenberg brings us into the high-stakes, dramatic world of her craft, where art, psychology and courtroom drama collide. Over the course of her legendary career, Jane has had a front row seat to some of the most iconic and notorious moments in our nation's recent history, sketching everything from Tom Brady's deflate-gate case, to John Lennon's murder trial to cases against Ghislaine Maxwell, John Gotti, Harvey Weinstein and most recently, the indictment against former President Donald Trump.

In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agnes Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between 1940 and 1950. She gives us the human drama behind some of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, along with the origin stories of now legendary movements, from Existentialism to the Theatre of the Absurd, New Journalism, bebop, and French feminism.

In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a cafe. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Ray's reputation.

Extraordinary new nonfiction, a gripping blend of history and memoir, by the author of the award-winning and best-selling international sensation The Hare with the Amber Eyes. In The White Road, best-selling author and artist Edmund de Waal gives us an intimate narrative history of his lifelong obsession with porcelain, or "white gold".

Andy Warhol claimed that he loved being outside a party—so that he could get in. But more often than not, the party was at his own studio, The Factory, where celebrities—from Edie Sedgwick and Allen Ginsberg to the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground—gathered in an ongoing bash.

Sam Turner's childhood taught her to trust her painting more than she should trust people, and that is what she has done her entire life. Then she meets Ali Westcott, a music store owner who is full of color and life and friendship. And she meets Ben, Ali's brother, who makes Sam think maybe there is more to life than being alone. Benjamin Westcott has always wanted to be an architect. He likes the clean beauty of a building coming together with his plans and attention to detail. He doesn't have time for messy emotions if he is going to get his home for runaway kids built. Everything in his...

'Thoughts On Art and Life' by Leonardo Da Vinci is a fascinating collection of writings from the great polymath of the Italian Renaissance. There are sections covering the great man's thoughts on life, art, and science. The translator, Maurice Baring trawled the available manuscripts to distil da Vinci's writings on these subjects into a single, accessible tome, which will be of interest to students of da Vinci, the Renaissance, and the history of both art and science.

Winner of the 2010 COSTA Biography Award. A total of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his Great Uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined.…

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is one of the most influential figurative painters of the 20th century. His paintings are in every major museum and many private collections here and abroad. William Feaver's daily calls from 1973 until Freud died in 2011, as well as interviews with Freud's family and friends, were crucial sources. Freud's circle was broad, including not just other well-known artists but writers, bluebloods, royals in England and Europe, drag queens, fashion models, gamblers, bookies, and gangsters like the Kray twins.

A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art.