Artist Architect

From his hardscrabble post-World War II Ontario childhood and coming of age to Mad Men-era New York City and the creative pinnacle of advertising, to the hallowed halls of Saturday Night Live and The New Yorker, Bruce McCall’s personal and creative journey is stunningly honest, bittersweet, and above all, inspiring.

Artists have learnt to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his typical engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists - from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world - to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

"J'ai toujours eu un cœur excentrique." Bono a grandi dans le nord de Dublin entre un père catholique et une mère protestante, alors que les violences sectaires se multipliaient en Irlande. Il n'avait que quatorze ans lors du décès de sa mère, perte qui va façonner sa recherche d'une famille. Il a commencé sa vie avec le sentiment d'être quelconque, pourtant toute son existence sera consacrée à combattre l'idée que quiconque puisse l'être. En quatre décennies, U2 passe d'une bande d'adolescents ambitieux au plus grand groupe au monde.

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.

Antony Armstrong-Jones, photographer, designer and film-maker, gained worldwide attention when he married Queen Elizabeth II's younger sister, Princess Margaret in 1960—the first non-aristocrat to marry into the Royal Family for 400 years. How did a "commoner" come to marry a princess, a woman whom he had long admired from afar? In fact, "Tony" descended from Welsh gentry, the son of a barrister and a society hostess. His family shared a long-established link with the Mountbatten arm of the Royal Family.

In the 1990s, Megan Margulies' Upper West Side neighborhood was marked by addicts shooting up in subway stations, frequent burglaries, and the "Wild Man of 96th Street", who set fires under cars and heaved rocks through stained glass church windows. The world inside her parents' tiny one-bedroom apartment was hardly a respite, with a family of five - including some loud personalities - eventually occupying the 550-square-foot space.

In Youth, the first of two volumes, Feaver conjures Freud’s early childhood: Sigmund Freud’s grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho - consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret - Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man’s coming of age.

Che cosa vuol dire creare? Cosa è un'opera d'arte? Cos'è la musica? Il processo creativo è spiegabile? Vera e propria icona dell'industria musicale, Rubin è noto per tirare fuori il meglio dagli artisti con cui lavora grazie alla sua capacità di sviluppare un rapporto di fiducia reciproca che porta i musicisti ad accedere alle più profonde sorgenti della loro fonte creativa e scoprire la musica che desiderano fare.

Léonard de Vinci est l’une des figures les plus emblématiques de la Renaissance. Fils illégitime privé de formation universitaire, son approche autodidacte dans quantités de domaines garantit l’originalité de cet esprit universel qui fut bien plus que l’auteur de La Joconde ou l’inventeur de machines volantes. Il fut également un anatomiste de renom, un ingénieur, un philosophe, un architecte et un inventeur.

Unlike most artists, Van Gogh developed very slowly, beginning with work as an art dealer that exposed him to many great works. He undertook this work for several years, after which he spent time as a missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church. After that, he drifted for several years before re-turning home to his parents’ house, where he took up painting, largely self-taught with books on anatomy and painting. His great works all date from the later years of his life.

《名人传》是有关贝多芬，米开朗基罗和列夫·托尔斯泰的传记。三位传主都是人类历史上极富天才的人物……《名人傳》是有關貝多芬，米開朗基羅和列夫·托爾斯泰的傳記。三位傳主都是人類歷史上極富天才的人物……

Marc Chagall, painter and cosmopolitan: Life and work in a short biography! Everything you need to know, brief and concise. Infotainment, education and entertainment at its best.

Ferocious Love is about Latimer Bowen’s journey from a wounded artist struggling with depression to a prophetic artist and seer who partners with the Holy Spirit to transfer God’s message and vision onto canvas.

Rob Spillman has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent among the West Berlin cognoscenti in a city 200 miles behind the Iron Curtain. There, the Berlin Wall stood as a stark reminder of the split between East and West, between suppressed dreams and freedom of expression.

Gustav Klimt, painting genius of art déco: Life and works in a short biography! Everything you need to know, brief and concise. Infotainment, education and entertainment at its best.

They called her La Maestra. Elisabetta Sirani was a talented and prolific artist in 17th century Italy. Trained by her father, she was running his studio by the time she was 16, and earned her first official commission the following year.

Andy Warhol and his pop art helped define the 1960s and 1970s in America. Born the son of poor Austro-Hungarian immigrants in Pittsburgh, he was fortunate enough to attend the Carnegie Institute and study art. After graduation, he moved to New York, where he became a successful commercial artist sketching women’s accessories for ads before soaring to popularity with his silkscreen paintings of Campbell soup cans and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe.

Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide at the age of 48, the presumed chaos and darkness of her own inner life became, for many viewers, inextricable from her work. In the spirit of Janet Malcolm's classic examination of Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, William Todd Schultz's An Emergency in Slow Motion reveals the creative and personal struggles of Diane Arbus.

Conocido en su país como Madiba, es abogado y político, fue el primer presidente de Sudáfrica elegido democráticamente mediante sufragio universal así como el líder del Umkhonto we Sizwe, el brazo armado del Congreso Nacional Africano (CNA). Estuvo 27 años en la cárcel, la mayoría de los cuales estuvo confinado en la prisión de Robben Island. Tras su liberación lideró a su partido en las negociaciones para conseguir una democracia multirracial en Sudáfrica, cosa que se consiguió en 1994.

Unser heimlicher Star in der Hörbuchreihe "Die Runde Ecke" hat das Tourette-Syndrom. Eine Krankheit, die durch sogenannte Tics charakterisiert ist. Jean-Marc sagt über sich: "Wenn es morgen eine Wunderpille gäbe, ich würde sie nicht nehmen." "Tourette in my head" ist eine berührende Mischung aus motivierenden Gedanken und tiefem Vertrauen in das Leben. Das Hörbuch erzählt von persönlichen Abstürzen, Neuanfängen, skurrilen Momenten und besonderen Triumphen.