Artist Architect

È l'alba del XVI secolo. L'Italia è divisa in una miriade di regni litigiosi e incapaci di opporsi alle mire delle grandi potenze. Tra quelle corti soggette ai capricci della guerra si aggira un personaggio bizzarro e affascinante, che sembra uscito dalla penna di uno scrittore. È un pittore e scultore che come nessun altro riesce a catturare l'anima di ciò che raffigura. È un inventore in grado di concepire monumenti di prodigiosa bellezza, architetture così ardite da superare ogni immaginazione, macchine belliche che sembrano provenire da un futuro lontano.

Rembrandt's life has always been an enigma. How did a miller's son from a provincial Dutch town become the greatest artist in the world? To find out, Onno Blom immersed himself in the world, the country, the city, and the house in which Rembrandt was born in 1606 and where he spent the first 25 years of his life. The result is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man, rich in local and biographical detail, and restless in its efforts to seek out the roots of his genius.

Coral Castle is the first audiobook to take an objective, journalistic look at one of America's most intriguing places: Coral Castle, located in Homestead, Florida. Edward Leedskalnin, an eccentric Latvian immigrant, built Coral Castle in the 1920s and 30s. Working alone with primitive tools, he quarried, carved, and set in place more than 1,100 tons of coral rock, creating what is commonly known as the American Stonehenge. How he accomplished this amazing feat remains a mystery.

Bacon concealed many important aspects of his life. He described himself as an asthmatic child in Ireland with foxhunting parents and a tyrannical father, but he was also rescued by a series of formidable women—women who in this biography emerge in their own right. He was never just a dissolute young man but was also a passionate reader, largely self-taught. Early on, influenced by Eileen Gray, he became a hard-working and ambitious designer, a brief career explored here in detail for the first time. He dreamed of remaking the modern room.

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade. His older sister, Donna, introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on 12-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”

Many recognize Stan Lee as the face of Marvel. Yet Jack Kirby is the one who did a lot of the hard work in creating such heroes as Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Ant-Man. While Lee was the public face for what became the multimedia brand, Kirby’s legacy is relegated to the shadows. Much like Bill Finger of Batman and Gene L. Coon of Star Trek, this man doesn’t get enough credit. A man who gave everything to the comic book industry. This book hopes to shed some light on his life and career.

Today's high-flying, high-rolling conglomarateurs and corporate raiders are a tame lot compared to their immediate predecessors. The most notorious of these is Robert Vesco, the Kingfish himself, who in 1973 fled the United States accused of looting $250 million from Investors Overseas Services. Now, in this riveting account, noted author Arthur Herzog tells the astounding story of this high school dropout from Detroit, who parlayed cunning, ambition, a brilliant mind, and above all, other people's gullibility and money into a vast financial empire.

In Five Days Gone, Laura Cumming brilliantly unspools the tale of her mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Using photographs from the time, historical documents, and works of art, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity with the tool set of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her family’s past and its legacies. Compulsive, vivid, and profoundly touching, Five Days Gone is a masterful blend of memoir and history, an extraordinary personal narrative unlike any other.

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.

In the 1960s and '70s, Frank Yandolino rode the hippie counterculture movement alongside visionaries like Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, and he helped put together the Woodstock Festival of 1969, the era's emblem of love and peace. From then on (and even before that), Yandolino, a beguiling fast-talker, charmer, and gifted storyteller, took charge of his life according to those ideals, grabbing and embracing all opportunities that were thrown his way.

Jackson Pollock was without a doubt one of the twentieth century’s most controversial painters. He started out painting abstracts in the style of Pablo Picasso but soon branched out, establishing the “drip” method, which entails dripping or flinging paint directly onto the canvas. For this, he was both praised and demonized; still, he persisted on his own chosen path.

Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture; Christina Ramberg, who drew on pop culture and advertising; and Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar.

Lucelle Raad is an artist whose original paintings and prints decorate countless walls of homes in the United States and Europe, as well as in other locations throughout the world. The majority of her subjects are children, as well they should be, for children are the most innocent, unassuming people there are to paint. She wasn’t always an artist, however. In fact, she never intended to be anything but a happy, well-adjusted adult - the goal of all children, whether they realize it or not. How she came to be an artist is quite another story altogether.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time - Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel García Márquez - remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss.

For nearly a decade, Palley has been on the frontline of fire. He has witnessed homeowners on the worst day of their lives. He’s seen puddles of aluminum where cars were once parked. He’s watched as 150-foot walls of flame cascaded down mountainsides and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. And he’s captured, time and again, the tireless commitment of firefighters as they work to save lives and homes, in terrain where fire always seems to have the upper hand.

Man Ray (1890-1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the 20th century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray’s Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art.

Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who GOT him. So he started asking himself questions: What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer?

Le età della vita di Leonardo furono marcate da ricerche e spostamenti, sia attraverso luoghi fisici sia - soprattutto - attraverso le discipline che egli studiò e intrecciò in un continuo avanzamento. La sua fu una vita affascinante, tanto che da secoli viene studiata, catturando la curiosità di tutti, dagli storici dell'arte ai critici, dai filosofi agli psicologi, fino a ciascuno di noi.

The second half of William Feaver's Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted work of biography: the definitive story of the epic life of one of the 20th century's most important artists. William Feaver, Lucian Freud’s collaborator, curator and close friend, knew the unknowable artist better than most. Over many years, Freud narrated to him the story of his life, ‘our novel’. Fame follows Freud at the height of his powers, painting the most iconic works of his career in a constant and dissatisfied pursuit of perfection, just outrunning his gambling debts and tailor’s bills.

Frank Lloyd Wright, designer of some 800 buildings, is widely regarded as the twentieth century's greatest architect - an unconventional genius who transformed both residential and commercial building design with his concept of "organic" architecture. In this charming memoir, Wright the architect and father, "a rebel" and "a jolt to civilization," comes to life through the vivid recollections and firsthand knowledge of his son.