Art & Design

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself...

This passionate, thought-provoking, often funny, and always-accessible book proposes a new way of looking at art, suggesting that it can be useful, relevant, and therapeutic. Through practical examples, the world-renowned authors argue that certain great works of art have clues as to how to manage the tensions and confusions of modern life. Chapters on love, nature, money, and politics show how art can help with many common difficulties, from forging good relationships to coming to terms with...

Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A. O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative...

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty ye...

What makes a colour work? What do colours mean to artists or cultures? Why does grey make a colour stand out? What colour are the oceans? Why is the yellow of lemons something to treasure? Award-winning illustrator Marion Deuchars takes us on a journey through colour, showing how its language is at the centre of how we think and feel about the world. Colour is everywhere. Through this book, we can see it afresh. Hardback: 176 PagesProduct Dimensions: 215 x 290 mmISBN: 9780141983356 Published ...

The colour photographs taken by one of the leading figures in contemporary Japanese photography in a special, luxury edition that includes an original print by Moriyama signed by the artist. For the first time, the colour photographs realised by Daido Moriyama, one of the leading figures in contemporary Japanese photography. An extraordinary limited-edition artist book edited by Filippo Maggia, intended for all collectors searching for the magic of a precious and extraordinary product destine...

Paul Rand (1914-1996) was a pioneer in the field of advertising design and typography, and his work still exerts a profound influence on the design profession. First published to critical acclaim in 1993, and long unavailable, Design, Form, and Chaos is now back in print. Exploring graphic design challenges such as the values behind aesthetics, the role of intuition, selecting a typeface, and the place of market research, the book elegantly demonstrates how utility and beauty can be effective...

For the first time ever, we have all the music in the world to choose from. As Ben Ratliff, one of America's celebrated music critics, shows us, it's time to listen in a new way too. Opening our ears to unexpected connections, new experiences and little-known delights, this book will change the way you appreciate music forever.Paperback: 272 pagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9781846146862Published by Penguin Books

Grunge, also known as the 'Seattle Sound', emerged from the Pacific north-west in the early part of the 1980s. With the unexpected success of Nirvana's single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' in 1991, grunge became a household word overnight and launched an American music movement on a par with punk and hip-hop. In Everybody Loves Our Town, Mark Yarm draws from exclusive interviews to tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of the Sub P...

In 1959, Richard Bellamy was a witty, poetry-loving beatnik on the fringe of the New York art world who was drawn to artists impatient for change. By 1965, he was representing Mark di Suvero, was the first to show Andy Warhol’s pop art, and pioneered the practice of “off-site” exhibitions and introduced the new genre of installation art. As a dealer, he helped discover and champion many of the innovative successors to the abstract expressionists, including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, D...

Covering an array of subjects, from the meaning of art to supermarket shopping, these pieces were chosen for their originality, literary style, and above all, their ability to persuade. The judges awarded the first prize to “Five Ways of Being a Painting” by William Max Nelson for “its curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, that makes it a real essay.” The biennial Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize is open to all essays written in English of b...

translated by Daniel W. Smith In this landmark text by one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze takes the paintings of Francis Bacon as his object of study. The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation and deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the tri...

Growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) dreamed of becoming an artist. One day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it--the plants, the people, the sky--were covered in polka dots. She began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. As she grew up, she traveled all around the world, from Tokyo to Seattle, New York to Venice, and brought her dots with her. Different people saw these dots in different ways--some thought the...

From Scandinavia is a collection of work from some of the most talented agencies in Scandinavia, such as Snask, Stockholm Design Lab, Bielke & Yang, Bond, Heydays and many more.Paperback: 168 PagesProduct Dimensions: 170 x 223 mmISBN: 9780993581229Published by Counter-Print

Not sure how to start your drawing of a flamingo or slippery slug? Boggled by how to draw an antelope, an armadillo, or a cheetah? How to Draw Almost Every Animal is here to help! Need to draw a hippopotamus? A lazy, brown dog? A quick, red fox? Then this collection of over 75 adorable animals to draw and doodle is just the book for you! This teaching tool does more than just show you completed pictures of the animals. Each illustration is broken down with step-by-step diagrams and helpful ti...

Don't let your artistic aspirations come to an end before they start! Everyone wants to draw stylish, evocative pictures, but between busy schedules, not knowing basic techniques, and simply feeling like their art isn't "good enough," many people quickly give up on learning to draw. This is where How to Draw Almost Every Day comes in! Each image in this technique-driven book is broken down with step-by-step diagrams, making the process of creating the image easy to understand. You'll learn to...

Learn to draw pretty much everything. With over 2,000 images, this visual reference book offers instructions for drawing animals, people, plants, food, everyday objects, buildings, vehicles, clothing, and more. Each entry is broken down with step-by-step illustrations making this book perfect for beginners or experienced artists in need of a quick refresher. Paperback: 240 PagesProduct Dimensions: 159 x 203 mmISBN: 9781631591402 Published by Quarry Books

In 1958, artist Joan Miró and critic Yvon Taillandier sat down for an in-depth discussion on Miró's life and work. Their conversation, one of the most illuminating and insightful looks into Miró's philosophy and creative process, was first published in a limited edition of seventy five copies in 1964. Though long out of print, this bilingual "treasure," in the words of Maria Popova, "remains the most direct and comprehensive record of Miró's ideas on art." This beautiful new edition presents ...

The drawings of Israeli artist Eran Shakine may look carefree and casual, but their message is serious: Muslims, Christians, and Jews share a history. They are linked through Abraham’s sons Ishmael, an ancestor of the Muslims, and Isaac, an ancestor of the Jews, as well as through Jesus, born a Jew. As Shakine demonstrates in this new collection of his work, Muslims, Christians, and Jews have a great deal in common. Knocking on Heaven’s Door presents new large-format oilstick drawings depicti...

Translasted by Damion Searls In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus--who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation--Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Rilke's constant warmth, his ability to sense in advance his correspondent's difficulties and propose solutions to them, and his sensitivity as a person and an artist come across in these charming and honest ...

North Korea uncensored and unfiltered - ordinary life in the world's most secretive nation, captured in never-before-seen ephemera. Made in North Korea uncovers the fascinating and surprisingly beautiful graphic culture of North Korea - from packaging to hotel brochures, luggage tags to tickets for the world-famous mass games. From his base in Beijing, Bonner has been running tours into North Korea for over twenty years, and along the way collecting graphic ephemera. He has amassed thousands ...

Recognizable by the signature four white stitches and blank tag, celebrated French fashion brand Maison Margiela made its debut in Paris in 1988. Founder Martin Margiela shied away from the spotlight, choosing anonymity over celebrity and ‘we’ over ‘I’. An avant garde at heart, he challenged the idea of traditional garments by experimenting with deconstruction and reconstruction, exaggerated silhouettes and trompe- l’oeil(optical illusion). Margiela’s spirit lives on in the Maison Margiela br...

Monocle is a London-based monthly publication featuring political, social, cultural and global issues through in-depth reporting by its correspondents around the world. Launched in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé, Monocle has also offered a series of books, newspapers and a radio channel that runs 24 hours a day. Monocle also operates shops and cafés to reach out to more readers. Its advertorial contents, created in collaboration with many brands, have provided a successful and steady source of revenue f...

Intended to be a generic line for the Seiyu Supermarket Group, Muji was launched in Japan in 1980, as Mujirushi Ryohin, which means “no-brand quality goods.” Having initially started out with just 40 products, Muji now sells more than 7,000 different items and has successfully expanded into the housing business, proving that a brand can indeed sell a lifestyle aesthetic.Magazine: 130 PagesProduct Dimensions: 170 x 240 mmISBN: 9791160360103Published by Magazine B

One day, the French artist Henri Matisse cut a small bird out of a piece of paper. It looked lonely all by itself, so he cut out more shapes to join it. Before he knew it, Matisse had transformed his walls into larger-than-life gardens, filled with brightly colored plants, animals, and shapes of all sizes! Featuring cut-paper illustrations and interactive foldout pages, Matisse's Garden is the inspiring story of how the artist's never-ending curiosity helped turn a small experiment into a rad...

A fun, creative and engaging introduction to the work of one of Britain's most exciting artists. With bold, colourful and playful illustrations by Rose Blake, Meet David Hockney is packed with make-and-dos and inspiring activities for young budding artists Paperback: 32 PagesProduct Dimensions: 248 x 280 mmISBN: 9781849764469 Published by Tate Publishing

It's everywhere, including the moon (on the commemorative plaque left by Apollo 11 astronauts), Nike sneakers, the artworks of Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, and Jenny Holzer, 2001: A Space Odyssey credits, Domino's Pizza boxes, Absolut Vodka bottles, and Red Bull cans. Futura and its typographic offspring have been the face of presidential campaigns from Richard Nixon to Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Futura is one of the most used fonts in the world today—the typeface of modern design—more so even th...

This catalogue is published to coincide with the UMAG exhibition North Korea’s Public Face 20th-century Propaganda Posters from the Zellweger Collection. For most people outside of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), it may come as a revelation that art is available in North Korea, or that it is a well-developed feature of national culture. As the state guides artistic production, all artists are members of the Korean Artists Federation, and must create a certain number of works...

Design is a way to engage with real content, real experience,' writes celebrated essayist Michael Bierut in this follow-up to his best-selling Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (2007). In more than fifty smart and accessible short pieces from the past decade, Bierut engages with a fascinating and diverse array of subjects. Essays range across design history, practice, and process; urban design and architecture; design hoaxes; pop culture; Hydrox cookies, Peggy Noonan, baseball, The Sopranos...

Although he is best known for pioneering Cubism, Picasso's works over a prolific seven-decade career are characterized by an impressive stylistic eclecticism and engage with almost every major artistic movement that followed in his wake. Pablo Picasso provides a concise overview of the great Spanish painter, sculptor, and printmaker's life and work, with insights into the creation of key works and rarely seen photographs of Picasso's studio from the David Douglas Duncan collection that shed l...

Pop Art is the most important 20th-century art movement. It brought Modernism to the masses, making art sexy and fun with coke cans and comics. Today, in our age of selfies and social networking, we are still living in a world defined by Pop. Full of brand new interviews and research, Sooke describes the great works by Warhol, Lichtenstein and other key figures, but also re-examines the movement for the 21st century and asks if it is still art? He reveals a global story, tracing Pop's surpris...

John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. In Portraits, Berger grounds the artists in their historical milieu in revolutionary ways, whether enlarging on the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves or Cy Twombly’s linguistic and pictorial play. In penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized a...

For their 25th anniversary issue, Purple celebrates the artists and models who incarnated the spirit of the magazine through their style, attitude, and personality. Since 1992, Purple has been connecting art and fashion. This issue pays tribute to some of their favourite models and celebrate modelling as a form of art. Throughout 25 different covers showing 25 Purple Icons, the magazine tells the story of its 25 years working with the best fashion designers, photographers and stylists. With e...

The great pantheon of fashion designers produces only a handful of creators who are masters of their métier. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is one of them. Widely recognized among her contemporaries as the most important and influential designer of the past forty years, she has, since her Paris debut in 1981, defined and transformed the aesthetics of our time. This lavishly illustrated publication examines Kawakubo’s fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. Existi...

Richard Gerstl (1883-1908) painted for just four years, but the work he produced in that short period is widely seen as well ahead of his time, including Self Portrait Against a Blue Background and The Fey Sisters. Although Gerstl never exhibited during his lifetime and his innovative work was largely ignored by both the academy and the art world, his portraits and landscapes are today regarded as some of the most important representatives of Austrian Expressionism. With Richard Gerstl, Dieth...

As the sixties dream faded, a new flamboyant movement electrified the world: GLAM! In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds explores this most decadent of genres on both sides of the Atlantic. Bolan, Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Slade, Roxy Music, Iggy, Lou Reed, Be Bop Deluxe, David Essex -- all are represented here. Reynolds charts the retro future sounds, outrageous styles and gender-fluid sexual politics that came to define the first half of the seventies and brings it right ...

Illustrated by Selçuk Demirel The great John Berger, art critic, novelist and long-time smoker, joins forces again with Turkish writer and illustrator Selçuk Demirel in an unexpected pictorial essay. ‘Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked.’ This charming pictorial essay reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society’s attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a ...

Through honesty, intimacy, intelligence, and swagger, Sneakers amounts to a singular rubber-soled taxonomy, a global group portrait of a culture that’s both personal and public, driven by commitment and curiosity, and sustained by our definitive cast of storytellers, historians, and artists. An absolute necessity for design devotees and sneakerheads of all ages! Sneakers is a definitive exploration of the cultural phenomenon of sneakers, now an 85-billion-dollar-a-year industry. This gift-wor...

In the 1950s, a French journalist joked that the Chinese were 'blue ants under the red flag,' dressing identically and even marching in an identical fashion. When the Cultural Revolution officially began, this uniformity seemed to extend to the mind. From the outside, this was a monotonous world, full of repetitions and imitation, but a closer look reveals a range of cultural experiences, which also provided individuals with an obscure sense of freedom. In The Art of Cloning, Pang Laikwan exa...

Drawing on the author’s personal experience of living and working as an architect in Syria, this timely and fascinating account offers an eyewitness perspective on the country’s bitter conflict through the lens of architecture, showing how the built environment and its destruction hold up a mirror to the communities that inhabit it. From Syria’s tolerant past, with churches and mosques built alongside one another in Old Homs and members of different religions living harmoniously together, the...

Which were the books that shaped art history as it developed in the twentieth century? This pioneering book provides an invaluable roadmap of the field by reassessing the impact of several of the most important works of art history. Each of its sixteen incisive chapters, focusing on a single title, is written by a leading art historian, curator or one of the promising scholars of today. In bringing these cross-generational contributions together, the book presents a varied and invaluable over...

London's Design Museum is entering an exciting period in its life as it prepares to move to the former Commonwealth Institute in Kensington. The Story of the Design Museum charts the story of the museum's life from its inception as the Boilerhouse Project to twenty-five years of groundbreaking exhibitions at Shad Thames. The book begins with a foreword by the founder of the Design Museum Sir Terence Conran, and concludes with an essay from the museum's architect, John Pawson, accompanied by s...

Step into the magical world of Moominvalley with this beautiful one of a kind book; a fun, fascinating, behind the scenes look at the wonderful world of the Moomins and their creator, Tove Jansson. Filled with illustrated maps and family trees, facts about Moomintroll behaviour and habits, this gorgeous book contains all you could wish to know about the beloved characters from the original Moomin stories and the world in which they live. Find out all about Moomintroll's adventures, Moominmamm...

illustrated by Christina Christoforou Antoni Gaudi has a reputation as monastic, mad and hermetic. But the architect of many of the buildings that define Barcelona's cityscape was no mad eccentric. He was a genius inspired by his faith in nature and the divine. Picking up the same strands of eclecticism and art nouveau current in fin de siecle European architecture, he transformed th into an idiom unique to himself and Barcelona to create a series of buildings as revolutionary in their engine...

Only one copy available, with slight tear in the back of the dust jacket. This comprehensive collection offers a thorough overview of typeface design from 1628 to the mid-20th century. Derived from a distinguished Dutch collection, a series of exquisitely designed catalogues traces the evolution of the printed letter via specimens in roman, italic, bold, semibold, narrow, and broad fonts. Borders, ornaments, initial letters, and decorations are also included, along with lithographic examples,...

Vasily Kandinsky was one of the first painters of abstract art and a founding member of the Blue Rider movement. Although he trained as a lawyer, Kandinsky abandoned this career path to devote himself to art, both as a creator and an influential teacher and theorist at the Bauhaus. Over time, Kandinsky's works grew more abstract, and he is best known for large, expressive paintings that free color from form and line. The book covers the entire span of his career, and focuses in particular on ...

The HDB block is full of look-out points. From the openness of the void deck to our windows that look out onto those of the block opposite; to live in an HDB block to see and to be seen. And with nearly 10, 000 public housing blocks spread throughout Singapore, it would not be hard to assume that the architectural elements directing lines of sight in HDB blocks would be similar. But amongst these 10,000 blocks, one might encounter a passer-by at a void deck in Simei framed by pillars painted ...

'Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right'. This extraordinary collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together activists, post-colonialists, surrealists, socialists, nihilists and a host of other voices. From the Négritude movement in Africa and Martinique to Brazil's Mud/Meat Sewer Manifesto, from Iraqi modernism to Australia's Cyberfeminist Manifesto, they are by turns personal, political, utopian, angr...