Yayoi Kusama is simultaneously one of the most famous and most mysterious artists on the planet. Millions have stood transfixed in her Infinity Rooms and posed with her enormous polka-dotted pumpkins.
Revolutionary and renegade, Keith Haring was an artist for the people, creating an instantly recognizable repertoire of symbols that became synonymous with the volatile culture of the 1980s. Haring pl
Fridamania has made Frida Kahlo's image ubiquitous: she has been reborn as a Halloween costume, Barbie doll, children's book character, textile print, phone cover, and the inspiration for everything f
Artemisia Gentileschi was the greatest female artists of the Baroque age. In Artemisia Gentileschi, critic and historian Jonathan Jones discovers how Artemisia overcame a turbulent past to become one
King of Pop Art Andy Warhol is one of the greatest artists of all time. Rarely venturing into public without his camera and tape recorder, Warhol was a great observer and documentarist of the American
In this book, biographical accounts by several of Titian’s contemporaries, including Giorgio Vasari and Pietro Aretino, trace the long, fascinating, and prolific life of this master of the Itali
Born Jacopo Comin, Tintoretto (ca. 1519–1594) was one of the great painters of the late Renaissance. This book presents the first biographies of Tintoretto, by Giorgio Vasari, Carlo Ridolfi, and Raffa
Memories of Degas brings together intimate portraits of the artist by two of his earliest and most important champions, the Irish writer George Moore and the German-born English painter Walter Sickert
Lives of Velázquez brings together two seminal early accounts of the great seventeenth-century Spanish painter (ca. 1599–1660). These texts, written by his contemporaries Francisco Pachec
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) had a short but prolific career as a photographer, taking up the camera in her late forties. Her work, with its distinctive, softly focused style, was not appr
The general outlines of Vincent van Gogh’s life—the early difficulties in Holland and Paris, the revelatory impact of the move to Provence, the attacks of madness and despair that led to h
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) had been widely known for decades when the young Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to interview him for an essay to be published in a German a
Giorgio Vasari, Florentine painter and architect, friend of Michelangelo and intimate of the Medici, is best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in
The paintings of Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), particularly his astonishing jungle dreams, are now so popular that it is difficult to realize how they were originally greeted with ridicule and inc
When Édouard Manet’s early paintings were greeted with outrage and derision in the 1860s, Émile Zola sprang to his defense, initiating a friendship that would last until Manet&rsqu
Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1435–1516), widely considered the greatest Venetian artist of his time, was born into the most influential artistic family in Venice. He received his training in the studio