A ​Life of Picasso The ​Prodigy, 1881-1906

John Richardson - A ​Life of Picasso, Volume II: 1907-1917
Richardson ​believes Picasso was "as much sinned against as sinning," at least during the period covered here. This abundantly illustrated second installment of a masterly, indispensable biography puts Picasso in a new light. Shattered by the death in 1913 of the father he loved and hated, the rebellious son concealed his grief but later would claim that the countless pigeons and doves in his pictures were a form of "repayment" to his pigeon-fancying parent. The messianic artist we meet here was misogynistic but also generous and loving. Sulking and bad-tempered (perhaps due to his stomach ulcers), he also displayed brightness of spirit and intelligence. He was a macho pacifist; a hypochondriac; an animal lover gifted with a rapport with dogs and birds. Picasso is often accused of betraying his friend, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was arrested in 1911 on charges of stealing Iberian sculptures from the Louvre?statues he and Picasso acquired from the thief, a Belgian drifter, but Richardson maintains that Picasso justifiably resented his friend for incriminating him in the theft. While Picasso escaped charges of receiving stolen goods, perhaps by pulling official strings, Apollinaire, released after days of interrogation and public humility, was devastated by the scandal. Currently a professor of art at Oxford, Richardson befriended Picasso and his circle in the 1950s while living in France, and the artist's friends?Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, Georges Braque, Apollinaire, confidantes Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas?come vibrantly alive. In a tour de force of scholarship, sleuthing and critical empathy, Richardson charts Picasso's invention (with Braque) of cubism, his escape from it and his rebirth as a classicist. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Francesca Marini - Caravaggio
Caravaggio, ​part of the Skira Mini Art Books pocket-sized series with lots of images. Published on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio's death, the turbulent life and revolutionary masterpieces of a genius: Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio. A new and stimulating opportunity to penetrate the very essence of the terribly natural painter, his revolutionary and astonishing naturalistic criterion.

William Somerset Maugham - The ​Moon and Sixpence
The ​first thing that took me was the writing style. The Shakespearean English, the choice of words, long, flowery sentences – the book takes you back to where the action was. My friend calls it a ‘true piece of literature’! What the book is about is immaterial. I don’t think one thinks about the story in Maugham’s books. That does not mean that the story is not worth talking about. In fact, the story had me completely engrossed from the very beginning. The story is unique in itself, simple, yet powerful. What gets you is the characterization. The main character, Strickland, is so strongly etched that one can start guessing what his reaction will be in certain situations. His wife’s character is so realistic – I guess women haven’t changed much since those days – she is just like any one of us. Maugham is known as the master of characterization and after reading this book, I realized what that meant. More than the story, more than the characterization, what I personally found engaging was the narration. The story is peppered with generous amount of soliloquy of the narrator, in which he puts forth philosophy of life in his own terms. These paragraphs are interesting and thought-provoking. I often found myself putting the book down and pondering over what I had just read. The story of the doctor in Alexandria and his friend is so strikingly relevant even today. We, city dwellers especially, should stop and think about the narration that follows this story. This is not intended to be a book review; one cannot review a classic. Reviewing Maugham’s work does not serve any purpose. No one is going to pick up a Maugham book depending on some review. This is penning down my thoughts about what I felt about The Moon and Sixpence. If you are one of the rare species like me who hasn’t tried Maugham’s books, I urge you to pick up one now.

Boel Westin - Tove ​Jansson Life, Art, Words
The ​Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomin stories, written between 1945 and 1970 and still in print in more than twenty languages. However, the Moomins were only a part of her prodigious output. Already admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, cartoonist and illustrator, she would go on to write a series of classic novels and short stories. She remains Scandinavia's best loved author. Tove Jansson's work reflected the tenets of her life: her love of family (and special bond with her mother), of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. Love and work was the motto she chose for herself and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising. If her relationships with men were shaded by an ambivalence towards marriage, those with women came as a revelation, especially the love and companionship she found with her long-time partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she shared her solitary island of Klovharu. In this meticulously researched, authorised biography, Boel Westin draws together the many threads of Jansson's life: from the studies interrupted to help her family; the bleak years of war and her emergence as an artist with a studio of her own; to the years of Moomin-mania, and later novel writing. Based on numerous conversations with Tove, and unprecedented access to her journals, letters and personal archives, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers a rare and privileged insight into the world of a writer whom Philip Pullman described, simply, as 'a genius'.

Art Spiegelman - Maus: ​A Survivor's Tale - My Father Bleeds History
A ​story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father's story and history itself.

Gilles Néret - Salvador ​Dalí
"A ​szürrealisták és köztem az a különbség, hogy én szürrealista vagyok." Salvador Dalí

Walter Isaacson - Steve ​Jobs (angol)
Based ​on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Bakó Zsuzsanna - Mednyánszky ​László
Ehhez a könyvhöz nincs fülszöveg, de ettől függetlenül még rukkolható/happolható.

Andy Warhol - The ​Philosophy of Andy Warhol
'I ​never think that people die. They just go to department stores.' Andy Warhol Andy Warhol - American painter, filmmaker, publisher, actor and major figure in the Pop Art movement - was in many ways a reluctant celebrity. Here, in his autobiography, he spills his secret and muses about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success, New York and America and its place in the world. But it is his reflections on himself, his Pennsylvanian childhood and his life among celebrities, from working with Elizabeth Taylor to partying with the Rolling Stones, which give a true insight into the mind of one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century culture.

Andy Warhol - The ​Andy Warhol Diaries
In ​celebration of its 25th anniversary, the bestselling classic is introduced to a new generation-with an added preface by Warhol's diarist and long-time friend, Pat Hackett, contemplating Warhol's lasting cultural impact. This international literary sensation turns the spotlight on one of the most influential and controversial figures in American culture. Filled with shocking observations about the lives, loves, and careers of the rich, famous, and fabulous, Warhol's journal is endlessly fun and fascinating. Spanning the mid-1970s until just a few days before his death in 1987, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES is a compendium of the more than twenty thousand pages of the artist's diary that he dictated daily to Pat Hackett. In it, Warhol gives us the ultimate backstage pass to practically everything that went on in the world-both high and low. He hangs out with "everybody": Jackie O ("thinks she's so grand she doesn't even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big"), Yoko Ono ("We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun"), and "Princess Marina of, I guess, Greece," along with art-world rock stars Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and Keith Haring. Warhol had something to say about everyone who crossed his path, whether it was Lou Reed or Liberace, Patti Smith or Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson. A true cultural artifact, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES amounts to a portrait of an artist-and an era-unlike any other.

Melissa McQuillan - Van ​Gogh
Van ​Gogh, the painter whose work was one of the major inspirations for twentieth-century art, is given a fresh and thorough appraisal in this comprehensive new study. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Melissa McQuillan looks at the influences on his life and work and discusses his paintings in depth. The author argues that Van Gogh's works were products of his deliberate engagement with contemporary artistic questions and of his experience as an art dealer. His subsequent reputation, the mythology that grew up after his death, the debates between naturalism and modernity and the social implications of Van Gogh's imagery are studied in full in this lucid account of an artist who sold only one painting during his lifetime but whose works now command the highest prices in the world. 168 illus., 25 in color.

Ismeretlen szerző - Frida ​Kahlo
Few ​artists have captured the public's imagination with the force of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.

Ozzy Osbourne - I ​Am Ozzy
"They've ​said some crazy things about me over the years. I mean, okay: 'He bit the head off a bat.' Yes. 'He bit the head off a dove.' Yes. But then you hear things like, 'Ozzy went to the show last night, but he wouldn't perform until he'd killed fifteen puppies . . .' Now me, kill fifteen puppies? I love puppies. I've got eighteen of the f**king things at home. I've killed a few cows in my time, mind you. And the chickens. I shot the chickens in my house that night. It haunts me, all this crazy stuff. Every day of my life has been an event. I took lethal combinations of booze and drugs for thirty f**king years. I survived a direct hit by a plane, suicidal overdoses, STDs. I've been accused of attempted murder. Then I almost died while riding over a bump on a quad bike at f**king two miles per hour. People ask me how come I'm still alive, and I don't know what to say. When I was growing up, if you'd have put me up against a wall with the other kids from my street and asked me which one of us was gonna make it to the age of sixty, which one of us would end up with five kids and four grandkids and houses in Buckinghamshire and Beverly Hills, I wouldn't have put money on me, no f**king way. But here I am: ready to tell my story, in my own words, for the first time. A lot of it ain't gonna be pretty. I've done some bad things in my time. I've always been drawn to the dark side, me. But I ain't the devil. I'm just John Osbourne: a working-class kid from Aston, who quit his job in the factory and went looking for a good time."

Ismeretlen szerző - Híres ​festők 29. - Gustav Klimt
Gustaw ​Klimt egész világon ismert festészete a századforduló gazdag művészi korszakának legjavát tartalmazza. Klimt - egy kissé titokzatos személyiség, a modern művészettörténet egyik legnagyobb provokátora és hatalmas alkotóerővel bíró művész egy személyben, aki életét teljes egészében a művészetnek szenteli. Tehetsége a hanyatlóban lévő Osztrák-Magyar Monarchiában bontakozik ki, a századvégi, hangulatos Bécsben. A kötelező kánonokat és kompromisszumokat félredobva, Klimt 1897-ben megalapítja a Szecessziót és a bécsi avantgárd vezetőjévé válik. Művészete nem összeegyeztethető a XIX. századi művészet hagyományt tisztelő szabályaival. Klimt ugyanis újat és újszerűbbet akar teremteni, a XX. századra méretezve.

Françoise Gilot - Carlton Lake - Life ​with Picasso
Françoise ​Gilot was a young painter in Paris when she first met Picasso - he was sixty-two and she was twenty-one. During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. LIFE WITH PICASSO, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental genius that was Picasso. She is a superb witness to Picasso as an artist and to his views on art.

Michael White - Tolkien ​- A Biography
J.R.R. ​Tolkien's masterpieces, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are among the most beloved books published in the twentieth century. And Tolkien's mythology has informed popular entertainment across all media -- from television's Star Trek to Led Zeppelin's lyrics to the good versus evil themes of the Star Wars films. Now his influence carries on into the twenty-first century with the magical whimsy of Harry Potter. Tolkien: A Biography presents the man behind the myth. This fascinating and poignant portrait of Middle-earth's creator reveals the author's early childhood, tainted by the tragic deaths of his parents; the horrors he experienced as a soldier in the trenches of World War I; his career as one of England's most prominent scholars in the halls of Oxford University; his friendship with fellow author C.S. Lewis and the founding of the Inklings group; how The Lord of the Rings was usurped by the 1960s counterculture movement only to bestow unwanted wealth and fame upon Tolkien -- and how, three decades after his death, his greatest work was translated into a trilogy of blockbuster films converting new fans to an ever-increasing legion of devotees. Book jacket.

Patrick McGilligan - Alfred ​Hitchcock
In ​a career that spanned six decades and more than sixty films, Alfred Hitchcock was the dominant figure in the first century of cinema. His films -- from The 39 Steps to The Birds, from Rear Window to Vertigo, from Notorious to Psycho -- set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling élan. He was both visionary artist and consummate entertainer ... and became the most widely recognized director who ever lived. In the decades since his death, the public image of Hitchcock has crystallized into a series of iconic images: the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable new biography -- the first in a quarter-century -- draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man, in all his three-dimensional glory. Here is the comprehensive film craftsman, forever pushing forward the boundaries of his art. Here is the passionate collaborator, who cheekily referred to actors as "cattle" but invigorated the careers of Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly. Here is the insatiable provocateur, testing the limits of his audience with his cocktails of sex and violence. And here, too, is the private man: dedicated romantic, constant trickster, impotent voyeur, devoted husband, a man who sacrificed his life, again and again, for his work. Like the best Hitchcock films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of fresh revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humor, and cliff-hanging suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.

Peter Falk - Just ​One More Thing
Peter ​Falk came to prominence as an actor in 1956 in the highly successful off-Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh with Jason Robards. Although he worked continuously for the next three years, bouncing from one off-Broadway theatre to the next, a theatrical agent advised him not to expect much work in motion pictures because of his glass eye. Later, a talent scout for Columbia Pictures described Falk as a second John Garfield, but Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, unfortunately disagreed: 'For the same price, I can get an actor with two eyes.' But in 1958, Twentieth Century Fox came to New York to make a movie - Murder Inc - and Falk landed a juicy role for which he received rave reviews and, incredibly, was nominated for an Academy Award. He was then nominated again for his second film, Pocketful of Miracles starring Bette Davis. Falk went on to become a favourite among filmgoers, yet it was through television that he reached his widest audience as Lt. Columbo, winning four Emmys for the role. Interestingly, Columbo's raincoat came out of Falk's bedroom closet. He bought it years before he became an actor. He's been quoted as saying, 'I wanted to wear something people would remember. Bottom line, it's the world's most famous raincoat.' Just One More Thing is pure Peter Falk, and reads as if he's sitting next to you, chuckling as he recalls his remarkable past.

Klösz György - Fényképek ​/ Photographs
Klösz ​Györgyről, elsősorban a Corvina Kiadó gondozásában először 1979-ben megjelent, és azóta több kiadást megért Budapest Anno... című kötet alapján mind a nagyközönség, mind a magyar fotókutatás úgy tudta és tudja, hogy Budapest fényképésze volt. Emellett ismertek voltak vidéki kastélyfelvételei, és a közelmúltban napvilágot látott számos, a millenniumi kiállítás alkalmával készült fényképe is.Mintegy 4000 különböző Klösz-felvételből kellett kiválasztani azt a 188-at, amelyeket ebben a kétnyelvű, angol-magyar, albumban bemutatunk. Érdekes feladat volt. A Klösz-pálya sokoldalúságát jelzik a valamennyi időszakból és valamennyi nagy képsorozatból válogatott képek. Arra törekedtem, hogy a képsorozatok nagyságrendjét is tükrözze a válogatás. Budapestről készült a legtöbb Klösz-felvétel, de ezen belül vannak például a villamosokról készült felvételek is, amelyek egyszerre két témát ölelnek fel. Szerettem volna olyan képeket megmutatni, amelyek bámulatba ejtik az olvasót. Szerettem volna megajándékozni a meglepetésnek és az örömnek azzal az érzésével, amelyet én éreztem, amikor újabb és újabb gyönyörű és sohasem látott Klösz-leletekre bukkantam. Viszonylag kevés portré szerepel a válogatásban. A Klösz-műterem nem volt a legkiválóbb a portrékészítésben, ezért inkább csak jelzésszerűen szerettem volna érzékeltetni, hogy ez volt a 19. századi fényképészeti műtermek napi rutinfeladata. Ezek közül a képek közül vagy a mesterieket válogattam, vagy olyanokat, amelyeken a kor jelentős személyiségeinek némelyike látható. Lugosi Lugo László

Ingo F. Walther - Picasso
"Azt ​várják tőlem, hogy megmondjam, mi a művészet? Ha tudnám, akkor sem árulnám el." Pablo Picasso