art biography

Hardcover. London, Arthur Baker, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with partial fading, 449 pages, b&w illustrations. The definitive biography of the larger-than-life figure of the French Revolution who was found guilty of loyalist inclinations and executed at the guillotine. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. US, Nan A. Talese, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 384 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color and black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. New York , Nan A. Talese, 1st US, 2014-11-11, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 430 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. London, Richard Cohen Books, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. Monumental biography and critical study, 810 pages, 200+ photographs, 16 pages in color. Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade's Gone By. . ., brings to Lean's biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry. The life and its biographer provide a landmark work on the cinema. Emerging from a childhood of nearly Dickensian darkness, David Lean found his great success as a director of the appropriately titled Great Expectations.There followed his legendary black-and-white films of the 1940s and his four-film movie collaboration with Noel Coward. Lean's 1955 film Summertime took him from England to the world of international moviemaking and the stunning series of spectacular color epics that would gain for his work twenty-seven Academy Awards and fifty-six Academy Award nominations. All are classics, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India. Ownership name on half-title page, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NewYork, Aperture, 2nd, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Vol. 1: 214 pages. Softcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Covers slightly yellow with age, clean inside and intact. Vol. 2: 290 pages. Softcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Covers slightly yellow with age, clean inside and intact. Soil/stain on bottom foredge, does not affect pages. From the back cover of Vol. 1: "To see, to react, to create; these are the fundamentals of all art production. But also to share is the measure of the great artist and the great person. In both his magnificent photographs and in the confidences and clarifications of his Daybook, Edward Weston takes us into himself and shares with us his particular mirror of beauty and compassion."

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover (cloth) in near fine condition with dust jacket which is protected by clear plastic covering, also in near fine condition. 293 pages., including 226 illustrations with 65 color plates. A beautiful and large-format monograph focusing on Willem De Kooning's life and paintings.

Softcover. NY, Harper Design, reprint, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 308 pages. Eleanor Dwight delivers the definitive biography of Diana Vreeland, the twentieth century's most influential fashion editor. Lavishly illustrated with exclusive photographs and personal materials from the legendary style maker's private collection, and featuring a new preface from Vogue's Andre LeonTalley, Diana Vreeland is an indispensible look at a grand dame of great couture. Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred drawings and photographs, many by the best fashion photographers of the time: Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, and Brassai. Here, too, are the trendsetters, artists, models, and celebrities with whom Vreeland worked and played, including Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta, Elsie de Wolfe, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and Jacqueline Kennedy.

NY, Knopf, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 369 pages, b&w illustrations. in a very good, unclipped dust jacket. Examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane"s pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane"s art took during the sixties. Bosworth"s engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

Hardcover. New York, Ecco, 2nd pr., 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 734 pages, b&w illustrations. The definitive biography of the beguiling Diane Arbus, one of the most influential and important photographers of the twentieth century, a brilliant and absorbing exposition that links the extraordinary arc of her life to her iconic photographs. It is impossible to understand the transfixing power of Arbus's photographs without exploring her life. Lubow draws on exclusive interviews with Arbus's friends, lovers, and colleagues; on previously unknown letters; and on his own profound critical insights into photography to explore Arbus's unique perspective and to reveal important aspects of her life that were previously unknown or unsubstantiated. He deftly traces Arbus's development from a wealthy, sexually precocious free spirit into first, a successful New York fashion photographer and then, a singular artist who coaxed secrets from her subjects. Lubow reveals that Arbus's profound need not only to see her subjects but to be seen by them drove her to forge unusually close bonds with these people, helping her discover the fantasies, pain, and heroism within each of them, and leading her to create a new kind of photographic portraiture charged with an unnerving complicity between the subject and the viewer.

Hardcover. New York, Ecco, 2016, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 734 pages. Hardcover. B&w photographs throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Basil Blackwell, 1st thus, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 283 pages. "These intimately revealing diaries, now translated into English for the first time, date mainly from the 1880s and 1890s, when Wedekind was leading a bohemian life in Berlin, Munich and Paris, savoring the artistic and erotic delights of a 'decadent' environment." In a bright dust jacket.

Softcover. New York, Plume/Penguin Group, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 218 pages. Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, his adventures, his enemies, his allies, and his long-suffering sweetheart and eventual mate, Tess Truehart, live again in the one book that traces his entire crime-fighting career; enriched by a wealth of original classic strips in black-and-white, with 24 pages of color. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. England, Antiques Collectrors Club, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 520 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Ex-Lib with usually stamps and markings on end papers, front fly leaf and spine. Faded dust jacket spine. Black and white illustrations throughout. Tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue boards with gilt designs and lettering on the spine, 420 pages. Binding is solid. Color frontispiece, many black and white photos and drawings. Stamping to front fly leaf, name on half title page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Raleigh NC, TwoMorrows Publishing, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 191 pages. Don Heck remains one of the legendary names in comics, considered an "artist's artist," respected by peers, and beloved by fans as the co-creator of Marvel Comics characters Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Black Widow, and for his long stint on Marvel Comics' team book The Avengers. In Don Heck: A Work of Art, author John Coates has meticulously researched and chronicled information on Don's storied 40-year career, including his time at DC, Dell, Gold Key, and as "ghost" artist on Lee Falk's The Phantom newspaper strip. From personal recollections from Don's surviving family, long-time friends, and industry legends, to rare interviews with Heck himself (where he discusses his career, artistic technique, triumphs, frustrations, and love of drawing), this book is full of insight into - and first-hand anecdotes from - the early days of Marvel Comics. It also features an unbiased analysis of sales on Don's DC Comics titles, an extensive art gallery (including published, unpublished, and pencil artwork), a Foreword by Stan Lee, and an Afterword by Beau Smith. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 174 pages. B&w frontispiece portrait. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) had something to say about virtually all her contemporaries among the literati, and they returned the favor in full measure. This well articulated primary and secondary bibliography covers the complete canon and its critical reaction, with illuminating annotations complemented by a biographical sketch. Included also are three personal views of Parker-- by Joseph Bryan, III, Richard Lauterbach, and Wyatt Cooper. The accumulated evidence suggests that Parker should be considered a major figure in American letters not just America's wittiest woman who happened to write. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages. A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America's greatest photographers. Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work 'surrealistic and disturbing.' At the same time, we know very little about O'Sullivan himself. Nor do we know-really know-much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan's Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author's own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O'Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, illustrated with 237 b&w photos. Much has already been written about early motion picture pioneers like D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, but their invaluable partner, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr has been overlooked and neglected - until now. With this very attractive and professional book, author Jeffrey Vance has given due credit to one of early cinema's most brilliant stars and dynamic personalities who not only had true star power but was a driving force behind the scenes as well. Often remembered these days only for his successful 1920s costume adventure dramas such as "The Mark of Zorro", "Robin Hood" and "The Three Musketeers" to name a few, Douglas Fairbanks had a varied, interesting and successful career well before this period, and also contributed greatly to the development of Hollywood. He was one of the founders of United Artists, he and wife Mary Pickford were the first `golden couple' of Hollywood who established Beverley Hills as the suburb of movie stars;

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 431 pages, b&w and color illustrations. For most of his life, Julius Erving has been two men in one. There is Julius, the bright, inquisitive son of a Long Island domestic worker who has always wanted to be respected for more than just his athletic ability, and there is Dr. J, the cool, acrobatic showman whose flamboyant dunks sent him to the Hall of Fame and turned the act of jamming a basketball through a hoop into an art form. In many ways, Erving's life has been about the push and pull of Julius and The Doctor. It is Dr. J who has stories to tell of the wild days and nights of the ABA in the 1970s, and of being the seminal figure who transformed basketball from an earthbound and rigid game into the creative, free-flowing aerial display it is today. He has a long list of signature plays - he's famous for winning the first dunk contest in 1976 with a jam on which he lifted off from the foul line, and he made a miraculous layup against the Lakers on which he soared behind the backboard before reaching back in to flip the ball in on the other side, with one hand. He inspired a generation of dunkers, including Michael Jordan, to express their improvisational talents. But Julius wasn't always as graceful and in control as Dr. J. Erving had a pristine image throughout his career and early retirement, but he was far from a perfect man. Here he gives detailed accounts of some of the personal problems he faced -- or created -- behind the scenes, including the adulterous affair with sports writer Samantha Stephenson, which led to the birth of his daughter, professional tennis player Alexandra Stephenson.Though his marriage survived that infidelity, the death of Erving's 20-year-old son Cory in 2000 in a tragic accident proved too much for the union to bear. Erving paints a raw, heartbreaking picture of the dissolution of his marriage, as his wife Turquoise began to blame him for his refusal to be paralyzed by grief for as long as she was. Their intense arguments came to a head when Erving stepped out of the shower one day to find his wife holding a lamp in one hand and a vase in the other, ready for a physical confrontation. "I knew somebody was going to get hurt, and it wasn't going to be me," he says. He packed a suitcase and he and Turquoise never lived under the same roof again.

Hardcover. NY, Continuum, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 301 pages, b&w illustrations. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Celebrates one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century: Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as 'Dr. Seuss'. Dr Seuss's ascendance from children's author to American icon confirms that his cultural significance rests not just with the beginning reader, but with the scholar, the artist, and the poet.Seuss's Beginner Books(starting with The Cat in the Hat in 1957) have obscured the enormous range of his contributions to American literature. Similarly his art, unfairly overlooked because it appears in children's books, cartoons, and commercials, actually covers a range of styles, including Surrealism, Art Nouveau, and Cubism. Bringing to light the adult perspective behind the children's writer, Philip Nel examines Seuss's lesser-known works, such as the 'adult book' The Seven Lady Godivas (1939), and the live-action musical The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). The book also features the most comprehensive Seuss bibliography ever produced, documenting his prodigious output.

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 352 pages. Drawing Blood is Molly's personal memoir of her career so far, her struggles to be recognized as an artist, the people she's met and her political world view. It's unusual for a young artist (b. 1983) to write a memoir so young but her life has been crammed with experiences that make this a meaningful, thought provoking book. Some people will undoubtedly be horrified that Molly chose to work in the adult indiustry to fund her early career but in naughties NYC that was, perhaps, the only way a struggling, working class, female artist could maker her way without a wealthy patron. Molly gives vivid descriptions of strip clubs, burlesque dancers, artists, protests, and a lifestyle that many can only imagine. The characters leap off the page illustrated by a vivid written style that draws in words as well as Molly makes art. The book has been described as an unflattering mirror held up to conventional middle-class lives.

Hardcover. NY, Scholastic Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 64 pages. Allen Say's own story of his path to becoming the renowned artist he is today. Shunned by his father, who didn't understand his son's artistic leanings, Allen was embraced by Noro Shinpei, Japan's leading cartoonist and the man he came to love as his "spiritual father." As WWII raged, Allen was further inspired to consider questions of his own heritage and the motivations of those around him. He worked hard in rigorous drawing classes, studied, trained--and ultimately came to understand who he really is. Part memoir, part graphic novel, part narrative history, DRAWING FROM MEMORY presents a complex look at the real-life relationship between a mentor and his student. With watercolor paintings, original cartoons, vintage photographs, and maps, Allen Say has created a book that will inspire the artist in all of us.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1st US, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 217 pages. Black & white line drawings by Shepard. Black & white photo on frontispiece. Blue cloth binding with gold spine lettering. English artist Shepard's (1879-1976) life story from 1890 on, a sequel to Drawn from Memory. The famed illustrator of the Winnie-the-Poo stories tells his story, with many vignettes of Milne and his books. Clean, bright copy, no dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Lippincott , 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Light edgewear to dust jacket. The illustrator of Winnie the Pooh recalls his London childhood.