art biography

Hardcover. NY, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 763 pages, b&w illustrations. From the author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography: Last Train to Memphis brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandily steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records. The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day. With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 194 pages. Includes a bibliography of Bannerman's books and 47 reproductions of the first British and first American editions and her illustrations for them. Phyllis Yuill and Justin Schiller helped with the publishing history and supplied illustrations. Hay shows that it was the illustrations of later artists that provoked the controversy over THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, not Bannerman's original text or pictures. Bound in the original gilt-stamped red boards. From the dust jacket: "This first biography of Helen Bannerman covers much new ground and is based on the vast collection of letters to the children, usually lovingly illustrated, in the possession of the Bannerman family. As well as telling the story of one of the most popular children's books of all time, Elizabeth Hay's biography offers an intimate picture of the daily life of a British memsahib in the heyday of the Raj." Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages, 120 illustrations including 54 plates in full color. Nice clean copy with tight binding and flawless dust cover. Printed in association with The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Hardcover. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 298 pages. B&W and color illustrations throughout. Nice clean copy with tight binding and dust jacket in good condition. Preface by David M Sokol. This is the definitive study of one of America's major artists and inventors, Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872). It covers his prodigious achievements in painting and technology, his passionate cultural ambitions, and his key role in the historic development of American art. The book imaginatively combines intellectual biography with interpretation of more than one hundred pictures. Three chapters consider Morse's most extraordinary artistic achievements: The House of Representatives, The Gallery of the Louvre, and The National Academy of Design. In a final chapter on the electromagnetic telegraph, an invention that imprinted his name on our language, there is a special discussion of the conceptual relationship between artistic and mechanical inventions.

Hardcover. UK, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Pictures throughout. Sarah Angelina Acland (1849-1930) is one of the most important photographers of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Born to a preeminent English family, Acland first gained note as a portraitist whose illustrious subjects--among them two prime ministers, the physicist Lord Kelvin, and the noted art critic John Ruskin--were visitors to her family's Oxford home. Yet it was through her work in the thenfledgling field of color photography that Acland achieved her greatest acclaim. When her color photographs were shown at the Royal Photographic Society in 1905, many considered them to be among the finest work produced in the new medium. An introduction to Acland's entire body of work, this volume contains more than two hundred previously unpublished examples of her photographs, spanning portraiture, studies of Oxford architecture, and landscape and garden photographs captured in Madeira, Portugal. Additional images include four unrecorded portraits by Lewis Carroll of Acland and her brothers--shed light on the work of her contemporaries, including acquaintances and artistic influences like Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron. A fascinating look at the earliest days of color photography, this book also offers a glimpse into the lives of an influential English family and its circle of friends.

Hardcover. New York, Abbeville Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages. b&w and color illustrations throughout. Takes us away from Sargent's famous society portraits and enters a world of open air studies and landscape paintings. Includes exerpts from Sargent's travel diaries. Light gray cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Beautiful, clean, crisp and tight copy in MINT condition. Looks brand new.

Hardcover. New York, Abbeville Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages. b&w and color illustrations throughout. Takes us away from Sargent's famous society portraits and enters a world of open air studies and landscape paintings. Includes exerpts from Sargent's travel diaries. Light gray cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Beautiful, clean, crisp and tight copy in MINT condition. Looks brand new.

Hardcover. New York, Nan A. Talese, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 732 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. From National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair, the definitive biography of Saul Steinberg, one of The New Yorker's most iconic artists.

Hardcover. NY, Nan A. Talese, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 732 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. From National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair, the definitive biography of Saul Steinberg, one of The New Yorker's most iconic artists.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press;, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. Saul Steinberg (1914-99) described himself as a "writer who draws," thus inspiring curator Smith to characterize Steinberg's brilliantly satiric drawings as "illuminations," thus linking his work to illuminated manuscripts and, given Steinberg's love of literature, to a particular favorite, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations. Smith also explores Steinberg's mission to illuminate the overlooked and the absurd. In the biographical sections of his beautifully crafted critique, Smith affectingly recounts Steinberg's life as a Jew in anti-Semitic Romania and an architecture student in Fascist Milan whose distinctive cartoons served as his ticket out of Nazi Europe and onto the pages of the New Yorker. Both Smith and renowned poet Charles Simic associate Steinberg's fascination with documents with his harrowing refugee experiences, while Simic, a fellow immigrant from the Balkans and a friend of Steinberg's, offers striking insights into the artist's comic sensibility. Both commentators reflect on the great change in Steinberg's work after 1960, as his images turned hallucinatory and nightmarish, his protest against tyranny more intense. As instantly recognizable as Steinberg's kinetic, punning, and slyly skewering art is, there hasn't been a comprehensive Steinberg book in years, making this outstanding volume invaluable in its reclamation of Steinberg's agile, philosophic, and category-defying art.

Hardcover. US, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. a celebration of jazz legend Sonny Rollin's incredibly prolific career. This intimate appreciation in pictures and words combines the images of John Abbott, who was Rollin's photographer of choice for the past twernty years has captured the saxophonist at home and at work, and the essays of Bob Blumenthal, a jazz critic who has chronicled Rollins and his art for nearly four decades.

Hardcover. New York, Harper, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 672 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co, reprint, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on half-title page. 162 pages. The story of the life of Kate Greenaway and her work with illustrating. In very good condition, some yellowing to edges of pages. The dust jacket is laminated, but cover is a bit yellowed. Minor bumping to corners, otherwise a very clean and tight copy. Small label at bottom of dj spine.

Hardcover. New York , Knopf, 3rd pr., 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 410 pages, b&w and color illustrations. Clean, bright copy in a similar unclipped dust jacket.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 144 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Designated a Living National Treasure in 1956, Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984) was one of the greatest artists of 20th-century Japan. This is the first book in English to trace Serizawa's artistic biography in detail using the finest examples of his work from leading Japanese collections. A major exponent of the mingei (people's crafts) movement, Serizawa achieved fame as a textile designer using traditional stencil-dyeing techniques and often working in large-scale formats such as folding screens or kimonos. The stunning works in this catalogue are important not only for the originality of their conception, but also for the variety of their materials: cotton, silk, hemp and a range of other fibers, and paper decorated with the brilliant yet warm hues of vegetable dyes. Dramatic in design, Serizawa's textiles have an expressive power that far transcends expectations of a "craft" medium.

Hardcover. London/New York , Faber and Faber, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 164 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, bright copy in a similar dust jacket.

Hardcover. London/New York , Faber and Faber, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 164 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, bright copy in a similar dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, April 30, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 274 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. In The Shadow Man, the bestselling author of Final Payments and The Company of Women elevates the memoir into an uncompromising and unforgettable art form as she seeks to learn the truth about her lost father. 20 photos.

Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli, New York / South Street Seaport Museum, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 128 pages, illustrated throughout in full color. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. 290 pages with 90 illustrations in color. Edited by Ruth Ronen. Text by Ariella Azoulay, Adi Efhal. Published on the occasion of the exhibition from the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 18 November 2007-13 January 2008. Biography.

Hardcover. London, Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages, Color photos by Ara Guller. Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art. Under Sleyman the Magnificent and his succcessor Selmi II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths, many of them presented and analysed in this book. In his greatest works, he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Little Brown, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This is a biography of C.L. Franklin, one of the black preachers in American history. It tells the story of black migration and activism, alongside the rise of gospel, blues, and soul music, with a cast of characters including Martin Luther King, Jr., B.B. King, Art Tatum, and Coleman Young.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1941, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcovrt in a lightly worn dust jacket, 141 pages. Frontis photo of Pinero. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (24 May 1855 - 23 November 1934) was an English actor and later an important dramatist and stage director. He became a prolific and successful playwright, authoring fifty-nine plays. These include serious social dramas, some dealing with social hypocrisy surrounding attitudes to women in second marriages. 'Pinero's talent was stagecraft. He knew how to organize material for effective presentation on the stage. He understood the mass psychology, the emotional reaction of the group in the theater, and thought little of the individual reader. As a result, the dialogue in his plays is right for the actor and the audience, but disconcerting to the readers. But in particular, Pinero was the master of suspense, motivating the turns in his plot sequence with unerring skill. For he understood stage business, the timinng of motion and sound, and, above all, the reactions of an audience to the physical properties on the stage itself. ' Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Hodder & Stroughton, 1st, 1923, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 280 pages, blue cloth covers with gilt design. Color frontispiece portrait of the famous English architect. Illustrated with 12 color plates, 91 b&w plates (some fold-outs). Top edge gilt, clean copy with the scarce light blue dust jacket that has light edgewear with coat-of-arms on front panel, title on spine.