"Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an al...
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An insider's account--the first of its kind--of the thoroughly unconventional life of one of the twentieth century's most shockingly original painters


Lucian Freud's paintings are instantly recognizable: often shocking and disturbing, his portraits convey a profound yet compelling sense of discomfort. Freud was twice married and the father of at least a dozen children, and his numerous relationships with women were the subject of much gossip--but the man himself remained a mystery. An intensely private individual (during his lifetime he prevented two planned ...
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Kingsley Amis described Paul Johnson's Intellectuals as "a valuable and entertaining Rogues' Gallery of Adventures of the Mind." Now the celebrated journalist and historian offers Creators, a companion volume of essays that examines a host of outstanding and prolific creative spirits. Here are Disney, Picasso, Bach, and Shakespeare; Austen, Twain, and T. S. Eliot; and D rer, Hokusai, Pugin, and Viollet-le-Duc, among many others.

Paul Johnson believes that creation cannot be satisfactorily analyzed, but it can be illustrated to bring out its salient character...
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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017

WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD FOR BEST COMICS-RELATED BOOK

FINALIST FOR THE NBCC AWARD IN BIOGRAPHY

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY

In the tradition of Schulz and Peanuts, an epic and revelatory biography of Krazy Kat creator George Herriman that explores the turbulent time and place from which he emerged--and the deep secret he explored through his art.

The creator of the greatest comic strip in history finally gets h...
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Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers--but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people?

Sue Roe's colorful, lively, poignant, and superbly researched biography, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, follows an extraordinary group of artists into their Paris studios, down the rural lanes of Montmartre, and into the rowdy riverside bars of a city undergoing monumental change. Vivid and unforgettable, it casts a...
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A compelling portrait of the life, work, and meaning of one of the greatest artists of all time.

Toward the end of his long life, Tiziano Vecelli--known to the world ever since as Titian (circa 1488- 1576)--was at work on a number of paintings that he kept in his studio, never quite completing them, as though wanting to endlessly postpone the moment of closure. Produced with his fingers as much as with the brush, Titian's last paintings are imbued with a unique rawness and immediacy without precedent in the history of Western art. As if to further cloud their me...
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J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist.

Turner was very much a man of his changing era. In his lifetime, he saw Britain ravaged by Napoleonic wars, revived by the Industrial Revolution, and embarke...
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