Artists, Architects & Photographers

Now a docuseries from Ken Burns on PBS! The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and...

Named a Must-Read Book by W Magazine, Time, and more “Everybody’s Fly could comfortably sit alongside books by Richard Price, Lucy Sante, Tom Wolfe, or Ed McBain, chronicling New York from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s with both vivid, journalistic descriptions and the outsized flair from...

This is Irving Stone's powerful and passionate biographical novel of Michelangelo. His time: the turbulent Renaissance, the years of poisoning princes, warring popes, the all-powerful Medici family, the fanatic monk Savonarola. His loves: the frail and lovely daughter of Lorenzo de Medici; the...

Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this work, Sue Prideaux...

One spring day in 1683, a notary's clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled upon one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Rather than dispel the mysteries of Vermeer's life, this discovery merely gave...

Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street...

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith galvanized audiences with their astonishing Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, a book acclaimed for its miraculous research and overwhelming narrative power. Now Naifeh and Smith have written another tour de force...

The vivid and masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—an American original whose own life was remade by art. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from...

In the tradition of John Richardson's Picasso, a commanding new biography of the Italian master's tumultuous life and mysterious death....

Disney experiences enthrall millions of guests around the world. How does it all become a reality? Find out in this action-packed narrative journey! Dream Chasing is a recounting by author Bob Weis of four decades of creating and seeing to completion challenging projects, leading teams from the...

National Best Seller From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.” M Train...

A vivid collection of trademark classic Tyrus stories, from his personal and professional life, that offer unfiltered insights into the heart of the nation while holding leaders accountable and celebrating the diverse experiences that define the American spirit. In his third captivating...

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the...

The inspiring true story of the self-made, Bronx-born portraitist who overcame all odds to become the most followed artist on social media worldwide—featuring never-before-seen drawings of the people and places that made him who he is. Devon Rodriguez talks to strangers: his subway sketches...

These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art....

"Through her art, Herrera writes, Kahlo made of herself both performer and icon. Through this long overdue biography, Kahlo has also, finally, been made fully human." — San Francisco Chronicle Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post “A definitive and ideal biography—pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I’ve ever read.” —The New York Times A critical darling, Crumb is the first biography of Robert Crumb—one of the most profound and...

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt.

In the tradition of classic collections of observations and musings such as Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera and Truman Capote’s The Dogs Bark, Waiting on the Moon is a treasure trove of vignettes from a legendary musical figure whose career spans more than six decades and is still...

Bringing together the author’s written reflections and his paintings, drawings, and photographs, Art Is invites us to see the world in prismatic and diverse lights, helping us navigate the fractured, divisive times we live in.

A riveting, heart-stopping family memoir that blends art, obsession, and love as the author searches for the spectacular jeweled egg that consumed her father’s dreams—and spelled her family’s downfall. When she was eleven years old, Serena Kutchinsky’s life changed forever. Her father...

Featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman! “J. Michael Straczynski is, without question, one of the greatest science fiction minds of our time.” -- Max Brooks (World War Z) For four decades, J. Michael Straczynski has been one of the most successful writers in Hollywood, one of the few to...

In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began what would become one of history’s most influential works of art—The Last Supper.

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit...

New York Times Notable Book “A smart, crackling chronicle of fast game, the ’80s art market, [and] the attraction of destruction.”— Village Voice A bold and vivid biography that chronicles the dazzling rise and tragic death of Neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In less than a...

One spring day in 1683, a notary's clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled upon one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Rather than dispel the mysteries of Vermeer's life, this discovery merely gave...

A riveting, heart-stopping family memoir that blends art, obsession, and love as the author searches for the spectacular jeweled egg that consumed her father’s dreams—and spelled her family’s downfall. When she was eleven years old, Serena Kutchinsky’s life changed forever. Her father...

The first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world, by the author of The Mirror and the Palette. It's not so long ago that a woman's expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism...

Yayoi Kusama has been placing dots on surfaces since 1939. She is still doing it. Every morning, from a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, she walks across the road to her studio, picks up a brush, and paints. She has been making that walk for nearly fifty years. She is ninety-seven years old. In between, she rewrote the rules. She invented immersive art before the term existed. She anticipated Andy Warhol, outpaced the Minimalists, and was erased from the record by an art world that could not figure out what to do with a Japanese woman who kept being first. She sold mirror balls for two ...

From the streets of Chicago to the launch control centers of America's nuclear force, from beating the odds in a near-fatal medical crisis to running marathons across Europe-this is the extraordinary story of a man who refused to quit.