Gathers two hundred photographs from over thirty-two thousand entries in an international photography contest to portray the current state of the environment

Your World: International Photographic Competition on the Environment 1991-1992

Arts & Photography

UNEP Staff

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Harpercollins

First edition bound in black cloth.Color illustrations, small 4to size, A Fine copy in a Fine dj.

Fantasy Art of the New Millennium: The Best in Fantasy and SF Art Worldwide

Jude, Dick

History & Criticism

Voyager

The wayward life (1898–1979) of the voracious art collector and great female patron of world-famous artists.
‘Mrs Guggenheim, how many husbands have you had?’ ‘Do you mean my own, or other people’s?’ Peggy Guggenheim was an American millionairess art collector and legendary lover, whose father died on the Titanic returning from installing the lift machinery in the Eiffel Tower. She lived in Paris in the 1930s and got to know all the major artists – especially the Surrealists. (Later she bullied Max Ernst into marrying her, but was snubbed by Picasso.) When the Second World War broke out, she bought great numbers of paintings from artists fleeing to America; as a Jew she escaped from Vichy France and set up in New York, where in the 1940s and 50s she befriended and encouraged the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Rothko, etc.)
Her emotional life was in constant turmoil – a life of booze, bed and bohemia (mostly rich bohemia). Her favourite husband was a drunken English dilettante writer called Lawrence Vail, but she bedded many others, including Samuel Beckett. Later she moved to Venice, where her memory is enshrined in the world-famous palazzo that houses her Guggenheim Collection.

Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict

GILL, Anton

Humor & Entertainment

A sweeping, beautifully written history of artistic patronage from 1000 to the present day by a Wolfson Prize-winning historian.
‘Marks of Opulence’ is a magisterial survey of European art and artistic patronage from 1000 until the birth of modernism. Tracing the history from the discovery of silver in the Harz mountains, through the catastrophic effects of plague in the 14th-century, to the studied magnificence of papal and royal courts in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, Platt shows how the great and the good have always used art to bolster political power.
Arguing that the acquisitive instinct – felt by all of us in different ways – is central to the history of Western art, Platt traces how art began to move out of the palaces of the aristocracy into the homes of merchants, bankers and industrialists. From the mid 19th-century onwards, and in the pre-war Belle Époque in particular, it was the immensely wealthy 'robber barons' and their widows – in London and Paris, in Berlin and Vienna, in Moscow and Barcelona, in Philadelphia and New York – who collected the work of the most innovative artists and broke the hold of the Academies on Western art.
Professor Platt's ambitious sweep through a thousand years of artistic endeavour in the West argues throughout that a superfluity of money is the chief driver of high achievement in the arts, and for the transforming power of great riches.

Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914

PLATT, Colin

Harper-perennial

A narrative history of how Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa came to be the most famous in the world – and one of the most powerful cultural icons of our time.
What has made the Mona Lisa the most famous picture in the world? Why is it that, of all the 6,000 paintings in the Louvre, it is the only one to be exhibited in a special box, set in concrete and protected by two sheets of bulletproof glass? Why do thousands of visitors throng to see it every day, ignoring the masterpieces which surround it?
For nearly 500 years the painting – and the mysterious smile on the face of the sitter – has been a source of mystery, speculation and reverence. In this groundbreaking new book Donald Sassoon describes not only the Mona Lisa and its history, but its mythology, and the processes which combined to raise it to its current unrivalled level of fame. He examines Leonardo’s innovative techniques; the problems concerning the identity of the sitter; what happened to the painting after it left Italy when Leonardo joined King François I’s court in France; the copies made in the 17th century; its celebration by 19th-century intellectuals; its theft and disappearance early in the 20th century; the surrealists’, other avant-garde artists’ and cartoonists’ uses of it; its appropriation by the advertising industry; and the never-ending flood of new and ‘conclusive’ theories about Mona Lisa’s smile.

Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting (Story of the Best-Known Painting in the World)

Sassoon, Donald

Reference

For the first time ever, a portfolio of illustrated work from the award-winning artist, John Howe, which reveals the breathtaking vision of one of the foremost fantasy artists in the world. Myth and Magic is arranged into six sections, which looks at the books by J.R.R. Tolkien that have inspired John, as well as a fascinating tour through the paintings that he has produced for some of the finest fantasy authors working today. From the beloved painting of Smaug which decorates The Hobbit, his numerous and bestselling calendar illustrations, the world famous "Gandalf" picture, which is synonymous with the HarperCollins one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, this large-format hardback will delight fans of Tolkien, and anyone who has been captured by the imagination of the artist who so brilliantly brings to life the literary vision of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Myth and Magic: The Art of John Howe

Howe, John.

Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.

A selection of stunning poster paintings from the celebrated Tolkien artist Alan Lee - the man behind many of the striking images from The Lord of The Rings movie. The 50 paintings contained within the centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1992 have themselves become classics and Alan Lee's interpretations are hailed as the most faithful to Tolkien's own vision. This new poster collection, a perfect complement to volume one, reproduces six more of the most popular paintings from the book in a format suitable either for hanging as posters or mounting and framing.

The Lord of the Rings Collection 2

Tolkien.J.R.R.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings Postcard Book: Postcards

CSI meets Who Do You Think You Are? meets Time Team meets The Antiques Roadshow. Two-dimensional works of art become three-dimensional thrillers. Philip Mould is an international art dealer who has lived the high stakes game of art sleuthing for twenty years. In Sleuth, we encounter the fascinating dealers, experts, auctioneers and restorers who risk fortunes and reputations to turn overlooked artworks into coveted treasures. Sleuth is laced with dramas: / Gainsborough's earliest picture emerges in a Los Angeles saleroom - the author has three days to find the missing facts and decide what to pay. / The most powerful man in the art establishment, with the influence to elevate a copy into a priceless original, is asked to look at a 'fake' Rembrandt self portrait: if he says yes a GBP5,000 picture turns into GBP5 million masterpiece. / A Vermont professor unlocks the door of a defunct Catholic church to reveal a hidden cache of 300 portraits. / An auctioneer notices from the upper story of a bus that Damien Hirst's restaurant is being dismantled. He swoops in and sells the fixtures and fittings for GBP13 million. Sleuth is a series of stories which not only reveals the extraordinary culture of detection but the people behind it. Paintings and their discovery become a way into the minds, preoccupations and professions of a raft of influential figures beyond the commercial and museum facade - men and women who have shaped their lives in pursuit of truth and profit through art.

Sleuth: The Amazing Quest for Lost Art Treasures

Mould, Philip

As Luck Would Have It Unabridged CD

Derek Jacobi

HarperCollins Audio

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