Ron Galella (1931 in the Bronx) moved to Los Angeles in his early twenties, where he trained as a photojournalist. In his free time he took pictures of the stars arriving at film premieres, selling them to the National Enquirer and Fotoplay. His photos are snapshots rather than portraits spontaneous, not staged, and extraordinarily authentic. Whether Jacqueline Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo, Andy Warhol, Sean Penn, Robert Redford, Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Mick Jagger, or Audrey Hepburn Galella managed to get them all in front of his lens. In addition to physical assaults, his photographic approach also caused him to be sued he had to promise Jacqueline Kennedy not to take another picture of her again as long as he lived. Andy Warhol, on the other hand, adored him, and Elizabeth Taylor used his images in her biography. In addition to his spontaneous paparazzi photographs, Galella also took staged pictures, commissioned by magazines such as Time, Rolling Stone, VOGUE or Vanity Fair. The publication presents more than one hundred of his astounding photos.

Robert Kennedy was the most imposing politician he ever met. And Johnny Depp is incredibly photogenic. Steve Schapiro (*1934 in Brooklyn) ought to know, because he has actually photographed them all: his expressive portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Barbara Streisand, Marlon Brando, David Bowie, Jodie Foster, and Robert de Niro are part of our collective visual memory. Besides his work with the stars, Schapiro and his camera accompanied the greatest political and social upheavals of the sixties and seventies. These photographs have also achieved iconic status. This volume includes a selection of photos taken over a period of more than fifty. In the accompanying essays, Schapiro explains how they were created, describing his experiences in a lively, humorous way. Along with previously unpublished photographs, the book also features new works by the old master.

Alongside his development of a revolutionary abstract style, Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) demonstrated an ambition to go beyond conventional easel painting. His famous large paintings with musical and theatrical associations transformed into veritable environments. The catalogue explores the evolution of a Gesamtkunstwerk in the work of Kandinsky including essays by leading Kandinsky scholars on painting as a total work of art, or the artist’s interest in music and theatre. Separated into three sections, it illustrates how Kandinsky’s fascination for the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the principles of synesthesia developed into large-scale painting within the context of the two highly significant artistic groups Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus, as well as in response to the changing historical circumstances, last but not least, culminating in his large-scale decorative utopian murals and installations.

Warhol's Queens combines the artist's portraits of actual female royalty with images of drag queens. For Warhol (1928-1987), both these genuine and fake queens epitomized idealized femininity, devoting their lives to presenting an unattainably glittering pageantry to the public for (not all too) close inspection. This volume juxtaposes Warhol's Polaroids of Princess Caroline of Monaco, Farah Diba Pahlavi and the then-Crown Princess Sonja, of Norway, with drag queens, whom Warhol characterized as living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be and the way some women still actually want to be. The intense faces with their exceptionally colored lips, eyes and hair are both aloof and strangely intimate. With its in-depth scholarly essays, this book is essential for fans of Warhol's portraiture and camp culture.

In 2012, the Museum Tinguely in Basel mounted the exhibition Tatlin: New Art for a New World, the first comprehensive overview of the Russian pioneer in more than 20 years. An interdisciplinary symposium took place during the show, for which researchers from around the world were invited to reassess Tatlin's oeuvre. This volume provides transcriptions of the occasion, which was divided into six themed panels: Paintings and Counterreliefs; Tatlin and his Contemporaries (with papers on Khlebnikov, Malevich, van Doesburg); Revolution, Architecture, Utopia: Tatlin's Tower; Literature and Theater (with papers on the artist's set designs and works with Khlebnikov); The Flight of the Letatlin (on Tatlin's glider); and Perception of Tatlin's Oeuvre in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century.

The oeuvre of El Greco (1541-1614) was first introduced to a broad German audience in 1910, through Julius Meier-Graefe's The Spanish Journey. Numerous artists subsequently caught Greco fever when they first saw larger groups of his works in the exhibitions that followed in Munich in 1911 and Dusseldorf in 1912. In his disregard for the Renaissance rulebook of painting, his love of dramatic mood and emphasis on emotive color and form, El Greco provided acrucial precedent for painters such as Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Ludwig Meidner and especially members of the Blaue Reiter (August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch and others). El Greco and Modernism presents more than 40 paintings by El Greco, gathered from the most famous museums around the world, and sets them alongside the work of the modernists he influenced. Describing his critical role in such currents as Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism and abstract art, this catalogue offers a richly illustrated account of how an artist who, in his time, had no imitators and virtually no pupils, would become a flexible lens for artistic self-discovery and one of the fathers of modernism in the early years of the twentieth century.

In 1905, Adolphe Stoclet commissioned a private mansion in Brussels. Josef Hoffmann designed the home and its garden, and the many artists and friends of the Wiener Werkstätte decorated all of the rooms. The end result was a true synthesis of the arts, an exquisitely realized environment whose residents would carefully dress so as to complement their surroundings. But it was the contribution of Gustav Klimt that would become the Stoclet Palace's most famous component: a three-part mosaic frieze for the dining room, consisting of 15 separate components inlaid with gold, enamel and semi-precious stones. On the occasion of the recent completion of the frieze's restoration — the only one of Klimt's murals that survived the aerial bombardments of World War II — this publication examines Klimt's methods and compares his instructions with the work's execution.

Pablo Picasso was one of the most frequently photographed celebrities of the last century. Virtually all of the great twentieth-century portraitists photographed him, including Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Man Ray, Irving Penn and Lee Miller. Photo Portraits of Picasso gathers these portraits for the first time, examining the often tense relationship between Picasso's control of his public persona and the intentions of the photographers. Ranging from classic staged sittings — some commissioned by Picasso himself — to more spontaneous snapshots, the portraits in this volume are a record of the artist's sustained, lifelong construction of his public identity. Other photographers included are Rogi Andre, Richard Avedon, Bill Brandt, Brassai, Rene Burri, Robert Capa, Lucien Clergue, Jean Cocteau, Denise Colomb, David Douglas Duncan, Jaques-Henri Lartigue, Herbert List, Dora Maar, Madame d'Ora, Willy Maywald, Gjon Mili, Inge Morath, Arnold Newman, Roberto Otero, Edward Quinn, Gotthard Schuh, Michel Sima and Andre Villiers.

«Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's «Boden Sea» for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: «I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist» he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, «Lightning Fields» (2006) and «Photogenic Drawings» (2007). Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.»

Trained sociologist and photographer Marrigje de Maar (born 1944) seeks out those magical households in which families have come together for generations — where life has worn itself into a house. Over the course of five trips to China, she photographed housing in Chinese communes that had been scheduled for demolition, finding within them a surprising diversity of types and uses of classical living spaces.

Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov (born 1957) is a storyteller who roots his themes in melancholic, humorous reflections on everyday life. His ambitious new installation at Ikon Gallery in the U.K. combines drawings, paintings, video and objects, and includes works made prior to 1989 (when Bulgaria was under Communist rule) alongside later pieces for which he is better known.

The work of Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov (born 1957) balances political and social critique with deliberate naivete. The artist's activities incorporate small-scale drawing, sculpture and installation, translating his lived experiences under a totalitarian Communist regime into universally relatable expressions of anxiety and thwarted hope.

Which institutions are on the cutting edge? Which gallery scene is the most vital? Which site-specific artworks should not be missed? Which biennials are scheduled for the coming years? Contemporary Europe is a concise, up-to-date and insightful presentation of European museums, art institutions, galleries, art fairs, biennials and public artworks.

In her digitally manipulated photographs and installations, German artist Claudia Rogge (born 1968) deconstructs social roles by dramatizing them. Taking such cliches as the innocent child, the grim executioner and the masked temptress, Rogge replicates their images ad nauseam until all meaning is drained from them.

«Jeff Koons' spectacular October 2008 exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie presented the infamous series of sculptures and paintings known collectively as Celebration, a project whose fabrication has involved so much labor (both manual and computer-aided) that Koons seemed to almost vanish from the art world radar in the 1990s, when he first undertook the series. At present, Celebration's best-known work may be the 10-foot-tall, stainless-steel «Balloon Dog», typical of the outsize scale and remarkably clean sheen of Koons' sculptures, in which the sensory joys of childhood object relations are revisited and espoused. Such works wear their playroom origins on their sleeves, but their gargantuan proportions, with their attendant sense of menace, establish them firmly in the adult world as infant objects retrieved and rebuilt with adult strength. «The work tries to gain support from the confidence of the gesture», Koons says, «to be kind of in the moment, and to have confidence within the self.» Inasmuch as such observations could be true of much art, Koons is unusually open about what drives his work, all the while preserving its self-sufficiency as art. This monograph documents these mammoth installations in the Neue Nationalgalerie's Upper Hall, an exhibition that without doubt constitutes a milestone in the artist's career.»

«During his lifetime, painter Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485-1547) was considered, along with Giorgione, the great hope of the Venetian School. Sebastiano later became Raphael's biggest competitor in Rome--he was, in fact, the only Renaissance artist capable of painting in the style of both the Venetian and the Central Italian Schools, taking cues from Giorgione, Da Vinci and Michelangelo to create a uniquely discerning and colorful style. Sebastiano was an innovator as well--he was the first to discover a technique that made it possible to paint with oil on stone, which Michelangelo deemed only for «women and lazybones like Sebastiano.» Michelangelo's poor opinion of the painter's abilities has perhaps shrouded Sebastiano's reputation for centuries. In his Lives of the Artists (1550), Giorgio Vasari reiterated Michelangelo's chastisement. A rediscovery of this Venetian portraitist is long overdue.»

n David Goldblatt received the world-renowned Hasselblad Award in 2006, he had been making photographs of the South African landscape and culture for more than 50 years. Born in 1930 in a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, his parents were Jewish refugees from Lithuania, and they raised him with an emphasis on tolerance and antiracism. In 1975, at the height of apartheid, Goldblatt explored white nationalist culture in Some Afrikaners Photographed, and in the 80s he observed workers on the Kwandebele-Pretoria bus, many of whom traveled eight hours every day to work and back. His late-90s solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art focused on architectural work, and showed off Goldblatt's uncanny ability to discover a society through its buildings and landscapes. His photographs of architectural structures revealed the ways that ideology had defined his home country's landscape.

The first African-American artist to attain art superstardom, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) created a huge oeuvre of drawings and paintings (Julian Schnabel recalls him once accidentally leaving a portfolio of about 2,000 drawings on a subway car) in the space of just eight years. Through his street roots in graffiti, Basquiat helped to establish new possibilities for figurative and expressioni...