Mark Rothko's work is among the most recognisable in modern art history. His huge colour-field works enjoy enormous popularity for their luminosity, moodiness, and immersive qualities. But he didn't always paint in bold, simple swaths of colour. This graphic biography traces Rothko's entire life, from his boyhood emigration from Russia to America, to his suicide in 1970. It touches on his schooling and early work for the WPA in the 1930s; the evolution of his art from representational to purely abstract; and the dawning of his artistic philosophy, which took him farther and farther away from the material world and toward a universally emotional and expressionist modality. The book's finely detailed drawings are Rothko's signature colours and draw readers into his fascinating creative journey. While Rothko the artist was largely misunderstood during his lifetime, this unique graphic biography offers a way of making sense of his life and of decoding the visual language he invented.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 128

Dimensions: 170 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 07-09-2021

This gorgeous survey of art from the Islamic world covers three continents and fourteen centuries. From its birth in the 7th century through modern times, the Islamic religion has inspired glorious works of art. This stunning book includes more than four hundred reproductions of treasures of Islamic art that span the world: from southern Europe, along the entire Mediterranean basin to sub-Saharan Africa through the Middle East, India, and Central Asia. Arranged geographically, the objects include paintings, miniatures, ceramics, calligraphy, textiles, carpets, and metal works. Each region is given a thorough introduction that offers historical context and extensive descriptions of its artifacts. Accompanying essays offer guidance in interpreting the many themes that tie these works together, including typology, calligraphy, and religious beliefs. With its large format, exquisite reproductions, and extensive research, this book is a thorough introduction to the Islamic artistic tradition.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 320

Dimensions: 270 x 287 mm

Publication Date: 27-09-2019

Over the course of seven years, a well-respected team of adventurers has embarked on scores of not-quite-legal investigations inside, below, and above the city's hidden infrastructures. Their first book published by Prestel, Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital, took readers under the city. Now, they reveal the results of their expeditions scaling the city's heights. Jaw-dropping photographs offer extraordinary views from vantage points that most of us will never reach. Divided into thematic chapters, the book offers personal accounts of various excursions, including travels up freestanding masts, pylons, and chimneys; the tops of public spaces such as the Barbican Centre and the British Museum; voyeuristic glimpses over the rooftop gardens of the rich and famous; and the heights of London "starchitecture": the Gherkin, the Shard, and the Walkie-Talkie. Each chapter includes a new artwork by illustrator Lizzie Mary Cullen, who specializes in urban psycho-cartography. This London urban exploration crew's exploits in procuring these photos have received extensive coverage in the worldwide press.Readers will enjoy these indefatigable explorers' quest to make their native city both known and accessible to anyone who shares their curiosity.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 176

Dimensions: 193 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 15-04-2016

As one of the founding figures of Impressionism, Camille Pissarro exerted considerable influence over the movement's other members, such as Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt. This publication focuses on Pissarro's collaborations with these and other artists. It also celebrates the avant-garde quality of his painting, particularly in his contributions to Neo-Impressionism. Focusing on his role in the revolutionary Impressionist movement of the 1870s, the book traces Pissarro's work in dialog with his fellow artists, particularly Cezanne and Gauguin, and also reveals his influence on works by Alfred Sisley, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and others. In addition to pages of exquisite reproductions of works by Pissarro and his contemporaries, this volume features illuminating essays on fascinating aspects of the life and work of this prolific artist. Readers will come away with a new understanding of how Pissarro's unique talent for collaboration and unity was vital to the development of French painting in the late 19th century.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 280

Dimensions: 250 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 05-10-2021

Immerse yourself in a strange and beautiful world as you journey from the beach to the depths of the ocean floor. Beneath the surface of the ocean lies a mysterious and astounding world that few people ever get to see. This book merges breathtaking art with the latest scientific research to take readers on a fantastic voyage on the submarine Marine Snow, where they meet blue whales, vampire squid, viper fish, and a giant sea spider. They’ll learn about bioluminescence, Radiolaria, and coral reefs, and discover incredible facts about the marine world. Annika Siems’s illustrations vibrate with color and detail, even as they convey the mystery of a place with scant natural light. From the smallest plankton magnified by thousands, to the most enormous whale, captured on a single page, the sea’s denizens are recreated with spectacular precision and artistry. Annika Siems' and Marine biologist Wolfgang Dreyer’s texts bring the ocean to life—whether they’re describe a transparent jellyfish or the way colors disappear from view as you descend to the ocean floor. A feast for the eye and the mind, this stunning book helps us comprehend a massive, mostly unfamiliar part of our world—one that flourishes with life and beauty.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 96

Dimensions: 290 x 320 mm

Publication Date: 15-10-2019

This vibrant examination of Paul Gauguin's life and work features more than fifty pieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek collection in Copenhagen, including paintings, wood carvings, and ceramics along with Oceanic art and Gauguin's works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's permanent collections. Each piece is reproduced in exquisite detail, offering a superb opportunity to enjoy Gauguin's groundbreaking use of color, line, and form. Essays examine Gauguin's relationships and reveal the struggles, indulgences, awakenings, and betrayals of his personal and professional life. Other essays provide new insights into Gauguin's travels to the far reaches of the French colonial empire in the Pacific and explore his cultural identity, sexuality, and spirituality. Beautifully designed to complement Gauguin's extraordinary oeuvre, this book offers a refreshing take on an artist whose life and work continue to fascinate to the present day.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 224

Dimensions: 220 x 270 mm

Publication Date: 16-11-2018

Peek behind the curtains of London’s iconic theatres with acclaimed actor Simon Callow as your personal guide. This richly illustrated exploration of the most remarkable London theatres features witty and engaging texts by actor Simon Callow, whose knowledge of the city’s dramatic venues is intimate and wide-ranging. One of the most prominent photographers of the past 50 years, Derry Moore, captures the theatres from every angle, whether it’s a velvet box seat at the Novello, the view from the Theatre Royal, Haymarket’s proscenium, or the grand entrance of the foyer in the Apollo Victoria. Exquisite close-ups of architectural elements—such as flamboyant Rococo Baroque friezes, William Edward Trent’s Art Deco mermaids, painted marble pilasters, and elaborately framed mirrors—highlight often unnoticed features and present each theatre’s unique character. From the West End to the South Bank, Westminster to Hackney, the theatres profiled here come to life in ways we rarely see, when the seats are empty and the stages silent.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 210 x 270 mm

Publication Date: 20-09-2019

For as long as humans have been making art, they have turned to the sun as the source of light, warmth and life itself. It appears as a symbol of limitless power, as the personification of gods and of Christ, and as a harbinger of change. Artists have also used the sun as a means of exploring light and color and as an entrée into discussions about climate. The first of its kind, this book investigates visual representations of the sun from antiquity to the present day. It is divided into seven roughly chronological sections that look at both epoch-spanning and period specific examples, including symbolic, allegorical representations, the iconography of mythological subjects, and mimetic qualities such as typology, phenomenology, and emotional effect. It includes more than two hundred stunning reproductions of well- and lesser-known works of art. Incisive and enlightening texts explore how solar symbolism figured in pre-Christian objects; through 17th-century depictions of the “Sun King” Louis XIV; how artists such as Rubens and Monet employed the sun in their narrative paintings; how the Impressionists first investigated the sun’s effects on a landscape; how Neo-Impressionists such as Seurat experimented with color, based on the Newtonian analysis of the solar spectrum; and how 20th-century artists incorporated a broad array of abstract, surrealistic, and transformative modes of solar representation into a variety of media.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 288

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 23-04-2023

This highly entertaining exploration of art, history, and commerce reveals how 30 masterpieces made the journey from image to icon. How did paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Scream achieve worldwide recognition? Why do certain artworks populate T-shirts, mugs, calendars, and advertising? Witty and well researched, this accessible exploration of visual and pop culture reveals how particular works of art have become part of the collective imagination. Readers will learn that Myron's Discobolus only became widely known when used to promote the Olympics, that Leonardo's Last Supper was one of the first paintings to be mass-reproduced, that the Mona Lisa became a celebrity only after being stolen from the Louvre, and that Girl with a Pearl Earring was deemed a minor Vermeer until it became the subject of a bestselling novel. Ranging from classical to contemporary, traveling through the Renaissance, Surrealism, and abstraction, Mona Lisa to Marge offers insights that are in turn thought provoking and surprising. Generously illustrated, it features the original artworks as well as the cartoons, ads, book and album covers, and everyday objects they inspired. The book will open readers' eyes to the artistic images that have become universal touchstones--and the fascinating stories of how and why they got there.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 144

Dimensions: 196 x 238 mm

Publication Date: 25-02-2014

For eight years before the First World War, a young Georges Braque and his friend Pablo Picasso shaped what was perhaps the most revolutionary stage in the history of modern painting: Cubism. This catalog of the accompanying exhibition focuses on Braque's turbulent pre-WWI period to reveal the processes by which the artist developed or reinvented his style in rapid succession- from Fauvism, Proto-Cubism, Analytical Cubism, papier colle to Synthetic Cubism. The amazing speed and intensity of Braque's evolution stands as a remarkable parallel to modern art's shifting focus from representation to abstraction. Bringing together sixty works from museums and private collections around the world, this book offers scholarly assessments that contextualise Braque's career amidst unprecedented technological advances, new schools of thought, and an overall acceleration of everyday life in Western Europe. This includes the invention of moving pictures, which held a particular fascination for the young artist. Film stills and documentary and archival material help readers make the connection between dynamization and the development of aesthetic forms in the visual arts, between the visual innovations of the pre-war period and the flood of media images in which we live today. More than half a century after Braque's death, this exploration of his remarkable career brings us closer to understanding the artist whom Guillaume Apollinaire considered the "touchstone" of Cubist art.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 256

Dimensions: 240 x 286 mm

Publication Date: 05-10-2021