"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history's most creative genius"--

The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of his--or any--age. To this day, mention the name "Andy Warhol" to almost anyone and you'll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol's name and dominated the public's image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that. In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. "The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was," as Gopnik writes. "That's why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure," from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the "performance" of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom--and his attempted assassination. The extent and range of Warhol's success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasn't been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warhol's archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictions--he was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic. Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today

Born in Holland, half Jewish, raised in Amsterdam, Brussels, Genoa, Philadelphia - Lionni is a man of many languages and cultures but no real home. His story is one of a constant search, a search that takes him from an ideal early childhood to a strict education in Italy that proved largely irrelevant to his future, and then to exile from Fascist Italy in America; from being a highly political aspiring artist to becoming a highly successful advertising director (he invented the famous "Never underestimate the power of a woman" campaign) and a powerful force in the world of graphics as the art director of Fortune magazine; from life in the affluent commuter world of Connecticut to a return to Italy and the life of an artist. After all this - a full life by any account - he finds yet another successful vocation as the author and illustrator of children's books that have sold millions of copies throughout the world.

A group of notable writers--including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow--celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, a group of notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home--from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London. With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home. Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house; Susan Walker on Morocco's ancient Roman House of Venus; Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writers' houses; Margaret Macmillan on her mother's Toronto house; a poem by Maura Dooley, "Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts"--the house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women; Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson; David Cannadine on Winston Churchill's dream house, Chartwell; Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo's Villa Emily; Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England; Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City; Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson's houses; a poem by Simon Armitage, "The Manor"; Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis; Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark; Alexander Masters on the fear of houses; Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera; Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life; a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue, "Safe Houses"; Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee; Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden's Austrian home; Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses; Julian Barnes on Sibelius and Ainola.

"Judy Chicago is America's most dynamic living artist. Her works comprise a dizzying array of media from performance and installation to the glittering table laid for thirty-nine iconic women in The Dinner Party (now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum), the groundbreaking Birth Project, and the meticulously researched Holocaust Project. She designed the monumental installation for Dior's 2020 Paris couture show and, in 2019, established the Judy Chicago Portal, which will help to accomplish her lifelong goal of overcoming the erasure that has eclipsed the achievements of so many women. The Flowering is her vivid and revealing autobiography, fully illustrated with photographs of her work, as well as never-before-published personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Chicago has revised and updated her earlier, classic works with previously untold stories, fresh insights, and an extensive afterword covering the last twenty years. This powerful narrative weaves together the stories behind some of Chicago's most significant artworks and her journey as a woman artist with the chronicles of her personal relationships and her understanding, from decades of experience and extensive research, of how misogyny, racism, and other prejudices intersect to erase the legacies of artists who are not white and male while dismissing the suffering of millions of creatures who share the planet. With the first career retrospective of her work forthcoming at the de Young Museum in 2021, Chicago reinforces her message of resilience for a new generation of artists and activists. The Flowering is an essential read for anyone interested in making change."--Publisher's description.

Don't Tell Sybil is a libidinous memoir by a master raconteur. George Melly (1926-2007) was impossible to ignore in London cultural circles between the 1950s and 90s. He first came to attention as a jazz singer, notable for risqué songs performed with verve rather than with great technical ability. An arresting personality, Melly dressed the part: his outrageous suits became a mark, and his talents as a raconteur soon brought him fame as a TV talkshow guest (usually late-night shows, for reasons of propriety). His cheerful bisexuality, recounted throughout his three volumes of autobiography, scandalized and then delighted a public whose own sexual attitudes changed over the decades they describe. Don't Tell Sybil is a supplementary volume of autobiography which treats in more detail Melly's youthful and long-lasting attraction to Surrealism, and his equally lengthy friendship with the contradictory character who headed up the English Surrealist group, E.L.T. Mesens. Their adventures form the core of this book--adventures of which Mesens did not want his wife, Sybil, to learn, hence the book's title. Mesens was a perfect subject, an artist and prankster who could be as punctilious and stingy as the most respectable bourgeois. Anecdotes of the artists who showed at Mesens' gallery, such as Schwitters and Magritte, pepper the narrative, a hugely affectionate memoir by a character who was truly larger than life. This new edition is augmented with previously unpublished photographs relating to Melly and English Surrealism.