Life's a Beach Parr Martin Thames&Hudson

A new translation of Giorgio Vasari's Life of Raphael, fully illustrated, that presents Vasari's appealing narrative with new precision • Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, written in 1550 and 1568, is a classic text of cultural history. This monumental assembly of artists' lives from Giotto to Michelangelo paints a vivid picture of the progression of art in the hands of individual masters • This illustrated stand-alone edition of Vasari's Life of Raphael offers a new translation of this rich and remarkable life, elegantly rendering Vasari's literary text in modern terms. A work of authoritative skill and precision, this new translation preserves Vasari's exciting narrative, alongside beautifully reproduced color illustrations

A major publication on Hokusai's remarkable late work, incorporating fresh scholarship on the sublime paintings and prints the artist created in the last thirty years of his life • An acknowledged master during his lifetime, Hokusai created sublime works during the last thirty years of his life, right up to his death at the age of ninety. Exhibitions since the 1980s have presented his long career as a chronological sequence. This publication, which will coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum, takes a fresh approach based on innovative scholarship: thematic groupings of late works are related to the major spiritual and artistic quests of Hokusai's life • Hokusai's personal beliefs are contemplated here through analyses of major brush paintings, drawings, woodblock prints, and illustrated books

This book traces the extraordinary life of an artist whose unforgettable imagery combined cruelty and wit, honesty and insolence, pain and empowerment • Admired by the Surrealists and photographed by the greatest, Frida was most renowned for her self-portraits and unusual still lifes. She learned about suffering at an early age. She contracted polio when she was six and was seriously maimed in a bus accident at the age of eighteen, which led to injuries that affected her for the rest of her life. She had a legendarily turbulent marriage to the great mural painter Diego Rivera, with whom she formed a strong attachment to indigenous Mexican folk art and a deep commitment to Communism

This full-career retrospective on the work of photographer Vivian Maier brings together a selection of key works from throughout her life and career • When Vivian Maier's archive was discovered in Chicago in 2007, the photography community gained an immense and singular talent. Little- known during her lifetime, Maier is now recognized as one of the great American photographers of the twentieth century. Born in New York in 1926 to an Austro-Hungarian father and French mother, she lived in France several times in her youth and worked as a governess in New York and Chicago for much of her adult life. It was during her years as a governess that she took many of the photographs that have made her posthumously famous. Now the subject of films and books, Maier lived in relative obscurity until her death in 2009

Karl Lagerfeld is a modern master of couture. He is also famously outspoken: his wise, surprising statements pop up like offbeat news flashes. This collection of quotations pays homage to the legendary eminence grise of the fashion world. Lagerfeld's pronouncements - on fashion, women, art, politics, love, and life high and low - are famously oracular, seized upon by fashionistas, acolytes and sages around the world. Created with the full approval of the designer himself, this cornucopia of Lagerfeld's maxims is required reading for us all today as we negotiate the trickiest curves of modern life. Cultivated, unpredictable, provocative, sometimes shocking, Lagerfeld's "bons mots" are always impossible to ignore

This beautifully illustrated book brings to life the greatest treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun. Fifty of the most important objects on display today are each accompanied by a short, accessible text giving the reader just enough information to understand their relevance and importance while retaining a sense of wonder at these ancient artefacts • Each carefully selected object is presented with a full-page colour image and a facing text explaining what the object is, where it was found and why it was buried with the young Pharaoh. There are quotes throughout the text from Howard Carter on his discovery of the tomb in 1922. An introduction by the esteemed Egyptologist Garry Shaw gives a brief overview of the history of ancient Egypt and sets out what we know about the life and times of the young king

The extraordinary life story of Song Huai-Kuei, better known as Madame Song, follows the arc of 20th-century history. Artist, entrepreneur and impresario, Song broke cultural barriers for love, transcended Cold War borders for her art, and laid the foundations for a global fashion industry. With her cosmopolitan outlook, she defined an influential vision for Chinese culture on the world stage and asserted an Asian perspective in 21st-century art and design. Madame Song is a name that everyone interested in the roots of contemporary visual culture needs to know • At the heart of this volume is a critical biography that explores Song's youth in revolutionary China, her cross-cultural marriage to Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov, her success within avant-garde circles in Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War, and finally her efforts within China to revive traditional aesthetics in tandem with the explosive rise of global couture

Neutral hues, an ill-fitting man's suit and wiggling locks of cut hair supplant Frida Kahlo's (1907-54) usual lively color palette, indigenous Mexican dress and long plaits in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940). Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlo's. In the wake of a divorce from artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo turns to her favorite genre, self-portraiture, to express her deepest emotional and psychological urges. Inscribed with the lyrics of a popular song that translate as "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that you're without it I no longer love you", the work oscillates between evocations of a popular culture shared by many and unflinching forays into the private sphere. Curator Jodi Roberts essay, too, moves between the public and the private as it situates Kahlo's painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution's legacy, the Surrealist tradition and the artist's own life to explore the ways in which Kahlo constructed and reconstructed her own identity

Recent advances in technologies and home-generated renewable energy have made building away from urban and rural infrastructures more practical and affordable than ever. This survey of the world's most innovative off-grid homes reveals the cuttingedge architecture and technology that is enabling us to escape to some of the most extraordinary natural environments on the planet • All of the houses featured in this book are fully, or almost fully, self-sufficient in terms of energy, water and, in some cases, food. Architecture and interior design expert Dominic Bradbury reveals how each architect has made everyday living in these wild and natural settings a rewarding and tempting reality. From snowbound cabins in the far Northern Hemisphere to coastal retreats that can only be accessed by boat, the diverse projects collected here show the innovative ways in which architects and their clients are tackling extreme climates, remoteness and construction challenges to enable a new way of life that is both liberating and sustainable

As feminism gained momentum in 1970s America, three photographers Abigail Heyman, Eve Arnold and Susan Meiselas published massively influential photobooks informed by the movement. The first, Heyman's Growing Up Female (1974), is a kind of feminist diary: the photographer casts a lucid eye at her own life and questions the imprisonment of women in stereotype roles. The second, Eve Arnold's "The Unretouched Woman" (1976), shows unknown women and celebrities in spontaneous everyday moments. The photos were deliberately not retouched or staged and offer a nuanced vision of women far from the glamor of glossy magazines. The third, Susan Meiselas Carnival Strippers (also 1976), is the fruit of three years of investigation into fairground striptease sideshows in the Northeastern United States

One Saturday evening, sisters Pip and Maisie are sitting in the warm snug of their grandparent's cottage on the edge of a forest in Scotland. Maisie is restless and longs for adventure, but life at the cottage is always slow. When a bright light suddenly falls from the sky into the forest next door, Maisie can't believe her luck - finally an adventure has come her way! She has boots on and torch in hand before Pip has even put down her hot chocolate • Maisie is desperate to discover the special something as quickly as she can. As the two sisters journey through the dark forest towards the gradually receding light, her imagination runs riot - perhaps it's space treasure, gold dust, or maybe even a creature from outer space! Pip, meanwhile, takes in the dark shapes and strange sounds around her, tentatively adjusting to the forest and its wild inhabitants

This sweeping overview of Rembrandt's extraordinary achievement as a draughtsman fills a gap in the otherwise enormous literature on the artist. Beautifully illustrated, mostly in colour, the more than 150 drawings - culled from a corpus of some 800 - are discussed in detail. The drawings span Rembrandt's entire productive life as an artist, from early self-portraits in the 1620s to late drawings from the 1660s of the victim of an execution, a state coach, and historical and mythological images. The scope of the book allows readers to delve into the very broad range of Rembrandt's oeuvre of drawings