BELLAS ARTES

Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed king of fantasy art for 50 years, his fame only growing in the years since his death. With his paintings now breaking auction records (Egyptian Queen sold for $ 5.4 million in 2019) he’s long overdue for this ultimate monograph.Born to a Sicilian immigrant family in Brooklyn, 1928, Frazetta was a minor league athlete, petty criminal and serial seducer with movie star looks and phenomenal talent. He claimed to only make art when there was nothing better to do – he preferred playing baseball - yet began his professional career in comics at age 16. Strip work led him to the infamous EC Comics, then to oils for Tarzan and Conan pulp covers. Both characters were interpreted by many before him, but as he explained in the 1970s, “I’m very physical minded. In Brooklyn, I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him,” and he used this first-hand knowledge of muscle and macho to redefine fantasy heroes as more massive, more menacing, more testosterone-fueled than anything seen before. As counterbalance he created a new breed of women, nude as censorship allowed, with pixie faces and multiparous bodies: thick thighed, heavy buttocked, breasts cantilevered out to there, yet still, with their soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real. Add in the action, the creatures, the twilit worlds of haunting shadow and Frazetta’s art is addictive as potato chips.

One of the most accomplished human beings who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) remains a quintessential Renaissance genius. The perfect companion to the Leonardo Graphic Work edition, this book is a compact catalogue raisonné of all of the artist’s masterful paintings. Drawn from our best-selling XXL edition, the book traces the artist’s life and work across 10 chapters, presenting all known paintings and drawing on his letters, contracts, diary entries, and writings to explore the man behind such groundbreaking artworks. From Virgin of the Rocks to Virgin and Child with St. Anne to the ever-beguiling Mona Lisa, you’ll find some of the finest treasures of the Louvre, Prado, and National Gallery, London here, as well as Leonardo works lost to time, but no less startling in their precision and poise.

Descubra a los artistas más importantes del mundo, incluidos Frida Kahlo, Leonardo da Vinci y Vincent van Gogh, y las historias de niños reales que los conocieron. La entrañable serie de libros de arte para niños de Laurence Anholt, que ha vendido millones de copias en todo el mundo, recopilada por primera vez en un volumen inspirador.

In 1952, after becoming one of the first-ever recipients of a Master of Science degree in Photography at Chicago’s Institute of Design, native New Yorker Marvin E. Newman returned to his hometown. Like many artists before, he set about chronicling the city. Unlike his predecessors, Newman chose color photography as the preeminent medium for capturing the people and energy of New York, and its emergence in the 1950s as the self-proclaimed “Greatest City in the World.”

The turn of the 20th century was a golden era in France. It was an age of peace, prosperity, and progress after a series of bruising wars and turmoil within the French Republic, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War, which had ended in 1871. From the ruins of conflict, the Belle Époque brought joie de vivre flourish, a boom in art, design, industry, technology, gastronomy, education, travel, entertainment, and nightlife.

Good News follows David LaChapelle’s creative renaissance as he surrenders to contemplations of mortality, moving beyond the material world in a quest for paradise. Featuring a monumental curation of images, it is a sublime and arresting new body of work that attempts to photograph that which can’t be photographed. It represents the final chapter to LaChapelle’s narrative in a collection of books that have captivated a generation of viewers across the globe.