From the streets of New York to the walls of its most prominent galleries, young graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was catapulted to international fame in his early 20s and died of a drug-overdose at 27. The subject of a feature film by fellow artist Julian Schnabel, Basquiat is one of the most admired artists to emerge from the 1980s art boom. This book explores his short but prolific career.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) adopted his famous pseudonym after publishing his ideas in the review L'Esprit Nouveau in 1920. The few buildings he was able to design during the 1920s, when he also spent much of his time painting and writing, brought him to the forefront of modern architecture. But it was not until after World War II that his epoch-making buildings were constructed, such as the Unite d'Habitation apartment...

The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of 20th-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting. Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the "Blane Reiter" in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the First...

Egyptian art was a sacred, holy art. This world and the next were inextricably connected. The proximity of human beings and gods affected art, led to a unique style, and a canon of rules that retained its validity from the Old Kingdom to the Late Era.

From rolling meadows to moody skies, how does the beauty, complexity, and dimensions of the world translate to artistic expression? This book examines the evolution and importance of the landscape genre from the late Middle Ages to modern times, selecting some of the most important landscapes in history from practitioners as diverse as Titian, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, and Andy Warhol.

Master Gerlachus - Fra Filippo Lippi - Albrecht Durer - Giorgione - Parmigianino - Michelangelo - Caravaggio - Peter Paul Rubens - Salvator Rosa - Nicolas Poussin - David Bailly - Velazquez - Rembrandt - Van Gough - Edvard Munch - James Ensor - Picasso - Frida Kahlo - Felix Nussbaum - Max Beckmann - Salvador Dali - Lucian Freud - Andy Warhol - Francis Bacon - David Hockney - Albert Oehlen - Jeff Koons - Gerhard Richter. Me, myself, and IIs a self-portrait...