Bulgari is a lavishly illustrated exploration of Italy's greatest jeweller. New photography and archival pictures trace the development of the Bulgari style, a distinctive look that has captivated royalty, movie stars and others for more than a century. This elegant volume will delight anyone in the fields of fashion and jewellery design as well as the many enthusiastic collectors of Bulgari jewels.

This sumptuously illustrated book surveys the exquisite range of costume jewelry produced by haute couture fashion houses, an often neglected subject. 'Costume Jewelry for Haute Couture' is for anyone with an interest in this most creative and accessible decorative art. It showcases the extraordinary diversity and exceptional craftsmanship of the jewelry in hundreds of beautifully reproduced pieces from such fashion houses as Chanel, Courrèges, Yves St Laurent and Lanvin. The story begins in antiquity, but the main focus is on costume jewelry’s heyday, which ran from the 1920s to the 1990s. The main stages in its development are placed in historical, social and cultural contexts, and in terms of their format and styles.The book also focuses on jewelry making and the partnerships between great couturiers, costume jewelers and craftsmen. The spectacular photographs include hundreds specially taken for this volume, as well as many original photographs of the jewelry being worn.

A beautiful, elegiac collection of sixty polaroid photographs by the late, great Soviet film director, Andrei Tarkovsky Composed of sixty luminous polaroids taken by Andrey Tarkovsky in Russia and Italy between 1979 and 1984, this beautifully produced series of cameos from the director’s life reveals him to be a master of the still as much as of the moving image. The photos in the first section, taken in Russia, have the radiant melancholy of lengthening shadows and trees looming through misty dawns near Tarkovsky’s country dacha, together with portraits of his wife, son and dog, loaded with nostalgia by quotations from his later diaries. Those taken in Italy portray exquisite still lifes and glimmering ruins. The book concludes with photographs from Tarkovsky’s personal collection. Tarkovsky is here revealed as realizing the utmost potential of a fleeting, disposable medium: his images seem to capture eternity in a moment.

'The Jeweled Garden' traces the inspiration and evolution of two centuries of garden-inspired jewelry. The great 19th-century French jewelers, Boucheron, Chaumet, and later Lalique, excelled in adapting flowers, trees, and fruits into wonderfully imaginative – and highly collectible – bracelets, brooches and necklaces. The legendary 20th-century firms Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari and Belperron also created memorable jewels emulating nature, as did American jewelers such as Seaman Schepps, Oscar Heyman & Brothers, David Webb and Verdura. Their ingenuity has in turn inspired the designs of our own time, including Mughal-influenced pieces by Joel Arthur Rosenthal, Stefan Hemmerle’s playful ferns and mushrooms, and Jacqueline Karachi-Langane’s cascading orchid necklace for Cartier. The 375 stunning illustrations make this a collector's piece in itself.

«Pierre Cardin, the inventor of «prêt-à-porter» whose graphically iconic initials personify his signature style, is best known for fashion and accessory design. However, he launched a unique furniture line during the 1970s that transposed his sculptural approach to fashion into furniture design: futuristic forms combined with traditional lacquer and cabinetmaking techniques and revolutionary space-age designs featured metal and plastics. Artistic director and catalyst, he challenged artists such as Serge Manzon, Christian Adam, Maria Pergay, Giacomo Passera, Prevost, and Pacos to renew contemporary French furniture design. Archival documents and newl commissioned photography include rare designs produced in his Paris workshops or by Japanese firm Yamada Shomei, such as his Space line that is the avant-garde symbol of this emperor of 1970s style. Cardin actively participated in this timely publication aimed at the burgeoning market for 1970s design.»

Here is an amazing journey through the world of toys and the children’s rooms that were their homes, from the late 19th century to the present day. More than seven hundred toys from the superb collection at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, are brought to life in a series of fabulous and fantastical scenes, strikingly staged to produce a toy’s-eye view of more than a century of fun and games. Dolls and teddies, trains and planes, robots and animals, favourite characters ranging from Donald Duck and Barbie to Luke Skywalker and the Ninja Turtles – all of these and more run riot through a land that seems both strange and familiar, comforting and unsettling, and absolutely evocative of the pleasures and pains of the playroom. The book is led by the gaze of Alberto Manguel, whose text explores what toys mean to both children and adults – how toys can tell us who we are and allow us to imagine what we may become. Manguel’s words and the extraordinary images come together to form a dazzling recreation of the dreamlike world of childhood, the serious business of pretending – and the magic of make-believe.

This expanded and updated edition of John Peacock’s unrivalled collection of drawings ranges over eleven centuries of English historical costume. More than a thousand illustrations, based on surviving garments and contemporary paintings and photographs, demonstrate the astonishing changes in men’s and women’s clothing over the centuries – from the simple tunics and gowns of the eleventh century to the petticoat breeches and ostrich-plumed hats of Charles II’s reign to the T-shirts and shorts of today. Clear and detailed drawings, plus notes that pinpoint specific features such as fabric, decoration, accessories and cut, make each costume immediately comprehensible. Completely up to date, and with a new chart showing the main changes in fashion through the centuries, this is an essential reference for students of theatrical design and fashion, drama groups and anyone interested in the history of costume.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940. After two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943. During this time, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, assuming that the photographer had died in the war, started preparing what they thought was a posthumous exhibition of his work. When he reappeared, Cartier-Bresson was delighted to learn of the exhibition, and decided to review his entire work and curate it himself. In 1946 he travelled to New York with about 300 prints in his suitcase, bought a scrapbook, glued each one in, and brought that album to MoMA’s curators. His first exhibition, a celebration of his survival, opened on 4 February 1947. In the 1990s, Cartier-Bresson once again returned to this scrapbook. Following his death in 2004, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the present owner of the prints, finished restoring them, making it possible to bring a large body of extraordinary, hitherto unpublished work to the public, images that have finally become a memorial collection after all.

«COATS! Max Mara will delight thousands of women who secretly slip on «my Max Mara» just for pleasure-and millions more who still wish they had gone ahead and bought that unforgettable coat. The publication of this book coincides with a traveling exhibition that includes more than 50 classic coats from the company archives, accompanied by numerous images and sketches showing their design development. The illustrations are highlighted by special interpretations of the iconic model #101801 Max Mara camel-hair coat by photographers such as William Wegman and Miwa Yanagi-plus sketches by Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Charles de Castelbajac, Luciano Soprani, Guy Paulin, and Anne-Marie Beretta, and classic fashion photography by Sarah Moon, Manfredi Bellati, Peter Lindbergh, Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, and many others. Essays and critical texts on the history of the company and its influence on fashion design give a broad view of Italian fashion, past and future.»

Beautifully illustrated and well documented with detailed technical entries, this volume surveys the production of Italian ceramic art through 500 objects. The essays examine the stylistic trends from the brilliant floral decorativism of the Tuscan ceramics by Galileo Chini, the extraordinary period of the 1920s and 1930s, as represented by Gio Ponti, Guido Andloviz, Giovanni Gariboldi, Pietro Meandri and Francesco Nonni, and the contamination by contemporary painting and sculpture, from the Futurists up to the first Informal pieces at the end of the second World War through the early works of Fontana, Leoncillo and Melotti. The book is filled with valuable information including biographical profiles of the artists, detailed descriptions of the manufacturers, a cataloguing of their back stamps, an up-to-date bibliography, and a technical glossary.Comprehensive and engrossing, the book is essential reading for collectors, antique experts, art scholars, students and anyone interested in ceramics.

Susan Herbert’s innovative, witty and hugely popular renderings of cats in human situations, from Shakespearean drama to masterpieces of Western art, have won her a large and admiring public. Now she draws on her lifelong fascination with cinema to give us a series of scenes from classic films – all with cats playing the leading roles. Here is an irresistible array of well-known characters, from the silent films of the 1920s through big-budget musicals and the lure of the Wild West to contemporary hit films. Here are flirting, dancing, detecting and menacing cats: a beguiling flower seller in Covent Garden, a seductive older woman and a young graduate, a hard-boiled private eye with a falcon.... Susan Herbert studied at the Ruskin School of Art. Having worked for the English National Opera and the Theatre Royal, she now specializes in limited edition prints of theatrical animals and exhibits frequently.

From the immaculate manicure of a geisha in Kyoto and the elegant dexterity of Balinese dancers’ hands, to a Havana street photographer’s stubby fingers and the ragged stumps of an Australian crocodile farmer, this eloquent book celebrates an often ignored area of communication – hands. The renowned photographer Basil Pao, who has accompanied Michael Palin on his journeys from Pole to Pole, around the Pacific Rim, across the Sahara and through the Himalayas, presents a collection of his photographs taken en route, all of which focus on hands. Captions accompany each image detailing the owners’ homes and lives. • Extensive captions accompany the photographs, giving details of the lives and homes of the people to whom the hands belong Basil Pao is a Hong Kong-based photographer, who took the images in all of Michael Palin’s recent books, including Pole to Pole, Full Circle with Michael Palin, Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, Sahara and Himalaya.

The originality of Turner’s technique alone puts him high in the canon of great artists, but his subject-matter gains additional interest with an understanding of his enormous appetite for travel. In this book, over 150 of his works of every type are lavishly displayed and superbly reproduced. For over forty years, from the 1790s to his old age in the 1840s, he made regular tours in Britain and on the Continent, chiefly in France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, with repeated visits to Venice in his later years. Using Turner’s own writings, letters, notes and verse; recorded impressions by his contemporaries; and reviews of his exhibited works, Andrew Wilton builds up a picture of a man of many secrets. A comprehensive chronology, illustrated with portraits of Turner and his associates and views of places with which he was connected, sets out his travels, exhibitions and projects. Light is shed on the private man by a list of the books in his library and even an inventory of the contents of his London house. Here is a book of the widest appeal, on an artist who, two centuries after he came to prominence, is finding new converts wherever his work is shown. Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at the Tate, London, where he is continuing to catalogue the Turner Bequest. He is the author of many works on the artist, including the standard catalogue of the watercolours.

«I have drawn all my life. I began withdrawing: I have never stopped drawing.»—Auguste Rodin From the «black» drawings contemporaneous with the Gates of Hell to his great watercolor nudes, this book reproduces hundreds of Auguste Rodin's most beautiful graphic works held in the collection of the Musée Rodin, a number of which are published here for the first time. The accompanying essays analyze the complex relationships between Rodin's drawings and his sculptures, the problems of attribution, and the role of sensuality in his work. Rodin's rich graphic oeuvre has until now been a little-known aspect of his art, yet it is crucial to a full understanding of his work. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the great sculptor's achievements.»

Wallpaper is back, but this time it is different. No longer used to cover cracks and imperfections in crumbling plasterwork, wall coverings are now a means of expressing individuality. Graphic designers and illustrators are playing with scale and using walls as their canvases, while fashion and textile designers are transferring their fabric prints to paper. This book is a showcase of fresh and innovative wallpaper designs from fifty artists, including graphic and fashion designers, illustrators, and established wallpaper designers. Using color photographs and original design material accompanied by exclusive interviews, this book illustrates the wide spectrum of approaches to wallpaper with designs produced for the home and commercial spaces.

Newly available in paperback, this collection of work by Henri Cartier-Bresson is the ultimate retrospective look at a lifetime's achievement. It is full of classic photographs that have become icons of the medium, as well as rarely seen work from all periods of Cartier-Bresson's life, including a significant number of previously unpublished photographs and a generous selection of drawings, paintings and film stills. The book also features personal souvenirs from Cartier-Bresson's youth, his family and the founding of Magnum.

The second volume of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia contains completely new drawings, text and photographs from Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev. During his fifty years working as a prison guard in St Petersburg's notorious Kresty Prison, Baldaev diligently recorded over 3,000 criminal tattoos, documenting their meanings within this closed society. This volume further explores the extremes of this incredible collection.

Whether photographing avant-garde theatre, gypsies on the steppes of Eastern Europe, resistance to Soviet guns and tanks advancing on Prague, or the environmental degradation of a crumbled empire, Josef Koudelka has consistently produced images that provoke a connection to the larger questions of human existence. This book is the first to unite all his most eloquent images, and is the ultimate volume on this key figure in 20th-century photography.

Hailed by Frank Whitford, art critic for The Sunday Times, as the best book about this fascinating artist that I've ever read, this scholarly and thought provoking book, available again after some time out of print, casts a remarkable light on Caspar David Friedrich, the leading German Romantic artist of the 19th century.