"Artists are expert lookers: they have learned to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his inimitable engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists--from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the...

Welcome to the greatest gallery on Earth. Put yourself in the picture with this incredible visual guide displaying the best artistic works of all time. You're the very special guest with unlimited access to the world's most important art through the ages, from ancient cave paintings to modern-day street art. On your journey through time, you'll see a wealth of valuable art, including Egyptian tomb paintings, Roman frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, and...

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....

Discover the properties of line, another essential element of art, as "descriptive" (describing reality) or "expressional" (conveying feeling). Learn about the use of geometric lines, implied lines, and directional lines within a composition. Also, study the compelling, psychological use of line in Picasso's works, Seurat's "The Circus", and in key Modern and Expressionist works.

Examine geometric and "organic" shapes in painting and sculpture and the crucial relationship of figure to ground and mass to space. Then, explore the illusionistic use of shading, shadows, and overlapping shapes in Caravaggio's and Friedrich's works, and the compositional power of shapes in paintings such as Matisse's "Dance" and Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam".

Across the centuries, self-portraits fascinatingly reveal the changing role of the artist. Follow this progression, from Renaissance painters subtly placing themselves within large compositions, to self-portraiture's emergence as a major form of self-revelation, noting many dramatic and colorful traditions within the form.

Introduces fifty celebrated works of art, including King Tut's sarcophagus and Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans, with historical and interpretive information for each piece.

Unlocking the human stories behind millennia of art, the eminent curator, taking us from ancient Babylon to contemporary Pyongyang, explains art's power to illuminate our lives and reveals how great art resonates powerfully by transcending the boundaries of time.

"Extraordinary reference book of over eighty famous painters, their lives, their loves, and their iconic paintings"--Provided by publisher