From October to December 1888 a pair of artists lived under one roof in the French provincial town of Arles. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh ate, drank, talked, argued, slept and painted in one of the most intense and astonishing creative outpourings in history.
A collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a different and iconic Penguin book jacket. From classics to crime, it contains over seventy years of quintessentially British design in one box.
'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.' Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival.
Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive "potato-coloured" czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where "you either died or came out famous". Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Drawing on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement began in 1848, and experienced its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Influenced by the then little-known Keats and Blake, as well as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, Pre-Raphaelite poetry 'etherialized sensation' (in the words of Antony Harrison), and popularized the notion ofl'art pour l'art - art for art's sake. Where Victorian realist novels explored the grit and grime of the Industrial Revolution, Pre-Raphaelite poems concentrated on more abstract themes of romantic love, artistic inspiration and sexuality. Later they attracted Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.
