From Azzedine Alaia, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Coco Chanel to Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood, more than a century's worth of fashion greats are celebrated in this new edition of Fashion Designers A-Z.…

On October 1, 1958, the world's first civilian space agency opened for business as an emergency response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik a year earlier. Within a decade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, u…

Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life-he was almost 80 years of age-he develo…

From the moment Star Wars burst onto the screen in 1977, audiences have been in equal parts fascinated and appalled by the half-man/half-machine hybrid Darth Vader. In 1999, creator George Lucas began the story of how Anakin Skywa…

In pursuit of both knowledge and delight, the craft of botanical illustration has always required not only meticulous draftsmanship but also a rigorous scientific understanding. This new edition of a TASCHEN classic celebrates the…

The Wunderkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities," saw collectors gathering objects from many strands of artistic, scientific, and intellectual endeavor, in an ambitious attempt to encompass all of humankind's knowledge in a single ro…

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead pr…

ernando Botero is an artist with his own style. For more than six decades, the Colombian's "Boterismo" technique has captured collectors, institutions, and public spaces worldwide with a unique, fleshy, overblown approach to the h…

Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionary Dada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York launche…

To his contemporaries in late 16th-century Venice, El Greco (1541 -1614) was a contrary fellow, an innate artist blessed with extraordinary talent, but stubborn in the pursuit of his own path. Throughout his career, as he progress…

orn Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings prese…

There are few images of 20th-century architecture more iconic than the nighttime view of Case Study House #22. At its eagle's nest promontory above Los Angeles, the building is a vision of streamlined glass and steel, its slick li…

Famed for his motto "less is more," Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a hotly-debated tastemaker of twentieth-century aesthetics and urban experience. Mies van der Rohe…

A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and leading art theoretician whose influence resonates to this day. Coining the term "Neo-plasticism", he pursued a styl…

Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics-and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the in…

Before reaching the tender age of 30, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) had already sculpted Pieta and David, two of the most famous sculptures in the entire history of art. As a sculptor, painter, draftsman, and architect, the …

Vincent van Gogh's story is one of the most ironic in art history. Today, he is celebrated the world over as one of the most important painters of all time, recognized with sell-out shows, feted museums, and record prices of tens …

Raphael (1483–1520) is considered the most important artist of the Italian High Renaissance alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo. In his short lifetime he created around one hundred paintings and numerous frescoes, including nine f…

A veritable folk hero in Latin America and Mexico’s most important artist―along with his wife, painter Frida Kahlo―Diego Rivera (1886–1957) led a passionate life devoted to art and communism. After spending the 1910s in Europe, wh…

With almost 300 entries, this architectural A to Z offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. Covering modern architecture from the 19th into the 21st century, pioneering architects are ea…

Celebrating the magick of the natural realm, Volume IV of The Library of Esoterica, delves into the symbolism, ceremony, and our ritual relationships with the botanical world. A visual journey through our interdependent evolution …

Superlatives tend to fail in describing Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior―that being said, it stands as one of the most extravagant feats in the history of mapmaking. The original Latin edition, completed in 1665, was the largest and most …

Celebrated around the world as a literary monument, The Divine Comedy, completed in 1321 and written by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), is widely considered the greatest work ever composed in the Italian language. The epic poem descr…

Renzo Piano rose to international prominence with his co-design of the Pompidou Center in Paris, described by The New York Times as a building that “turned the architecture world upside down.” Since then, he has continued to craft…

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect. For years, she was widely acclaimed and won numerous prizes despite building practically nothing. Some even said her work was simply impossible to build. Yet, during the latter years of he…

​The buildings burned in our memories, which to us represent the spirit of ’50s and ’60s architectural design, were those whose pictures were widely published in magazines and books; but what about those that got lost in the proce…

A Small House is a tribute to the endless artistic inventiveness of architects and ingenuity of perception of the familiar and known concepts. It is also a conscious pivot towards sustainability and reduction of impact on the envi…

Building is one of very few endeavours that are physically connected to the surface of the earth, fixed and enduring. Nevertheless, for centuries, especially in the West, we have considered ourselves separate and above nature, dri…

From Snow White to Cinderella, Rapunzel to Rumpelstiltskin, the Brothers Grimm bequeathed a canon of stories which have become literary and childhood classics. The most widely read story collection after the Bible, their magical t…

Richard Smyth had always been drawn to the natural world, but when he became a father he found a new joy and a new urgency in showing his kids the everyday wild things around them. As he and his children explore rockpools in Whitl…