Biography & Autobiography : Artists, Architects, Photographers

Decades of war and revolution in Europe forced an "intellectual migration" during the last century, relocating thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States. For many of Europe's premier performing artists, America proved to be a destination both strange and opportune. Featuring the stories of George Balanchine, Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and many others, Artists in Exile explores the impact that these famous newcomers had on Ameri more...

Price: $13.99

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. more...

Price: $40.00

Nicholas Fox Weber, author of the acclaimed Patron Saints (“Exhilarating avant-garde entertainment”—Sam Hunter, The New York Times Book Review ) and Balthus (“The authoritative account of his life and work”—Michael Ravitch, Newsday ), gives us now the idiosyncratic lives of Sterling and Stephen Clark—two of America’s greatest art collectors, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and for decades enemies of each other. more...

Price: $35.00

Throughout his childhood, Mike O’Connor’s family pretended to be normal. But Mike and his two younger sisters knew that their parents were hiding something–a secret they didn’t dare talk about. The family appeared to be no different from any of their small-town Texas neighbors–that is, until suddenly, the O’Connor’s would flee, leaving with only a few hours’ notice, abandoning houses and pets and possessions and running across the border to Mexico. more...

Price: $24.95

Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years ( Wanderlust ), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America ( River of Shadows ), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery. BACKCOVER: “A meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost”. — The New Yorker. “This indispensable California writer’s most personal book yet.”. — San Francisco Chronicle. “An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism . . . a book to set you wandering down strangely fruitful trails of thought.”. — Los Angeles Times more...

Price: $15.00