Small Books

This visual gift book introduces readers to the field of Black figuration by highlighting key works from the National Portrait Gallery exhibition The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure. The selections included in this brief introduction...

A window into the world of functional everyday design The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of “super normal design”: alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable...

Derek Jarman's Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love.   “For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.” —Derek Jarman   Originally...

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained...

In a world of infinite images here is a guide to 65 of the best ever taken. From early experiments with light and form through Leica masterpieces and now artificially generated images, take it or leave it, this is our opinion as to why these particular...

For as long as there’s been paint, there have been women painters – these are the painters you may not have heard of who have shaped the way we see. From artists at the forefront of the Dutch Golden Age to avant-garde radicals in Soviet Russia and...

 Explore the dynamic world of 1960s pop art through Lucy Lippard's insightful analysis of this groundbreaking international art movement. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series presents timeless works by...

 What is the purpose of art in a world on fire? Can it be a genuine form of political resistance? What is the purpose of art in a world on fire? In this exhilarating and deeply inspiring work, Amber Massie-Blomfield considers the work of artists,...

 Improve your skills and techniques for drawing mammals! This small, portable book presents more than 500 drawings for 100 species of mammals, collected into categories of habitat—land, water, and air. In this book, artist and teacher Michel...

Take a Seat An overview of exemplary chairs More than any other piece of furniture, the chair has been subjected to the wildest dreams of the designer. The particular curve of a backrest, or the twist of a leg, the angle of a seat or the color of the...

For Papier Tigre “the Earth is blue like an orange” (Paul Eluard). The relationship between shapes and colors provides an opportunity for the clever mingling of the figurative and the abstract. Sometimes unexpected colors come to life and displace a too...

Reissued to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, this book explores one of the most important art schools of the last hundred years. The Bauhaus, a school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919, informed the aesthetic...

An extraordinary synthesis of more than a century’s worth of art across Central and South America, Latin American Art Since 1900 covers everyone from popular figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, to a wide range of other artists who are less...

A new edition of the groundbreaking book by Whitney Chadwick maps the complete history of women artists from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to today. Art historian Whitney Chadwick’s acclaimed bestselling study challenges the assumption that great...

 An overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that responds to today’s environmental crisis, from species extinction to climate change. Art and Climate Change collects a wide range of artistic responses to our current ecological emergency...

As Art Director for Muji since 2002, Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara (born 1958) and his aesthetic of pared-back, beautifully functional objects have taken the world by (quiet) storm. With Kenya Hara: Designing Japan, the designer presents his...

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to...

“I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don’t invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made—but to be untangled—in the real world.” —Vincent van Gogh to Émile...

A beautiful and delightfully handy art book that is designed to inspire, this collection of 150 beautifully reproduced Vincent Van Gogh images makes a stylish gift. His writings have been edited and selected to create an enlightening, uplifting, and...

This indispensable introductory guide explores the art of the African continent from its early origins over 75,000 years ago to the contemporary, set in the context of postcolonial debates, the restitution of cultural objects and artifacts, and the...

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism...

The twentieth volume in the renowned ekphrasis series, this collection of Virginia Woolf’s writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.   Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the...

Discover 300 pages of color inspiration with 450 as rich as they are surprising, combinations inspired by 150 destinations. Reflecting the diversity and beauty of our animal world. This book is a great combination to the volume 1, still with CMYK and...

'Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.' Vincent van Gogh saw nature and art as inseparably linked. In The Healing Power...

A Japanese designer offers a compelling alternative way to engage with our possessions, our history, our environment, and each other. The Japanese phrase "hodo-hodo" originates in ancient times. When contemporary designer Taku Satoh applies it to his...

This delightful little book pays homage to the cat through artfully curated Japanese poetry and prints. No one captures the graces and idiosyncrasies of cats quite like the painters, printmakers, and haiku masters of Japan. From the Edo to the Showa...

A revised edition of the classic little book, which has over 500,000  copies in print. New material and illustrations make the book even more  accessible to readers who are interested in mindfulness, in seizing the moment, in staying steady in...

Street art is a phenomenon and subculture movement that reaches from the darkest urban backstreets to the most glamorous international art  fairs. Despite having earned a place in the canon of twentieth-century  art history, its qualifications...

One of our customer favorites, Drawn from Life is finally back in print! This ideally shaped and sized book offers bite-size lessons that will help anyone master the classic practice of life drawing. Over 100 pieces of art by contemporary artists...

Arranged alphabetically, this biographical encyclopedia features  every major photographer of the 20th century alongside her or his most  significant monographs.  From the earliest representatives of  classical Modernism right up to...