THIS IS DALI

Intellectual, emotional, restless, dogged, loyal, selfish; Kandinsky was an artist - and a man - of contradictions.
This genre-defying painter didn`t pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts. He was a Russian, yet he spent more than half of his life on the road, and died in self-imposed exile in France. As an artist he is credited with history`s first abstract painting, but it was his theories that had a profound and lasting impact on the way that people understand and value what art can achieve.

Paul Gauguin created some of the most advanced art in a brilliant generation of artists - all of whom struggled against the stifling conformity of the late 19th century's artistic mainstream. He created paintings whose radically simplified lines and colours echoed the unschooled art of the rustic and native cultures he loved. After his famously disastrous stay with Vincent van Gogh in southern France, Gauguin escaped European civilization for the Polynesian islands.
Immersing himself in the culture, he produced a series of radiant canvases and powerful sculptures - his last great works. From his childhood in Peru to his experiences in Tahiti, the story of Gauguin's life is recounted in authoritative text by an expert on the Post-Impressionists and compelling imagery by an award-winning illustrator.

Mercurial, saturnine, scandalous, and unpredictable, Caravaggio—as a man, as a character, and as an artist—holds dramatic appeal.

Francis Bacon was one of the giants dominating the artistic landscape of the mid-twentieth century, AND served as the inspiration AND launching point for much of the figural AND abstract art that came after him. This highly illustrated book features not only 20 of the artist's major works, but in stunning original color illustrations portrays the events of his life AND the circle of friends AND associates with whom he formed a louche, brazen gang that cut open the belly of the old propriety. The major periods of Bacon's life ON the edge, such as his time spent in Berlin, Paris, AND the seedy milieu of post-war London, are portrayed, along with the influential figures, such as Peter Lacey AND George Dyer, who shaped both his personal life AND his art. An original AND highly visual book, This is Bacon forms a fascinating, readable, AND provocatively entertaining introduction to one of the most influential masters of twentieth-century art.

Leonardo da Vinci lived an itinerant life. Throughout his career - from its beginnings in the creative maelstrom of fifteenth-century Florence to his role as genius in residence at the court of the king of France - Leonardo created a kind of private universe for himself and his work. Leonardo also spent a great deal of time away from his easel, pursuing his interest in engineering, natural science, sculpture, poetry, fables, music and anatomy. In the time that another artist would finish a series of paintings, he would work on one. Sometimes a painting would take decades, accompanying him on his travels as he worked on other commissions. Leonardo`s private world was both vibrant and active. It sometimes did and at other times did not interact with the wider world. But what emerged from it has established Leonardo as the definition of the Renaissance Man.

Belgian artist René Magritte's biography is a key element of his art. His life is infused with bizarre moments: a surreal journey oscillating between fact and fiction that he always conducted as the straight-faced bowler-hatted man.