TASCHEN

"In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from f..

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"Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat's complex relationship captivated the art world then and now. At a time when Warhol was already world famous and the elder statesman of New York cool, Basquiat was a downtown talent rising rapidly from the graffiti scene. Together, they forged an electrifying pe..

"In the midst of the realist-leaning artistic climate of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance, Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) was more than an anomaly. Bosch's paintings are populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire, fan..

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"""The Tower is also present to the entire world... a universal symbol of Paris... from the Midwest to Australia, there is no journey to France which isn't made, somehow, in the Tower's name."" - Roland Barthes When Gustave Eiffel completed his wrought iron tower on Paris's Champ de Mars f..

"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 tales are stalwarts of early learning and imagination, listed in UNESC..

"From the time The Big Penis Book was published, readers anticipated The Big Book of Pussy. Granted, perhaps not the same readers, but the seed had been planted and the calls and letters began flowing in. Once they had that long-awaited book, some found themselves overwhelmed by the variety and abun..

"How can we pack so much big booty into such a tiny and inexpensive package? Sorry, but it's a trade secret we can't divulge, except to say that shoehorns and spandex were involved. The original Big Butt Book featured a great cross section of delectable rears from the 1950s to the present day. He..

"In 1953 Marlon Brando donned a black leather Perfecto motorcycle jacket, military cap, denim jeans, and engineer boots to portray Johnny, sneering leader of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, in The Wild One. In 1954 Tom of Finland abandoned brown leather in his artwork to create his own wild ones: m..

"Tom's taste for police officers and felons-and for sexual tension between the two-developed late in his career. ""I've never been to prison,"" he told a class at the California Institute of the Arts in 1985, ""but I hear it's a closed world where there are different roles and people behave differen..

"When we think Tom of Finland we first picture muscular, macho young men in military gear. Tom's vision of masculine perfection was formed during his service as an officer during World War II. Though he served in the Finnish air force, it was the German troops, stationed in Finland to help the count..