This Is...Series

This series offers readers an engaging journey into the lives and works of iconic figures across art, design, and culture. Each volume demystifies the personalities who shaped our world, exploring their enduring impact on modern times. Through richly illustrated pages and insightful narratives, you'll delve into the fascinating realms of creators whose ideas often challenged conventions. It's an essential collection for anyone curious about how singular visions transform collective perception.

Recommended Reading Order

1
This is Dalí
Catherine Ingram
4.1(427)Add rating
Salvador Dalí is one of the most popular artists in the world, known for his lavish lifestyle, gravity-defying moustache, and bizarre art. This book tells the story of Dalí's life and explores the meaning of his Surrealist paintings. It goes beyond his fine art practice and discusses his venture into the commercial world from his extravagant jewelry to his cheeky design for the Chupa Chups lollipops. Surrealism is revealed as a way of life; illustrations bring to life the extraordinary Dream Ball at the Coq Rouge, his fabulous home at Port Lligat, and his underwater fantasy at the World Fair's Surrealist pavilion. Fun, provoking, and endlessly frustrating, Dalí is brought under the spotlight.Catherine Ingram brings her specialized knowledge to the book, while Andrew Rae, an award-winning illustrator, vividly portrays the text.This title is not appropriate for ages under 18.
2
This is Pollock
Catherine Ingram
3.9(119)Add rating
1956 bezeichnete das Time Magazine Pollock als Jack the Dripper. Seine Maltechnik wurde zum Exempel dafür, wie ein individueller Stil als politische Waffe eingesetzt und Amerika als demokratische Nation repräsentiert wurde.Pollock selbst sagte, dass er aus seinem Bewusstsein heraus gemalt habe: Die tröpfelnde Farbe spiegelte seinen beunruhigten Verstand wider. Dieses Buch spürt Pollocks Karriere und der Bedeutung sein Werke nach.
3
This is Warhol
Catherine Ingram
4.0(346)Add rating
Andy Warhol, the iconic Pop artist, presented himself as the vacuous, dumb kid, famously saying, 'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintingsand there I am. This book penetrates the surface and explores Warhols art from his beginnings as a commercial artist to his apotheosis as a society portrait painter.
4
This is Gauguin
George Roddam
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.1(55)Add rating
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.
5
This is Bacon
Kitty Hauser
80 pages
3 hours of reading
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 title portrays the events of his life and the circle of friends and associates with whom he formed a louche.
6
This is Van Gogh
George Roddam
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.4(367)Add rating
Vincent van Gogh used art to express his intensely emotional response to the world around him. Enraptured by the beauty of nature and tormented by the sorrows of human existence, he produced in his tragically short life some of the most powerfully expressive paintings ever seen. Many have made the mistake of thinking him mad, and he did suffer throughout his life periods of mental anguish. But Van Gogh's paintings are not the works of a madman. Van Gogh famously sold only one painting during his life, but within a few years of his death he was recognized as one of the greatest modern painters

This is Magritte
Patricia Allmer
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.0(131)Add rating
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. The events of Magritte's childhood played an important part in creating the surrealist, but it was his popular culture borrowings from crime fiction, advertising and postcards that has made his work instantly recognisable. The often unreliable nature of Magritte's accounts of his own life have transformed his public image into a kind of fictional character rather than a 'real person'. He would shape his own life story to be its own surreal work of art. This Is Frank Lloyd Wright brings his projects and persona into vivid focus. Wit and visual punch have been the hallmarks of the This Is series to date; the first architectural title in the series will give readers an up-close look at Wright's progress from difficult childhood, to struggling apprenticeship, to early success, through mid-life setbacks and on to late-life comeback. Beautiful specially commissioned illustrations documenting the important events in his life sit alongside photographs of Wright's most iconic buildings (including Fallingwater and New York's Guggenheim Museum).
This Is Kandinsky
Annabel Howard
80 pages
3 hours of reading
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. Richly illustrated with specially commissioned artworks and 20 of Kandinsky's major works, This is Kandinsky forms the perfect introduction to the life of this revolutionary figure in twentieth-century art. This title is appropriate for ages 14 and up
This is Goya
Wendy Bird
80 pages
3 hours of reading
3.9(10)Add rating
Moderne Kunst beginnt mit Goya. Er war der erste, der Kunstwerke um ihrer selbst willen schuf. In einer Zeit kultureller und sozialer Dynamik, als die alten Gesellschaftskonzepte durch Revolutionen und technischen Fortschritt erschüttert wurden, brachte Goya seine Bilder der Menschheit auf die Leinwand. Seine jugendliche Bilder von fröhlichen Bauern verwandelten sich in eindringliche Studien von menschlichem Leid, Verzweiflung und Erlösung.
This is Monet
Sara Pappworth
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.5(141)Add rating
Claude Monet is best known as a leader of the Impressionists, his paintings defining the style that triggered a revolution in art. During the eighty-six years of his life, Monet never rested, and was always driven by the urge to paint. This book tells about Monet's work.
This is Cézanne
Jorella Andrews
80 pages
3 hours of reading
3.9(55)Add rating
Paul Cézanne stellte die Konvention in Frage und leistete Pionierarbeit für die moderne Malerei. Er hat Landschaften und Alltagsleben in einer Weise gemalt, die den Formen eine eigene Autonomie gegeben hat. Dieses Buch begleitet Cézanne auf seiner künstlerischen Reise und konzentriert sich auf seine prägenden Entdeckungen, die er abseits der modischen Metropole Paris in der Provinz und im ländlichen Frankreich gemacht hat.
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This is Leonardo da Vinci
Joost Keizer
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.2(85)Add rating
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.
This is Rembrandt
Jorella Andrews
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.3(57)Add rating
Rembrandt van Rijn is probably the most famous Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. His works are greatly loved today, but he was not always so well regarded. His life was one of a dramatic rise and fall, unfolding during the Golden Age of the newly formed Dutch Republic. Rembrandt's public acclaim and wealth as a painter came to him as a very young man. His images were vigorous, psychologically compelling but also often less-than-flattering. By his middle age taste had shifted to more idealized visions, and by the time of his death in 1669 Rembrandt was destitute. But whether the public was with or against him, Rembrandt continued to paint with the same passion, and arguably the art he produced in his final, destitute years is his most intimate, sensitive and open
This is Matisse
Catherine Ingram
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.1(96)Add rating
Ursprünglich klassisch ausgebildet, ließ er sich von den Impressionisten und Cézanne inspirieren und schuf einen Stil, der die Schönheit von Farbe, Form und Linie hervorhebt, indem er sie auf das Wesentliche reduziert. Obwohl er als Führer der Fauves und Inspirationsquelle für die meisten Vertreter der Moderne angesehen wurde, weigerte er sich selbst, mit einer Schule in Verbindung gebracht zu werden und galt immer als enfant terrible.
This is Caravaggio
Annabel Howard
80 pages
3 hours of reading
4.5(88)Add rating
Mercurial, saturnine, scandalous, and unpredictable, Caravaggio—as a man, as a character, and as an artist—holds dramatic appeal. He spent a large part of his life on the run, leaving a trail of illuminated chaos wherever he passed, most of it recorded in criminal justice records. When he did settle for long enough to paint, he produced works of staggering creativity and technical innovation. He was famous throughout Italy for his fulminating temper, but also for his radical and sensitive humanization of biblical stories, and in particular his decision to include the brutal and dirty life of the street in his paintings. Caravaggio was a rebel and a violent man, but he eyed the world with deep empathy, realism, and an unrelenting honesty.