The Kisokaido route through Japan was ordained in the early 1600s by the country’s then-ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu, who decreed that staging posts be installed along the length of the arduous pass...
A unique tribute from David Bowie’s official photographer and creative partner, Mick Rock, compiled in 2015, with Bowie’s blessing.In 1972, David Bowie released his groundbr...
Simon “Woody” Wood, founder and editor-in-chief of Sneaker Freaker magazine, has spent the last two decades analyzing the global cult of footwear fanatics. That experience directly insp...
Calling All EC Fan-Addicts!A history of the world’s most notorious comicsIn 1947, Bill Gaines inherited EC Comics, a new venture founded by his legendary father M. C. Gaines...
The sky’s the limit with 50 ingenious tree houses around the worldThe idea of climbing a tree for shelter, or just to see the earth from another perspective, is as old as humanity. In t...
When traditional craft met blossoming ModernismPoets and intellectuals brushed shoulders in bustling coffeehouses, young avant-gardists heralded a new era in social and sexual liberalism, wal...
Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a fighting spirit. Despite a cancer diagnosis in 1941, increasing frailty, and the confines of a wheelchair, the indomitable Frenchman never stopped in his quest...
Architectural remnants of the USSRElected the architectural book of the year by the International Artbook and Film Festival in Perpignan, France, Frédéric Chaubin’s Cosmic...
Botanical masterworks from the National Library of ViennaIn pursuit of both knowledge and delight, the craft of botanical illustration has always required not only meticulous draftsmanship bu...
When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artist’s Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in ...
With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ...
The world’s greatest magicians from the Middle Ages to the 1950sMagic has enchanted humankind for millennia, evoking terror, laughter, shock, and amazement. Once persecuted as heretics ...
A visual journey through Vienna’s dazzling historyVienna combines drama and elegance like no other. For centuries the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the stately city on the Danub...
A personal portrait of Paul McCartney by Harry BensonHarry Benson began photographing Paul McCartney in 1964, when the Beatles took America by storm, toured the world, and made their movie de...
A catalogue raisonné of “the painter’s painter”Manet called him “the greatest painter of all.” Picasso was so inspired by his masterpiece Las Meninas that...
One of the greatest pioneers in the history of architectureAcclaimed as the “father of skyscrapers,” the quintessentially American icon Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) was an...
The roaring twenties in BerlinIt was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret,...
Wolfgang Tillmans compiles 30 years of his workto draw a picture of where we are todayLike hardly any other artist of his generation, Wolfgang Tillmans has shaped our perception of the ...
A world of music, dance, and the Moulin RougeIn our imaginings of Paris, painter and graphic artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) has no small role to play. In his prints, poste...
Lyrical forms from FinlandAlvar Aalto (1898–1976) made a unique modernist mark. Influenced by both the landscape and the political independence of his native Finland, he designed warm, ...