Paris is the City of Light in all its facets. In the 1920s La Ville des Lumières gleams especially bright and becomes a magnet for creative people from around the world. This is the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealism, café culture and cabaret. The most famous artists of the epoch, later called Classic Modernism, are in close contact and have lively exchanges with one another - including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, René Clair, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Man Ray, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. The creative life and all its excesses flourish - bohème is the word for this way of living. Composers like Igor Stravinsky, writers like James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway and exiles from Eastern Europe like Constantin Brancu?i or Marc Chagall enrich the illustrious scene on Montparnasse. The pulsing bars and dance halls of Montmartre are captured by photographers André Kertesz and Brassaï. The French economy is booming and luxury department stores like La Samaritaine open their doors. Coco Chanel creates her own perfume and designs the little black dress. More than 30 outstanding works of architecture, painting, sculpture, film, photography, design and fashion are presented, including Giacometti's Surrealist Suspended Ball and the film Un chien andalou by Dalí and Buñuel. Colour images like Tamara de Lempicka's Self Portrait in the Green Bugatti and Paul Colin's Josephine Baker in a Banana Skirt and many mono photos too. 21 x 26cm, 96 pages. New from Taschen.

Lars Johnsson lives on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. He is an artist, author and ornithologist, and started painting birds at the age of four, and is celebrated as one of the world's leading wildlife artists. With him we meet the Chiff-Chaff, Bullfinch, Great Black-backed Gulls in stormy waters, Eurasian Wigeons and Curlews sunbathing, buzzards and crows, Golden Eagle, Greenfinch and the all-knowing White Gyrfalcon captured masterfully in watercolour. Plus elder-flowered orchid, trees and foliage, sky and sea as authentic locations for his avian subjects. His unique style is based on a deep understanding of birds and an extraordinary power of observation, and his paintings are executed directly in or based on sketches and studies made in the field. This gorgeous book uses not only the thoughts of the artist himself, and his descriptions of those habitats where he finds most of his inspiration - the Sea, Shorelines, Coastal Meadows and Arctic tundras - but also essays by a leading wildlife sculptor to convey something about the brilliance of Jonsson's work. Here are his early works, sketchbooks, watercolours, oil paintings, lithographs and ornithological projects to dazzle readers with his genius. Here too are descriptions of how he manages to capture his subjects so that they appear to leap off the page. We loved his piece about trying to portray the Wood Sandpiper. Apparently, this bird is constantly busy foraging, and usually hides its feet in the mud. It is also a challenge to get it to show its face and reveal its special facial expressions. 192 pages 30.5cm x 24.5cm in living colour.

Observer Best Art Book 2021, it is an illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague-ridden Apocalypse, the first works mass produced by any artist, to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, Dürer's art was a revelation. It not only showed us who we are, but also foresaw our future, a vision that remains startingly powerful and seductive today. Philip Hoare encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare and traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan and the artist pursued. 'In another scene, from Eden, other animals slipped out of the forest, the humans as naked and content as them, until then. The scene receded, three-dimensionally, in layers. In the distance, a goat teetered on a cliff. Maybe this is where the world began... Then in another picture I saw an angel... Another sleepy dog dozed at the hem of their robes, a comet burst over the distant sea.' We can appreciate the many famous artworks through the eyes of a dreamer and wonderfully descriptive writer. 'Dürer gave you more ink per square inch. Peter Ursem, a Dutch artist, tells me that woodcuts differed from wood engravings... They're fossils, or contour maps of the seabed. In their gullies and crevices, agony collects. Dürer turned these blocks in his inky fingers, before the next run. Adam and Eve are chased from Eden; an archangel wields a sword; Christ dies, over and over again.' In 1515 Dürer created his Man of Sorrows, the first metal etching known to western history. If his woodcuts are astounding, his engravings are almost uncanny. Very well illustrated and with a series of colour plates at the end of this fine 4th Estate publication with its witty accounts and delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world. 304pp.

Original illustrations from Audubon's masterwork Birds of America. Favourites include the Blue Jay, Golden Eagle, colourful flycatchers, warblers, waterbirds, the Barred Owl, Passenger Pigeon, Belted Kingfisher, Red-shouldered Hawk, Carolina Wren, Baltimore Oriole, American Flamingo, Yellow-billed Magpie, all with vibrant plumage and ideal subjects for colouring in. John James Audubon (1785-1851) was born in Haiti and raised in France, emigrating to North America when he was 18 to avoid conscription into the Napoleonic Wars. His true passion was ornithology and he spent many years identifying and recording bird species. Peter Gray, a long established illustrator of books, provides the outline on each right hand page, some portrait some landscape orientation, and we can follow the colours of Audubon's originals in situ on branches and sometimes with berries and flowers on the opposite page. 96 pages, 22.5 x 28cm, softback.

Large, glamorous art publication by Philip Wilson Publishers of Bloomsbury, the topic is William Powell Frith (1819-1909), one of the most successful painters of the Victorian age, celebrated for his highly original depictions of modern life subjects in the 1850s and 1860s. He was virtually a household name due to the widespread dissemination of reproductive engravings which made his images familiar throughout the world. His three great panoramas of the contemporary world, Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands), The Derby Day and The Railway Station depicted Victorians at leisure and are scrutinised in depth. Similarly covered is Frith's later and more exclusive panorama reconstructing the Private View of 1881 at the Royal Academy, where Oscar Wilde has centre stage. Essays explore important and hitherto neglected areas of his personal life and professional activity, of significant biographical interest are studies of his connections with Yorkshire, the county of his birth and also his first wife Isabelle's, and his friendships with the contemporary writers notably the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and his historical genre pictures focussing on the early success of 'An English Merry-Making, A Hundred Years Ago.' An intriguing angle is the recreation of certain of his famous compositions as Tableaux on the London Stage, yet another fresh topic in this presentation of 'The People's Painter'. So lifelike are the eyes and skin in page after page of gorgeous colour images on these heavy glossy white pages - Poor Maria, The Beautiful Grisette, Vanessa who was a longtime lover and correspondent of Jonathan Swift. It was well known that Frith was a friend as well as a devotee of Charles Dickens and his paintings are brimming with life and incident such as Alexander Pope's vain declaration of love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The courtyard of Millbank Prison provides a unique view of life in disgrace wearing shaming uniform dotted with arrow motifs. Another favourite of ours is Frith being buttonholed by a flower seller as they stand against a backdrop of the Bay of Naples. 192 glamorous pages, 22.9 x 27.6cm.
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