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All Hail the King of Fantasy Art. Frank Frazetta finally gets the big beautiful book he deserves. Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed lord of...

Floral Buildings. Art Nouveau marvels across Europe. At the turn of the 20th century, architecture took an imaginative leap. As new construction materials and technologies met such...

All Hail the King of Fantasy Art. Frank Frazetta finally gets the big beautiful book he deserves. Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed lord of...

The Strangest Super-Heroes of All. The foundation of a pop-culture phenomenon. When Marvel publisher Martin Goodman asked Stan Lee to deliver another new team book for his line of comics, he had no idea he’d be getting something like The X-Men. In fact, nobody could have imagined the extraordinary phenomenon the X-Men would eventually grow into—not Goodman, not Lee, not even the forward-thinking futurist Jack Kirby. What they started out as was a charming, ragtag team of misfits, devised by Lee and Kirby to be mutants—youngsters born with “X-tra” powers thrust upon them not by accidentally crossing paths with cosmic rays or a nuclear blast, but by the fate of birth—led by a no-nonsense professor who trained them to become heroes that could protect the world from menaces, mutant and otherwise. The first years of storytelling laid the foundation for much of what has put the X-Men at the crossroads of comics and popular culture: Hounded by a public that fears and misunderstands them, mutantkind find themselves at the heart of their own civil rights struggle; Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, and Iceman found safety amongst themselves despite the challenges that set them apart from others in society; and Professor Xavier lined up against his ideological foe, Magneto, who had assembled a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to take the fight for their self-preservation directly to humankind. Along the way, Lee and Kirby—who were on fire taking comics into the Marvel Age—introduced a menagerie of villains and supporting characters that would become mainstays of Marvel and its lore: the super-powered siblings Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch; the formidable Blob; the unstoppable Juggernaut; the jungle dweller from the Savage Land, Ka-Zar; the demigod from the stars, the Stranger; and Bolivar Trask and his army of mutant-hunting Sentinels. And as Lee and Kirby gave way to new talents so they could move on to new corners of the Marvel Universe, Atlas era art veteran Werner Roth teamed with writing newcomer and future X-Men legend Roy Thomas...

Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Basel, Switzerland, 1997-1998 In Autumn 1998, after the trees around Fondation Beyeler and in the Berower Park had shed their leaves, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped 162 trees—some up to 25 meters high—with 55,000 square meters of polyester fabric and 23 kilometers of rope. The effect of light and weather on the translucent material created a kind of amorphous sculptural choreography, an ever-changing variety of shapes, surfaces, and colors. The fabric, used every winter in Japan to protect trees from frost and heavy snow, lent the trees the appearance of precious and fragile objects. The Fondation Beyeler project was a pièce de résistance for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and an extension and expansion of many years of interest in the concept of wrapped trees...