TAJ Mini Books

Elizabeth Taylor defines movie star. Breathtakingly beautiful from a very young age, she most successfully made the rare transition from child star to adult star. Pocketing two Best Actress Oscars and numerous other honors for achievement in acting, Elizabeth battled an overbearing stage mother, a strong handed studio, unhappy marriages, global media attention, alcohol and prescription drug addiction, and life-long health problems to emerge, if not victorious, resolute and reflective and appreciative of all that she had experienced and learned. In addition to her career, Elizabeth is well known for her seven husbands and eight marriages, two of which were to the tempestuous Welsh actor Richard Burton, and for her magnificent jewelry collection. Her fight for funding to support AIDS/HIV research was also a major part of her life's work after her acting career was largely over. Filled with photos of Elizabeth, her husbands, her leading men, and her four children, this book tells the story of Ms. Taylor's almost unbelievable life as leading lady, jet-setter, and adulteress, as well as a pretty down-to-earth person simply seeking happiness. Her story is fascinating, just as she was.

Why shoot a revolver when a modern semi-automatic carries more rounds, reloads faster, is flatter and slimmer, and is no more costly? Revolvers are no-problem guns. Because it has a relatively straightforward design, a revolver is very reliable. A semiautomatic is sensitive to cartridges, and stories about jammed actions because of insufficiently powerful rounds are numerous. Revolvers do not jam. If a revolver misfires or a case is underpowered, the shooter simply pulls the trigger again. The complexity of a semi-auto's mechanics compared to a revolver gives the revolver an edge in durability. A revolver can take a great deal of punishment and still shoot a tight group. The final point in favor of revolvers is their ability to accept powerful loads. No semiautos can withstand the power of loads such as .454 Casull or .475 Linebaugh. In short, revolvers still rock!

When Liberace was just seven years old, he memorized the full 17-page score of Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night's Dream" in one day. No matter your opinion of Liberace's ostentatious and flamboyant style, his talent on the piano is unarguable. He learned the entertainment business as a teenager playing honky tonks and bars, moving after high school graduation to New York City, "the city that never sleeps." He found moderate success there, but soon moved to California, staying only a year before returning to The Big Apple. To stand out in an extremely competitive market, Liberace practiced 12 hours a day and originated his unique style, combining the classic works, shortened to appeal to a mass audience, with the popular tunes of the day. It was at this time, in the early 1940s, that he plopped the infamous candelabra on his grand piano. The lavish, over-the-top costumes would come later. Soon, Las Vegas beckoned and Liberace did not look the other way. From 1945 until the end of his life in 1987, Liberace called Las Vegas home-along with his multiple other homes, all of which he decorated in the most lavish (some would say completely kitsch) way imaginable. Liberace was a force to be reckoned with, a very talented and original artist.

The greatest artist of the 18th century, Francisco de Goya began his career as an apprentice to a local artist where one of his jobs was adding draperies and modesty items to nude figures in religious paintings; for this he was titled "Reviser of Indecent Paintings." But by the age of 40, Goya had established himself as a leading Spanish artist. Goya simultaneously pursued a number of disparate projects, commissions he received from prestigious churches and royalty, as well as producing several lengthy series of lithographs to express his dislike of several subjects, notably Spanish high society and war. Brushing into controversy on several occasions, Goya threaded the political needle of alternating French and Spanish rule of his home country of Spain as well as successfully navigated the choppy waters of the Spanish Inquisition when it questioned the morality of La Maja Desnuda, one of his most famous paintings.

Eugène Delacroix was highly influential in the 19th-century Romanticism art movement and is considered by many art historians to be the most important of the Romantic painters. Delacroix is often attributed with refining Romanticism, not only aesthetically but philosophically, as his work influenced not only art, but also literature. One of Delacroix's best-known paintings, completed in 1830 and on the cover of this book, is Liberty Leading the People, which represents the Parisian people in their search for liberty, fraternity, and equality, a subject of great importance to the French nation on the heels of their revolution, which in turn followed closely and was inspired by the American Revolution. In 1832, Delacroix traveled to North Africa and Spain as part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco after the French acquisition of Algiers. He sought artistic inspiration, as well as an escape from stifling Parisian society. Delacroix wished to immerse himself in a more primitive-socially and physically-environment in order to find new energy and subjects from which to create art. He produced over 100 works based on his experience in Morocco, furthering a new trend in art called Orientalism. Much of his work remains in French institutions. The Museum Eugène Delacroix is housed in a small building attached to the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Piet Mondrian pioneered the de Stijl movement-Dutch for "The Style"-that emerged in the early 20th century and which served as an important transition from a focus on Symbolism and Realism to a new and growing focus on abstraction. The evolution of Mondrian's initial, traditional style, akin to that of The Hague School, through to his much later works in primary colors and geometric forms, which he called Neo-plasticism, is marked by rather sharp deviations in stylistic form and experimentation along the way, including Cubism and Fauvism. Much of Mondrian's work was greatly influenced by Theosophy, a movement considered to be the genesis of "New Age" beliefs, begun by the Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky in 1875. The goal of her followers was to find inner enlightenment. As Mondrian sought personal inner beauty and the reason for his existence, he sought the same in his art, reducing and simplying the subjects of his paintings to the true essence of what he perceived as their inner beauty and raison d'etre. In the company of artists such as Picasso and Dalí, Mondrian's body of work is without question one of the most evolutionary in style and imaginative in content, ranging from excellently executed realistic depictions to the most abstract interpretations of their subjects.

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as simply Sandro Botticelli, was born in Florence, Italy, probably in or around 1445. Serendipitously winning a high-profile commission from the Florentine court, he was catapulted to notoriety as wealthy patrons, in particular the Medici family, hired him to create works that celebrated their lives and their family's lives and marked important events such as weddings. Botticelli's range was wide: he embellished the walls of the Sistine Chapel with three frescoes, illustrated Dante's The Divine Comedy (just under100 drawings still exist), and painted both mythological and religious scenes-Primavera and The Birth of Venus, and Adoration of the Magi, being respective examples of his excellence in the genre. Botticelli never wed, possibly due to his unrequited love for the married Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, who died very young. By the end of 15th century, Botticelli came to believe that Humanism-a philosophy embraced by the Medici family-was amoral. His reaction was to burn many of his paintings and thereafter to produce only religious-themed works.

The image most indelibly linked to the term Pin-Up Girl is a busty, longlegged, beautiful woman posing provocatively on calendars, posters, and in magazines primarily during the World War II years, most often in the U.S. military's Yank magazine. These images make up the quintessential and most recognizable Pin-Up Girls, although they are only representative of a specific era in pin-up history. The Pin-Up Girl has actually been around since the late 19th century. The pin-up genre ran the gambit, both in art and photography, from simply the image of a glamorous and beautiful woman to what was considered quite risqué before the swinging sixties-total nudity. Many Pin-Up Girls made a mark for themselves later as models or actresses, but the launching pad of their careers was a growing market for these "cheesecake" images. Today, sex and nudity are no longer taboo. In the midst of the blatant exhibitionism we find ourselves surrounded by today, the discretion of pin-up is a welcome respite as well as a comforting recollection of years gone by. We invite you to take a stroll down memory lane and enjoy a more innocent time.

Edith Head is probably the most iconic of all Hollywood costume designers. Beginning in the early 1930s until her retirement in 1977, Edith Head costumed the stars of over 500 films. With 35 Academy Award nominations for Best Costume Design, she won 8-the closest to come to her record is Irene Sharaff, who garnered 15 nominations and 5 wins. Edith Head truly surpassed all of her competition. Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Natalie Wood, Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, and Katherine Hepburn are just a few of the female stars Head dressed, both in character and as themselves. And winning her last Oscar for The Sting in 1974 meant that her designs for male stars, explicitly Paul Newman and Robert Redford, were superb as well. Her style acumen stretched from the exotic, historical costumes she designed for Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments to the classic, timeless costumes she designed for Roman Holiday, To Catch a Thief, and Sabrina. This book is a sampling of Edith Head's most famous work.

Rembrandt is indisputably the greatest artist of the seventeenth century, and many would say the greatest artist of all time. His mastery of composition, paint, and line-he was a superlative etcher-over a lifetime's work has rarely been emulated, let alone surpassed. At a time when other artists specialized, his themes covered history, pastoral and Biblical scenes, group paintings, and most celebrated of all, portraits. Although excruciately little is known about Rembrandt's personal thoughts and musings-he had no contemporary biographer and left no letters or diary-he did leave over 90 authenticated self-portraits, which offer the details of his outward appearance as he progressed from a young adult to an elderly man. For the majority of his life, Rembrandt enjoyed success and wealth as he catered to the artistic proclivities of the wealthy Dutch merchants in Amsterdam, but personal and financial tragedy dogged him as well. Forced to declare bankruptcy a decade before he died, he continued painting to pay the bills, creating some of his most noteworthy works of art in the process.