The National Book Award Finalist is now a major motion picture directed by Marjane Sartrapi, starring Rosamund Pike and Sam Riley.

“Vivid and ethereal.”—The New York Times

“Radioactive is quite unlike any book I have ever read—part history, part love story, part art work and all parts sheer imaginative genius.”—Malcolm Gladwell

A visual journey into the life of Marie Curie, as told through the dazzling collage style of acclaimed author and artist Lauren Redniss.

Radioactive is the mesmerizing, landmark illustrated biography of Marie Curie, by acclaimed author and artist Lauren Redniss. Through brilliant visual storytelling, Redniss walks us through Curie’s life, which was marked by extraordinary scientific discovery and dramatic personal trauma—from her complex working and romantic relationship with Pierre Curie, to their discovery of two new scientific elements, to Pierre’s tragic death, to Marie’s two Nobel Prizes. A haunting and wondrous portrait of one of history’s most intriguing figures, Radioactive combines archival photos, images, and clippings with dazzling line drawings and a compelling narrative to tell Curie’s story. Far more than an art book or a graphic novel, Radioactive is a stunning visual biography and a true work of art.

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This beautiful calendar showcases 12 artworks by printmaker Clare Curtis. After studying illustration and printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, then spending some time in London developing a career in illustration, Clarereturned to her home town of Felixstowe in Suffolk to pursue her love of printmaking. Chiefly a lino cutter but also producing lithographs and screen prints, her work reflects her love of British twentieth-century art and design, as well as plants and gardens. Informative text accompanies each work and the datepad features previous and next month’s views. Printed on FSC-certified paper, with plastic-free packaging.

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One of the most important American contemporary artists, Kerry James Marshall is known for artworks that address the ‘crisis of under-representation’ of the black figure in the pictorial traditions of the Western world, from museums to comic books. His work has been widely celebrated in major museum retrospectives such as Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (Antwerp, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid) in 2014 and Mastry (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles) in 2017, and through numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.

Best known as a painter, Marshall has throughout his career also produced a vast graphic oeuvre that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. An assiduous worker, he spent his youth acquiring time-honored skills of art – drawing and painting, but also wood engraving and printing. By his midtwenties, he recalls, ‘I could paint in egg tempera.… I was good at printmaking. I could do woodcuts, etchings, aquatints. I knew all of those techniques.’

Most of his prints have been produced not in professional print workshops, but by the artist, working alone in his studio. They range from images the size of postcards to his 50-foot-long, 12 panel woodcut Untitled (1998–99), to iterations of his ongoing magnum opus, Rythm Mastr. And while some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist’s archive and are unknown to the public.

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Munch’s early life in the industrial town of Kristiania (renamed Oslo in 1925) was marked by sickness and poverty. His first works centred on the expression of deep emotional experiences, specifically the deaths of his mother and teenage sister when he was growing up, as well as passionate yet unhappy love affairs of which his deeply religious father disapproved. Encouraged by his encounters with a Bohemian society of artists, writers and poets, he developed a visual landscape that was a radical deviation from the slick society portraits and grand Scandinavian landscapes then so much in vogue. His efforts attracted considerable attention and much criticism, and he practised with little financial success as a painter for ten years before he started to gain his reputation as a profoundly innovative printmaker.

Written by a team of acknowledged experts, and with an interview by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, this book will shed new light on the production of some of Munch’s most remarkable works.

Table of Contents

Foreword by the directors of the British Museum and the Munch Museum; Sponsor’s foreword • Introduction • 1. Transfigured continent: Impressions from Munch’s Europe • 2. The inner soul of an artist: Munch’s background and the development of his Frieze of Life • 3. Munch and the world of printmaking • 4. Munch and the theatre in Paris • 5. ‘Is art influenced by too much business?’: Cultural capital and the market for Munch • 6. Plates, stones and blocks: Munch’s printing matrices • Reflections on Edvard Munch: an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard • Checklist of works in the exhibition • Chronology; Checklist of exhibited items; Notes; Selected bibliography; Prints by Munch in UK public collections; Acknowledgments; Picture credits; List of contributors; Index

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