"A masterpiece."—L. Jon Wertheim, author of Glory Days A celebration of the cultural influence of tennis that paved the way for the sport we love today. In its foundational years, tennis inspired paintings, ballets, music, fiction, poetry, theatre, and even clothing design. This book presents riveting exemplars from all the arts while also lovingly portraying the game of tennis as an art form of its own. Tennis is a game of precision, timing, athleticism, strategy, and, sometimes, a little luck. Small wonder this sport attracts so many players and fans—including artists and writers who see something transcendent in hitting a ball with a racket over a net and inside a rectangular field. As Weber writes, "The thrill of the thwack of the racquet and the perpetual state of suspense about what is coming next appeals to individuals from every walk of life....It has prompted the creation of sublime architecture...

Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-three years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography).The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well these figures' lesser-known wives and girlfriends. In this extraordinary group biography, Weber brilliantly brings to life the Bauhaus geniuses and the community of the pioneering art school in Germany's Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s and early 1930s.Here are: Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the architect who streamlined design early in his career and who saw the school as a place for designers to collaborate in an ideal setting . . . a dashing hussar, the ardent young lover of the renowned...

From acclaimed biographer and cultural historian, author of Balthus and Patron Saints--the first full-scale life of le Corbusier, one of the most influential, admired, and maligned architects of the twentieth century, heralded is a prophet in his lifetime, revered as a god after his death.He was a leader of the modernist movement that sought to create better living conditions and a better society through housing concepts. He predicted the city of the future with its large, white apartment buildings in parklike settings--a move away from the turn-of-the-century industrial city, which he saw as too fussy and suffocating and believed should be torn down, including most of Paris. Irascible and caustic, tender and enthusiastic, more than a mercurial innovator, Le Corbusier was considered to be the very conscience of modern architecture.In this first biography of the man, Nicholas Fox Weber writes about Le Corbusier the precise, mathematical,...