History & Criticism

Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power.

Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way....

A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation.

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality....

"Inspiration leaps off the pages from Jerry Saltz's new book on creativity. . . . This book is for the artist or non-artist, for the person who gets plain English, for the person who understands that practical talk can coax out the mystical messages that lie underneath." —Steve Martin Art has...

This audiobook narrated by best-selling author Mary Beard explores how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power....

From a world-renowned painter comes an exploration of creativity's quintessential - and often overlooked - role in the spiritual life....

These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art....

Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it's never been told before....

In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it....

A dazzling gift, the unforgettable, unknown history of colors and the vivid stories behind them in a beautiful multi-colored volume. “Beautifully written . . . Full of anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all the answers.” —NPR, Best Books of 2017 The Secret...

Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street...

In this influential sequence of linked interviews, Ranciere explores the interplay of art and politics. The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness “Brilliant . . . To read this...

In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began what would become one of history’s most influential works of art—The Last Supper.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object beautiful and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely....

An expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir, and biography on the subject of loneliness told through the lives of six iconic artists....

In 12 fascinating lectures, you will hear the stories behind the theft and/or destruction of some of the world’s most famous pieces of art....

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and...

The fascinating story of Vincent van Gogh’s two groundbreaking years in Paris, where he transformed himself from a provincial unknown into one of the world’s great visionary artists. Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his...

Featuring an enlightening introduction by the book's translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, providing generational and cultural context for Kandinsky and his work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art gives testimony to the mind and creative expression of Kandinsky and other artists of his generation....

Here is a tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries....

Many bemoan the decay of culture. But we all have a responsibility to care for culture, to nurture it in ways that help people thrive....

A riveting, heart-stopping family memoir that blends art, obsession, and love as the author searches for the spectacular jeweled egg that consumed her father’s dreams—and spelled her family’s downfall. When she was eleven years old, Serena Kutchinsky’s life changed forever. Her father...

It's not so long ago that a woman's expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men without repercussion. The fact that so many radical female artists also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has been sorely neglected for too long. In The Other Side, we explore the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women.

The story of Italian art is one of the greatest in human history: a golden thread that begins in ancient Rome, weaves through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and continues to shape the way we understand beauty, faith, and the world today. From the Etruscans’ vivid tomb frescoes to Michelangelo’s masterpieces on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to Caravaggio’s dramatic use of light and shadow, Italian artists have created works that define Western Civilization.

Yayoi Kusama has been placing dots on surfaces since 1939. She is still doing it. Every morning, from a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, she walks across the road to her studio, picks up a brush, and paints. She has been making that walk for nearly fifty years. She is ninety-seven years old. In between, she rewrote the rules. She invented immersive art before the term existed. She anticipated Andy Warhol, outpaced the Minimalists, and was erased from the record by an art world that could not figure out what to do with a Japanese woman who kept being first. She sold mirror balls for two ...

In Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik – Versuch einer Selbstkritik und philosophisches Weltbild verbindet Friedrich Nietzsche seine philosophischen Überlegungen mit der Kunsttheorie und der griechischen Tragödie. Er entwickelt die berühmten Konzepte des Apollinischen und Dionysischen als grundlegende Prinzipien der Kunst und Kultur. In seinem später verfassten „Versuch einer Selbstkritik" reflektiert Nietzsche seine frühen Gedanken kritisch und zeigt die Entwicklung seines Denkens.

Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have—and, of course, continue to do so—often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval.