History & Criticism

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

In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of 2,000,000 years of human history using 100 objects selected from the museum's vast and renowned collection. Presented by the British Museum's then director Neil MacGregor, each episode focuses on a...

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought....

What is your art really about? Where is it going? What stands in the way of getting it there? These are questions that matter, questions that recur at each stage of artistic development - and they are the source for this volume of wonderfully incisive commentary. Art & Fear explores the way art...

'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking...

A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation. The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses...

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 Neil MacGregor, the author of A History of the World in 100 Objects, this is a view of Germany like no other. For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental Europe. Thirty years ago, a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new...

Charlotte Mullins brings art to life through the stories of those who created it and, importantly, reframes who is included in the narrative to create a more diverse and exciting landscape of art. She shows how art can help us see the world differently and understand our place in it, how it...

The meteoric rise of the largest unregulated financial market in the world -- for contemporary art -- is driven by a few passionate, guileful, and very hard-nosed dealers. They can make and break careers and fortunes “Shnayerson tackles his subject with gusto, parading a cast of colorful...

'Less is more': Everywhere we hear the mantra. Marie Kondo and other decluttering gurus promise that shedding our stuff will solve our problems....

Take a tour through the wilder side of art history and discover true tales of murder, forgery, trickery, and great art—featuring jaw-dropping profiles of Da Vinci, Dali, and more With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of...

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through color—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought.

From the acclaimed biographer and author of Balzac's Omelette, an engaging new work on the life of "the father of Impressionism" and the role his Jewish background played in his artistic creativity. The celebrated painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) occupied a central place in the artistic...

Hot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings that taken together form a group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans....

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...

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves....

Brought to you by Penguin. 'For anyone who has enjoyed The Cultural Tutor on X, this book will be more of the same delight. Expect nuggets of insight and wisdom, wrapped in the author's trademark warmth and wit' Alain de Botton Who does the Mona Lisa actually depict? Why do we still look to the...

In this companion volume to The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of human artistic achievement...

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the...

Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach", turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Miller...

Keith Haring is synonymous with the downtown New York art scene of the 1980's. His artwork-with its simple, bold lines and dynamic figures in motion-filtered in to the world's consciousness and is still instantly recognizable, twenty years after his death. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition...

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores...

Das abenteuerliche Leben der Sehnsuchtsbilder von Caspar David Friedrich – mitreißend erzählt von Florian Illies. Kein deutscher Maler löst solche...

Contemporary art has never been so popular - but the art world is changing. In a landscape of increasing globalization, there is growing interest in questions over the nature of contemporary art today and the identity of who is controlling its future. In the midst of this, contemporary art...