History & Criticism

Modern Man is a riveting biography of Le Corbusier - a man who invented new ways of building and thinking....

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....

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

Leonardo's Brain uses Da Vinci as a starting point for an exploration of human creativity....

Ghalib's poetic trajectory begins from Urdu, then moves to composing almost entirely in Persian and finally swings back to Urdu. It is nearly as complex as his poetry. However, his poetic output in Persian is far more than what he wrote in Urdu....

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....

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

A deeply researched warning about how the digital economy threatens artists' lives and work - the music, writing, and visual art that sustain our souls and societies - from an award-winning essayist and critic....

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 this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned collection of essays, Ayn Rand throws new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life....

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

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

With lips slightly parted and eyes fixed on a point in the distance, a breathtaking marble portrait of Costanza Piccolomini appears alive....

From Neil MacGregor, the author of A History of the World in 100 Objects, this is a view of Germany like no other....

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery....

When Picasso became Picasso: the story of how an obscure young painter from Barcelona came to Paris and made himself into the most influential artist of the 20th century....

Plutarchs's (46-120 A.D.) epic chronicle of the lives of great Grecians and Romans....

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris....

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

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)....

In Reshaping Art, T. M. Krishna examines what art is and how we can harness its power to make ourselves and our communities open and sensitive....

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....

A true historical “detective story” full of insight about how we look at art―and the artists and eras that produced it....

In this landmark study of Italy from the 14th through the early 16th centuries, Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt chronicles the rise of Florence and Venice as powerful city-states....

A "heroic" biography of John Cage and his "awakening through Zen Buddhism" - "a kind of love story" about a brilliant American pioneer of the creative arts who transformed himself and his culture....

Published in 1873, Studies in the History of the Renaissance is considered one of the most influential works in the field of aestheticism. The book is a collection of essays that explore various artists of the Renaissance period, focusing primarily on the art, culture, and philosophy of the time.

When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see?

Как известно, жизнь каждого яркого дарования делится обычно на три периода. Сначала его осыпают насмешками и бранью, всячески угнетают и преследуют. Потом открывается счастливое время признания, за которым следуют дни восторженного поклонения. Наконец, так же неминуемо наступает охлаждение, сопровождающееся нередко резкими выпадами по адресу недавнего любимца и властителя дум. Этой трафаретной схемы избежали немногие даровитые люди, и единственный вариант, вносимый в нее жизнью, сводится к тому, что одни умирают в расцвете славы, а другим суждено ее пережить, изведать к концу жизни всю горечь забвения.

La saga des Médicis, sous la plume du grand Dumas. Les Médicis sont une des familles les plus riches et les plus influentes de Florence. Des ressources financières considérables leur permirent d'investir dans l'architecture, la sculpture, la peinture mais aussi dans la collection de pierres précieuses et d'objets d'orfèvrerie. La maison de Médicis est apparue, au XIIe siècle, au sein de la République de Florence, et devient, au XVIe siècle, la famille régnant sur le grand-duché de Toscane.

Avant que les yeux de sa petite fille ne voient plus, un grand-père décide de lui montrer autant d’œuvres que possible. Un merveilleux roman d’initiation, une plongée émouvante au cœur de l’art.