Showing titles in History & Criticism

The Gutmanns, as they were known, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.

Phoebe Hoban, author of definitive biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced. Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud’s work and life, showing how the two converge.

The two most treasured documents of American freedom together on one audiobook. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… Drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 as an act of rebellion, The Declaration of Independence powerfully expresses the political principles of...

For ten years Geordie Greig was among a very small group of friends who regularly met Lucian Freud for breakfast at Clarke’s restaurant on Kensington Church Street. Over tea and the morning papers, Freud would recount stories of his past and discuss art. It was, in effect, Freud’s private...

If ever a catharsis in Western European Civilization occurred, it had to have been the period we refer to as the Renaissance. After a thousand years of theocracy, manorialism, feudalism and narrow economic development, Europe was ripe for change. She got it with a vengeance.

Even 150 years later, we are haunted by the Civil War---by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary W. Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief systems of their age: religious, political and aesthetic. From the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of the human mind.

Master Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for his magnificent autobiography. In this work, which was actually begun in 1558 but not published until 1730, Cellini beautifully chronicles his flamboyant times. He tells of his adventures in Italy and France, and his relations with popes, kings, and fellow artists.

Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.

In a secret meeting in 1981, a master thief named Louis Royce gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime. As a kid, Royce had visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made a habit of sneaking in at night to find a good place to sleep. He knew the Museum's security was lax, and he gave this information to a boss of the Boston criminal underworld. It took years before the Museum was hit. But when it finally happened, it quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history.

Tarea es la de pintar a Don Quijote hasta más difícil que la de hinchar un perro. No ya ilustrar la obra imperecedera de Cervantes, sino vestir de carne visible y concreta un espíritu individual y vivo, no mera idea abstracta. Con escrupuloso cuidado me he entretenido en entresacar de las páginas vivas de El Ingenioso Hidalgo, cuantos pasajes se refieren más o menos directamente a los caracteres físicos de Don Quijote. Invito al lector a que divaguemos un poco acerca de la expresión pictórica de este símbolo vivo.

Al final la lectura deviene la música de un río ancho y calmo que nos arrastra junto con los objetos que expresan la cultura del mundo hacia un océano apacible de remansadas sensaciones y conocimientos. Un acierto pleno y una obra que, estoy seguro, va a ocupar un lugar importante en la bibliografía del tema.

When Dave Hickey was 12, he rode the surfer's dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn't quite turn out - he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which just about killed him. Fortunately, for Hickey and for us, he survived, and continues to battle, decades into a career as one of America's foremost critical iconoclasts, a trusted, even cherished no-nonsense voice commenting on the all-too-often nonsensical worlds of art and culture.

When I asked a group of girls who had been at Hatherop Castle in the 1960s whether the school had had a lab in those days they gave me a blank look. 'A laboratory?' I expanded, hoping to jog their memories. 'Oh that kind of lab!' one of them said. 'I thought you meant a Labrador.' As we discover from Ysenda Maxtone Graham's quietly hilarious history of life in British girls' boarding schools between 1939 and 1979, this was a not untypical reaction.

This is the beautifully told story of charismatic and unconventional pop artist Martin Sharp, from his lonely privileged childhood, to the heady days of the underground magazine Oz to Swinging London and beyond. Sharp blurred the boundaries of high art and low, he drew rock stars and reprobates...

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.

In The Language of Things, Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, decodes the things around us: their hidden meanings, our relationships with them, how they shape our lives and why we desire them. Design is everywhere. It seduces, pleases and inspires us. It makes us part with our money. It defines who we think we are. An iPhone, an anglepoise lamp, a Picasso, a banknote, an Armani suit, a William Morris textile, a Lucky Strike packet, a spacecraft - every object tells a story.

Had Hitler succeeded in conquering Europe, he would have crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. The Nazis had in their possession priceless artifacts that would give Hitler legitimacy in his subjects' eyes: the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire including the Spear of Destiny, alleged to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion. Looted from the royal treasury in Vienna, Austria, the Crown Jewels were hidden in a secret bunker deep beneath Nrnberg castle, known to few.

In dit multidisciplinaire college kijkt Kitty Zijlmans naar de vele aspecten van kunstgeschiedenis, waaronder esthetica en kunstkritiek. Maar ook naar de rol van de kunst in de maatschappij en de veranderingen daarin als gevolg van de opkomst van moderne kunst en de mondialisering.

Se davanti a una tela di Jackson Pollock la tua reazione è "Vabbè, con una latta da cinque litri nel garage di zio Franco questo lo facevo pure io", questo audiolibro è per te. Perché tutti pensano che per apprezzare l'arte siano necessari paroloni incomprensibili o libri pallosissimi? Daniela Collu vuole dimostrarci che non è così. Storica dell'arte per formazione e conduttrice radiotelevisiva per professione, ci invita a una passeggiata tra 60 opere, artisti e monumenti fondamentali, facendoci scoprire che si può godere della bellezza senza soggezione.