Showing titles in History & Criticism

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. You'll learn that Michelangelo's body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn't stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O'Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you'll never forget!

Here is a tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries - many of them still hanging in prominent museums and private collections today. Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history.

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. 

A National Book Critics Circle finalist One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York “The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen...

In the six lectures of A Short History of Role-Playing Games, gaming consultant and avid gamer Jamin Warren will take you on a whirlwind tour of role-playing games, tracing a fascinating story of community-building, technical innovation, and, occasionally, cultural backlash.

Bloomsbury presents Mad Enchantment by Ross King, read by Mark Meadows Claude Monet’s water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The...

Bloomsbury presents Mad Enchantment by Ross King, read by Mark Meadows Claude Monet’s water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The...

A compelling call to rediscover the transformative power of art in an age of distraction, coercion, and spectacle – featuring an introduction from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Donna Tartt In Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, J. F. Martel offers a compelling and incisive meditation on...

A beekeeper herself, she gives insight into the activity in the hive and describes the bees' natural order and habits. She explores the myths of the past and how and when they were replaced by fact. For example, the heated discussions that broke out in the 18th century when it was discovered that the hive was ruled by a queen, not a king as had been the belief since Aristotle. 

Straightened. Stigmatised. 'Tamed'. Celebrated. Erased. Managed. Appropriated. Forever misunderstood. Black hair is never 'just hair'. This book is about why black hair matters and how it can be viewed as a blueprint for decolonisation. Emma Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the...

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...

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, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and explores the riches of computer-created art.

Por las páginas de este libro desfilan personajes importantes de la mitología greco-romana tales como Prometeo, Deucalión, Pirra, Faetón, Europa, Perseo, Dédalo, Ícaro, Meleagro, Tántalo, Pélope, Níobe, los argonautas, Heracles, Teseo… Estos relatos, basados en las fuentes clásicas y ya imprescindibles para el conocimiento de la mitología, los debemos al erudito, poeta y escritor alemán Gustav Schwab (Stuttgart, [redacted-phone-number]), quien resultó un entusiasta divulgador de la cultura clásica y recopiló las sagas y leyendas de su país en la colección titulada Die schönsten Geschichten und

'Groundbreaking' KATY HESSEL 'Lively and passionate' SIR ANTONY GORMLEY 'A revelation' KATE BRYAN For forty thousand years, we have been carving and moulding, shaping and chiselling, feeling our way and sensing our place in the world through sculpture. In this accessible, story-led journey into...

Barbara Kruger once defined art as "the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an...

A dazzlingly original and ambitious audiobook on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. 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...

The first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world, by the author of The Mirror and the Palette. 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 Art, painter, critic, and modern-art advocate Walter Pach examines the uneasy state of American visual culture in the early twentieth century. Pach argues that wealthy collectors and museums too often treat art as a prestige commodity, pouring money into established European masterpieces...

«Меньше значит больше» стало мантрой современных гуру минимализма, которые обещают, что избавление от избыточного количества вещей — это ключ к решению большинства проблем. Минимализм приобрел огромную популярность. Кайл Чайка, известный культурный обозреватель, критик, искусствовед на протяжении многих лет изучает минималистские тренды. Поиски приводят автора к философским и духовным истокам минимализма, а также к историям истинных минималистов — художников, архитекторов, музыкантов.

A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born. "Not only is it a splendid exploration of...