History & Criticism

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 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...

"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...

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

Now a major motion film! At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloging the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy...

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...

Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. After the death of famed art detective Harold Smith, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to take up the case....

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....

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...

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

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...

From celebrated art historian, curator, and teacher Sarah Lewis, a fascinating examination of how our most iconic creative endeavors—from innovation to the arts—are not achievements but conversions, corrections after failed attempts. The gift of failure is a riddle: it will always be both...

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...

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

In God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and religion scholar Stephen Prothero argues that persistent attempts to portray all religions as different paths to the same God overlook the distinct problem that each...

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.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent times Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life...

New York Times Notable Book “A smart, crackling chronicle of fast game, the ’80s art market, [and] the attraction of destruction.”— Village Voice A bold and vivid biography that chronicles the dazzling rise and tragic death of Neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In less than a...

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....

A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never seen it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas...

One spring day in 1683, a notary's clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled upon one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Rather than dispel the mysteries of Vermeer's life, this discovery merely gave...

No one skewers the popular movements of American culture like Tom Wolfe....

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later....

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.

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.

Discover how Impressionism transformed the art world and laid the foundation for modern art as we know it. This comprehensive exploration traces the movement's origins in 1870s France through its profound influence on twentieth-century artistic development. From Monet's water lilies to Renoir's intimate portraits, explore the masterpieces that challenged academic tradition and revolutionized how artists investigate color, light, and visual perception. Learn how Impressionism's radical principles opened pathways to Fauvism, Cubism, abstraction, and beyond—making it the pivotal movement ...

Twelve lives. Twelve reckonings. One quiet truth: that endurance, not brilliance, is the highest form of art. The Art of Endurance explores the second lives of the world’s creators—painters, poets, and composers who found renewal not in triumph, but in the long silence after it. From Michelangelo’s unfinished marbles to Verdi’s fields at Sant’Agata, from Beethoven’s deaf defiance to Grandma Moses’s late-life blossoming, these portraits reveal what remains when genius has outlived applause. Each chapter invites the reader into the interior moment of change—the hour when ...