Art History category: 15294 books

A “delightful” tour of Rome’s St. Agnes Outside the Walls, examining the stories, rituals, and architecture of this seventeen-hundred-year-old building (The Christian Science Monitor). In The Geometry of Love, acclaimed author Margaret Visser, the preeminent “anthropologist of everyday...

A spellbinding journey into the high-stakes world of art theft Today, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently...

In 1943, while the world was convulsed by war, a few visionaries -- in the private sector and in the military -- committed to protect Europe's cultural heritage from the indiscriminate ravages of World War II. In the midst of the conflict, the Allied Forces appointed the monuments officers—a...

A smart and playful introduction to the often-mystifying world of contemporary art What is contemporary art? What makes it contemporary? What is it for? And why is it so expensive? From museums and the art market to biennales and the next big thing, Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art?...

Tolstoy shares his views about the imprecision of general opinions on art, the time, effort, public funds, and public respect spent on art and artists. The difficulty of meaning in art, and especially what is good, useful art, art for the sake of which we might condone such sacrifices as are being offered at its shrine. So, what is art?

The leading art critic of the Victorian era, John Ruskin created a large body of work, writing influential essays and treatises on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy, to name but a few. This comprehensive eBook presents the...

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous,...

The Bauhaus movement (meaning the “house of building”) developed in three German cities - it began in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, then continued in Dessau, from 1925 to 1932, and finally ended in 1932-1933 in Berlin. Three leaders presided over the growth of the movement: Walter Gropius, from...

Oscillating between the majesty of the Greco-Byzantine tradition and the modernity predicted by Giotto, Early Italian Painting addresses the first important aesthetic movement that would lead to the Renaissance, the Italian Primitives. Trying new mediums and techniques, these revolutionary artists...

When you look out of your studio window, what do you see? I see my determination to be free in America. Faith Ringgold: A View From the Studio is a remarkable book about a world-famous Black American artist. It is an artist's artist's book--by one artist and about another--about the making of art,...

An International Bestseller “An absolute gem of a book.” —The Observer Just before one of its darkest moments came the twentieth century’s most exciting year . . . It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt in his car factory, and the year Louis Armstrong...

The vivid and sensuous paintings of Paul Gauguin are among the most reproduced and recognisable in the history of art. Most books on the artist concentrate on one aspect of his story, whether it is the time he spent in Brittany, in Arles with his friend Vincent van Gogh or in the South Seas. By contrast,...

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the...

Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrated by late 19th-century psychologists and art theorists, this book puts forward an innovative interpretative method of decoding the forms and spaces of...