History & Criticism

The unforgettable, unknown history of colors and the vivid stories behind them....

Joining the best sellers Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, a lively and intriguing tale of two artists whose competitive spirit brought to life one of the world’s most magnificent structures and ignited the Renaissance....

An epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, therecently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million - and might not be the real thing....

A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never heard it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast....

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....

All That Glitters is a dazzling insider’s account of the contemporary art world and the stunning rise and fall of the charismatic American art dealer Inigo Philbrick, as seen through the eyes of his friend and fellow dealer.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative....

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)....

Rembrandt Is in the Wind is an invitation to discover some of the world's most celebrated artists and works and how each of them illuminates something about God, people, and the purpose of life....

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....

The Gutmanns amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, and Guardi But the Nazi regime snatched everything from them....

In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself....

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before....

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through color—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought.

Hot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings that taken together form a group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans....

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

The Alexandre Dumas Collection, with its deep roots in French history, sheds light on the innate sense of honor, duty, responsibility, and love felt by those who lived during the time. Listen as the author takes you on a historical journey to a time when men fought to the death....

Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.

A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl....

What exactly is a work of art? Within the context of this guided trip inside the artist's psyche, Author traces the development of transcendent books, paintings, jokes, movies, songs, and other forms of artistic expression.

Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting—casually at first, and then more and more obsessively—the country's great museums....

Art Monsters is a landmark feminist intervention in the way we think about women's stories and bodies, calling attention to a radical genealogy of feminist art that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims....

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.....

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions....

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

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers.

On October 15, 1958, Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an "event sale” of seven Impressionist paintings. The seven lots went for £781,000—at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world center of the art market and Sotheby's as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and paved the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years.

Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of World War I, avant-garde artists and writers sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life. Following the evolution of these revolutionary groups, How to Be Avant-Garde charts its pioneers and radical ideas.

Leonardo da Vinci is best known for his art, including the portrait of Mona Lisa, but there was so much more to this man. His genius extended into his greatest passions: scientific discovery, experimentation, and design. Nothing in (or out of) this world was unworthy of his curiosity; he pursued the study of botany, anatomy, engineering, military defense, flight, the behavior of water and light, astronomy … and more.

Em Mulheres na história da arte, mergulharemos em narrativas que ressaltam a extraordinária jornada das mulheres na arte ao longo dos séculos. Desde as grandes mestras renascentistas até as contemporâneas pioneiras do século XXI, este livro oferece uma perspectiva abrangente e inspiradora sobre como as mulheres desafiaram e redefiniram os limites do mundo artístico.