History & Criticism

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)....

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....

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

A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation.

Today it's routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, or watch a movie or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous.

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....

A fascinating biography of the philanthropist Albert Barnes, whose pioneering collection of modern art was meant to transform America’s soul.

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

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....

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....

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. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: Witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary listeners to fine art....

All That Glitters is at once a shocking and compulsive story of ambition and downfall, a cautionary tale, and an intimate portrait of friendship and its loss.

Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present....

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....

In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it....

The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million....

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves....

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris....

Featuring an enlightening introduction by the book's translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, providing generational and cultural context for Kandinsky and his work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art gives testimony to the mind and creative expression of Kandinsky and other artists of his generation....

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....

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

We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings....

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

The director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park offers a vivid view of daily life in the lost city, shares the latest discoveries, and reflects on preserving heritage.

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. Emperors, shahs, sultans, and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status.

The Mysterious John Quidor A Forgotten Painter. A Lost Masterpiece. A Legacy Buried in Shadows. John Quidor's name has long teetered on the edge of oblivion, an overlooked artist whose dreamlike and eerie works whispered of deeper truths. Known for his haunting depictions of literary scenes and spiritual visions, Quidor's career was marred by tragedy: a devastating fire that consumed his studio, a cholera outbreak that ravaged New York, and a quiet disappearance that left the art world puzzled. But his story didn’t end there. Driven westward, Quidor resurfaced briefly in Adams County, ...

Today it's routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, or watch a movie or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous. In Flashes of Brilliance, New York Times photo editor Anika Burgess engagingly blends art, science, and social history to reveal the most dramatic developments in photography from its birth in the 1830s to the early twentieth century.

Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored. In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void. Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, Blackness in museums, Blackness in feminist art movements, as well as Blackness in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history.

What does it mean to call something "new"? Why is Western art and culture, even after postmodernism, still so obsessed with the concept? What are the consequences of relying on culture to bring about social change? In this provocative book, David Balzer argues that Western culture was never designed to produce truly new or original artifacts. Rather, we move from fixation to fixation, trend to trend—a cycle of creation and destruction with deep origins in Judeo-Christianity and the paganism that preceded it.