Showing titles in History & Criticism

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress. Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum's lifeblood.

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. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes—painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.

The Secret Lives of Color tells the unusual stories of 75 fascinating shades, dyes, and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso’s blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history. In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from into a unique study of human civilization.

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.

From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York comes a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. In this delightful exploration of craft in its many forms, curator and scholar Glenn Adamson explores how raw materials, tools, design and technique come together to produce objects of beauty and utility.

O livro descreve o surgimento, nos anos 1920, do rádio de galena,no Rio de Janeiro,através do qual se projetariam duas manifestações musicais básicas da música popular.

The enchanting story of La Maison du Pastel, a tiny shop in Paris that has been providing pastels to artists since the eighteenth century, and the two women who fell in love and brought it back to life.

What is art? A mere imitation of life or something far greater—an act of creation that reveals the soul of the universe? Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher-poet of American transcendentalism, elevates art beyond the canvas, beyond words, beyond form itself. In this essay, he explores the divine spark within creativity, arguing that true art is not bound by technique or tradition but flows from the spirit of the artist, a force both mysterious and essential.

Китай — процветающее государство с богатыми историей, культурой, традициями. Искусство этой страны всегда выделялось на общем фоне, а разнообразные китайские надписи, статуэтки, кувшины, тарелки, чашки, зеркала, костюмы покоряют своей оригинальностью и красотой. Китайские парки, сады, пагоды отличаются необычным стилем оформления и каждый год притягивают миллионы туристов. Эта книга — своеобразный путеводитель по искусству Поднебесной, который подробнее познакомит вас с основными жанрами, видами, направлениями, шедеврами китайского искусства и его историей.

★ "The Art of Balancing Yin-Yang Energy" is an enlightening and transformative guide that unveils the ancient wisdom of harmonizing the opposing forces of Yin and Yang within ourselves and the world around us. Drawing from the profound teachings of Eastern philosophy and modern-day practices, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of Yin and Yang and provides practical techniques to achieve balance, harmony, and fulfillment in all aspects of life. In today's fast-paced and chaotic world, finding balance is more crucial than ever. Whether you seek to improve your relationships, ...

In 1922, after fifteen years of searching, archaeologists finally discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun. There, buried alongside the king's mummy, they found more than 5,000 unique objects, from the mundane to the extravagant, from the precious to the everyday. Tutankhamun's spectacular gold mask is justifiably famous, but the rest of the treasures remain largely unknown, their stories untold.

The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world's greatest art museum.

What is modern art? Who started it? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it such big money? Join BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art.

How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter provides a guide for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. A much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world.

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.

From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America’s first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs.

Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the 10 most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.

"Know thyself" - this fundamental imperative appeared for the first time in ancient Greece. For the Greeks, self-knowledge and identity were the basics of their civilization and their sources were to be found in where one was born and into which social group. These determined who you were and what your duties were. In this book the independent scholar Ingrid Rossellini surveys the major ideas that, from Greek and Roman antiquity through the Christian medieval era up to the dawn of modernity in the Renaissance, have guided the Western project of self-knowledge.

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur.