Showing titles in History & Criticism

Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners, the mining companies have arrived and Aboriginal art has flourished.

Sheridan Morley writes: "When my father died at eighty-four on the morning of Derby Day 1992 (one of the few he ever missed), he and I had been together for just over fifty years. In the immediate aftermath of his sudden death, I knew two things; how much I would always miss the sheer joy of his company, and how much I wanted to write about him, if only to explain to myself and my children the life and career of the last great Boulevardier of his or any other time."

Who are the Medici brothers? And who is trying to assassinate them? Why was the Pitti Palace never completed? And what part did Leonardo play in all of this? Leonardo da Vinci is remembered as an artist and inventor. But who was he before anyone knew his name? This family-friendly novel explores the history and the legends of his early years in Florence. It also weaves a mystery of politics and power.

Qu'est-ce que l'art ? Comment s'est-il constitué et défini à travers l'histoire ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec la philosophie ?

Though many have never heard her name, Alice Prin—Kiki de Montparnasse—was the icon of 1920s Paris. She captivated as a ground-breaking nightclub performer, wrote a bestselling memoir, sold out exhibitions of her paintings, and shared drinks with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp and Gertrude Stein. She also shepherded along the career of the then-unknown American photographer: Man Ray.

"Il dipinto era steso su un ampio tavolo coperto da carta velina. Presentava l'aspetto comune a molti dipinti antichi realizzati con una tecnica eccellente. Le vernici ingiallite offuscavano i colori e le forme. Ma lasciavano trapelare intatta la forza della pittura di Michelangelo." Antonio Forcellino, tra i massimi conoscitori dell'opera del maestro fiorentino, è abituato a ricevere decine di richieste di expertise, la maggior parte improbabili. Tra queste c'è anche quella di un americano che gli manda per email la fotografia del disegno preparatorio di una tavola in suo possesso.

Hidden Hands tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part. Without manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased and the remnants of their labours destroyed.

Walter Benjamin beschreibt in seinem berühmtesten Aufsatz Ursprung und Technik der Reproduktion von Kunstwerken und bietet damit die theoretische Basis für die Diskussion über die Vervielfältigung von Kunst in der Neuzeit.

In this series of essays, Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator, examines the current art scene with a scathing intelligence and a crystalline eloquence of writing style. Particularly amusing are his dissections of art-show catalogspeak.

Este es un ensayo corto, un poco alejado de un análisis puramente psicoanalítico, que intenta interpretar la enigmática escultura de Moisés en San Pietro-Vincoli esculpida por Miguel Ángel.

This is an art adventure story and a memoir all in one, written by a leading expert on the Renaissance whose metier is a high-stakes detective game involving massive amounts of money and frenetic activity in the service of the art market and scholarship alike. It's also an eloquent argument for the enduring value of visual creativity, told with passion, brilliance, and surprising candor.

Inner growth and healing through art Why artists get stuck Finding yourself through art Traps that artists fall into Art and sex The three stages of art In this highly original work, John Ruskan explores the intricacies of feeling-oriented art. He presents radical insights about the nature of the art process that explain exactly what it is that artists do, how they can do it better, and how to make art an essential route to enlightenment through revealing and integrating the personal subconscious. This book is not just a rehash of old art therapy principles, but breaks new ground in the ...

In Reshaping Art, T. M. Krishna examines what art is and how we can harness its power to make ourselves and our communities open and sensitive. Well known for his attempts to break Karnatik music out of its high-caste confines, the author takes us through a journey of understanding what art means to different groups of people and the ways in which we all create and enjoy it.

The Ark of the Covenant has been lost for more than 2600 years. Many sources allege that the Knights Templar had discovered it while they were in Israel during the Crusades (and they may have hidden it elsewhere). No one is talking about where the Ark is located today. But there were hints to its whereabouts hidden right in front of us. The word 'Ark' appeared clearly in rebus pictograms. In fact, you'll be surprised to find the extent to which there were clues to the Ark concealed in the artwork pertaining to the Knights Templar. This book explores just what the secrecy around the Ark ...

When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see?

In 1882, there was an artistic explosion of creativity in Europe. To a poor girl, Maria, and her alcoholic, prostitute mother, Sien, in The Hague, Netherlands, that didn't mean much until one winter evening when her mother brought Vincent Van Gogh to their home. Before his stint in Paris with the bohemian painters of his day, Van Gogh tried for a family life while learning the trade of art. Seminary school was a failure, and his cousin, Klee, had rejected his romantic advances.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. Now, a new collection of Franzen’s non-fiction brings fresh demonstrations of his vivid, moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a master noticer, social critic, and self-investigator. In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, the writer returns with renewed vigour....

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Turner by Franny Moyle, read by John Sackville. J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life.

In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder.

Serving as a supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, Viral Cultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic's past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS.