History & Criticism

The award-winning art historian and founder of the Vision & Justice project uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.

Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

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.

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)....

It is one of the enduring enigmas of the human experience: many of our most iconic, creative endeavors are not achievements but conversions, corrections after failed attempts....

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....

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

When Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of O’Keeffe was first published in 1989, it received rave reviews and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year....

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....

A riveting story of how dueling ambitions and the power of prodigy made America the cultural center of the world—and Picasso the most famous artist alive—in the shadow of World War II....

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

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

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake....

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

Plutarchs's (46-120 A.D.) epic chronicle of the lives of great Grecians and Romans....

Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one of history's most influential and beloved works of art - The Last Supper....

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....

A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake....

A fascinating and counterintuitive portrait of the sordid, hidden world behind the dazzling artwork of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and more....

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 lively and deeply researched group biography of the figures who transformed the world of art in bohemian Paris in the first decade of the 20th century....

One of the nation’s top art critics shows how six great artists made old age a time of triumph by producing some of the greatest work of their long careers—and, in some cases, changing the course of art history....

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....

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....

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....

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans-then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris.

Driven by different motives, Robert Moses and Francis Cardinal Spellman had the same vision: to display Michelangelo's masterpiece, the Pietà, in the Vatican's pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.

Edvard Munch's The Scream, an inspiration for the world's most celebrated memes, had hidden a ghostly secret! In fact, several images of rebus pictograms linked to physics were being deliberately embedded in The Scream. Our books are picture-based so the audiobook should ONLY be an add-on. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview on a few different secrets that pertain to The Scream. Munch had concealed clues to math and physics. That premise seems impossible. But it is true. Secrets were being purposefully concealed in the artworks. We'll present ample evidence to back ...

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing.