History & Criticism

Diamond Is Fragile was one of my favorite books from my late grandfather's library. Much to my surprise (and dismay) it was only published once in the former Soviet Union approximately 50 years ago and (to the best of my knowledge) has never been published abroad....

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.

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....

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

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.....

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....

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 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....

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....

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

Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings....

Spanning from the classical sculpture of Ancient Rome to contemporary performance art, this guide provides a rich overview of art history, covering many topics explored in a history of art degrees....

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....

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....

An expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir, and biography on the subject of loneliness told through the lives of six iconic artists....

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....

Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. After the death of famed art detective Harold Smith, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to take up the case....

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....

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....

In this landmark study of Italy from the 14th through the early 16th centuries, Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt chronicles the rise of Florence and Venice as powerful city-states....

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.

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 ...

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.

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.