An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending. “An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review As...

Winner of the Arts Club of Washington Marfield PrizeA New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionThis "admiring and absorbing biography" (Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review) charts Sam Wagstaff's incalculable influence on...

Describes life in Paris between the wars, discusses art, fashions, drama, architecture, and advertising, and evokes the spirit of the times

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color red throughout the agesThe color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege in...

A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass mediaThis fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and...

In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound,...

One of the most important sculptors of this century, Richard Serra has been a spokesman on the nature and status of art in our day. Best known for site-specific works in steel, Serra has much to say about the relation of sculpture to place, whether...

While the Olympics, because of their modern revival, enjoy the greatest fame today, in ancient Greece other religious festivals were equally elaborate and impressive spectacles. The lavishly illustrated Goddess and Polis is the first work devoted to the...

Since the early 1980s, Anish Kapoor's investigations into objecthood, materiality and gravity have explored the concept of the void, or "objects becoming space." His sculptures, installations and public art test the phenomenology of space and have...

Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan is the first book-length study to focus on short-story small scrolls (ko-e), one of the most complex but visually appealing forms of early Japanese painting. Small picture scrolls emerged in Japan...

One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the...

The major paintings of iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) presented together in an accessible volume.   Andrew Wyeth is an essential introduction to the enduring masterworks of this profoundly popular American artist.   Published on the...

The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 100 Objects brings the world of Shakespeare and the Tudor era of Elizabeth I into focus We feel we know Shakespeare’s characters. Think of Hamlet, trapped in indecision, or Macbeth’s...

The fact that some domestic cats are able to make marks with paint has always been explained by biologists as an instinctive form of territorial marking behavior. Now, Why Cats Paint presents a cogently argued theory based on recent evidence which...

No other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cézanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed true to the principle of...

It was a dappled and daubed harbor scene that gave Impressionism its name. When Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet was exhibited in April 1874, critics seized upon the work's title and its loose stylistic rendering of light and motion upon water to...

Most art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for...

An enlightening, accessible guide to understanding and appreciating European art from the Middle AgesHow to Read Medieval Art introduces the art of the European Middle Ages through 50 notable examples from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, which is...

Many of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases—naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarmé, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a...