What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAbout Looking
John Berger · 198 pages
This successor to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, written over the last ten years, searches for meaning within and beyond what is looked at. Why do zoos disappoint children? Why do we take snapshots of those we love? How do the media use photographs of agony? When an animal looks us in the eyes, what does that look mean? Berger describes how a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s com
On Art and Life
John Ruskin · 109 pages
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilizatio
Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art
Julian Barnes · 336 pages
An updated edition of the highly acclaimed collection of writing on art by one of Britain's best-loved authors, with seven new illustrated essays. 'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we
The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa
Michael Kimmelman · 256 pages
From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe · 128 pages
A lamentation on the state of modernist, international style architecture. In this long-form architectural screed in essay form, Wolfe takes aim at celebrated figures in the modernist movement—most notably Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius—and examines the reasons for their rise and continuing acclaim.
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Olivia Laing · 336 pages
"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with an
The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
Robert Henri · 275 pages
From 1915 to 1927, Henri was a popular and influential teacher at the Art Students League of New York. He provided for each student not a style so much as an attitude, an approach to art. Henri's philosophical and practical musings were collected by former pupil Margery Ryerson and published as The Art Spirit (1923), a book that remained in print for several decades. Henri's other students inclu
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
Playing to the Gallery
Grayson Perry · 200 pages
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
Mark Doty · 75 pages
The Power of Art
Simon Schama · 448 pages
Taking eight famous painters and their great masterpieces, this book takes you back to the intense moment in history when these works were conceived and born. In each case the artist is backed into a corner, and given a chance to confound his rivals, enemies and critics.
Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
Camille Paglia · 202 pages
An enthralling journey through Western art's defining moments, from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Queen Nefertari to George Lucas's volcano planet duel in "Revenge of the Sith."
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Walter Benjamin · 374 pages
A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Thinking Architecture
Peter Zumthor · 77 pages
Featuring four essays by Peter Zumthor, this volume exhibits the essence of Zumthor's architectural ideas.
Wall and Piece
Banksy · 207 pages
From the Publisher: Graffiti artist Banksy decorates streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cities throughout the world. His identity remains unknown but his work is witty, subversive and prolific. And now, he's put together the best of his work in a fully illustrated color volume.
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky · 92 pages
A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his o
The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature
Jose Ortega y Gasset · 204 pages
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired
Francine Prose · 432 pages
"In this new book, Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process.". "There is no ideal muse, but rather as many variations on the theme as there are individual women who have had the luck, or misfortune, to find their destiny conjoined
Interaction of Color
Josef Albers · 81 pages
Josef Albers' "Interaction of Color" is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers' unique ideas of colour experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edi
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art
Eileen Myles · 365 pages
Poet and post-punk hero Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing ab