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Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum
Michael Gross · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA History of the World in 100 Objects
Neil MacGregor · 707 pages
Neil MacGregor's radio series 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' has been a unique event that has set a benchmark for public service broadcasting in the UK and across the world. This book will be the tie-in to that event, reproducing the scripts describing the objects that made us who we are.
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt · 817 pages
"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra
The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
Lynn H. Nicholas · 498 pages
A discussion on the theft and collection of great European art in World War 2.
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art
Laney Salisbury, Aly Sujo · 339 pages
A tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries—many of them still hanging in prominent museums and private collections todayProvenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a g
Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures
Robert K. Wittman, John Shiffman · 324 pages
Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI's Art Crime Team, pulls back the curtain on his remarkable career, offering a real-life international thriller. The son of an antique dealer, Wittman built a twenty-year career going undercover, usually unarmed, to catch art thieves, scammers, and black market traders in Paris and Philadelphia, Rio and Santa Fe, Miami and Madrid. Wittman tells the stories
Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum
Jason Felch, Ralph Frammolino · 375 pages
Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and frank interviews, Felch and Frammolino give a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum and tell the story of the Getty's dealings in the illegal antiquities trade. Fast-paced and compelling, "Chasing Aphrodite" exposes the layer of dirt beneath the polished facade of the museum business.
The Lost Painting
Jonathan Harr · 279 pages
A decaying palazzo on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome makes a discovery that inspires a search for a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a revolutionary painter beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and
Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis
Robert M. Edsel · 496 pages
When Hitler's armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind's greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire. On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these histor
Seven Days in the Art World
Sarah Thornton · 274 pages
The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Ar
The Stolen Queen
Fiona Davis · 353 pages
*A New York Times Bestseller* From New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis, an utterly addictive new novel that will transport you from New York City’s most glamorous party to the labyrinth streets of Cairo and back. Egypt, 1936: When anthropology student Charlotte Cross is offered a coveted spot on an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, she leaps at the opportunity. That is u
The Master of the Prado
Javier Sierra · 306 pages
"Author Javier Sierra embarks on a grand tour of the Prado museum in this historical novel that illuminates the fascinating mysteries behind some of the greatest paintings in the world--complete with gorgeous, full-color inserts of artwork by Raphael, Boticelli, and other masters"--
The House Girl
Tara Conklin · 372 pages
A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
E.L. Konigsburg · 162 pages
Having run away with her younger brother to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twelve-year-old Claudia strives to keep things in order in their new home and to become a changed person and a heroine to herself.
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.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier · 248 pages
This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier d
POPism: The Warhol Sixties
Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett · 402 pages
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
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell
Deborah Solomon · 560 pages
"Deborah Solomon's definitive biography of Joseph Cornell, one of America's most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists, now reissued ten years later Few artists ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his enigmatic shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Legends about Cornell abound--th
Subway Art
Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant · 104 pages
New afterwords continue the story, tracing the decline of the subway and graffiti scene in the late 1980s to its unexpected rebirth as a global art movement.
De Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens, Annalyn Swan · 732 pages
Traces the career of abstract expressionist Willem De Kooning, discussing his personal life with wife Elaine Fried, and his battle with alcoholism and Alzheimer's disease.