What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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
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
About 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
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty
Dave Hickey · 93 pages
"The Invisible Dragon made a lot of noise for a little book. When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty - and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging." "With this revised and expanded edition, Hickey is back
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.
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 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
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.
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
Mark Doty · 75 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
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
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
Playing to the Gallery
Grayson Perry · 200 pages
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.
Leonardo da Vinci
Walter Isaacson · 616 pages
The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improv
Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams
Diane Waldman · 152 pages
"Out of the fantasies that enriched a private, often reclusive life, Joseph Cornell created a "poetic theater of memory." His box constructions and collages feature such characters as a Medici princess, birds, ballerinas, and movie stars. Using the seemingly commonplace materials that he collected in five-and-dime stores and other shops in New York City - cordial glasses, mirrors, marbles, and ma
Carl W. Peters
Richard H. Love, Carl William Peters · 962 pages
Throughout his life Peters depicted the ordinary places and people of America. From Rochester to Rockport, Peters made an amazingly coherent group of fascinating, masterful American pictures.
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
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