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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorUnderstanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Scott McCloud · 215 pages
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art
History of Beauty
Umberto Eco, Girolamo De Michele · 438 pages
From the Publisher: What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Charles Baudelaire · 224 pages
"Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet and writer, has also been called 'the father of modern criticism'. This stimulating volume gathers together some of his most celebrated critical writings."--Amazon.
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson · 304 pages
Discusses whether the brutal imagery present in reality and entertainment will shock society into a less alienated state and help create a just social order or whether focusing on representations of cruelty makes society more cruel.
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
Roger Shattuck · 397 pages
The modernism of our times explained through a study of four significant men.
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
Walter Pater · 238 pages
Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was one of the most talked about books in nineteenth-century Britain, and it remains a work of unusual importance to anyone interested in art history or English literature. Pater’s luxurious and finely wrought style inspired generations of writers, and his unique blend of scholarship, philosophy, and personal bias made his view of the quinte
Encounter
Milan Kundera · 192 pages
Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Camille Paglia · 718 pages
Discusses the works of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Rousseau, de Sade, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Emily Bronte, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, and Emily Dickinson.
This is Not a Pipe
Michel Foucault · 66 pages
What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambigui
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
Daniel J. Boorstin · 811 pages
In this engrossing companion to his bestselling The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of achievement in the arts. The Discoverers, which has been translated into twenty languages, gave us an epic of the quest to understand the world, from the heavens to the human heart. Now Boorstin puts flesh on the great figures who hav
Ways of Seeing
John Berger · 166 pages
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we e
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
Orlando Figes · 748 pages
"Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, this internationally renowned historian does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.". "Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg - a "wind
Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs
Paul Koudounaris · 192 pages
An intriguing visual history of the veneration in European churches and monasteries of bejeweled and decorated skeletons Death has never looked so beautiful. The fully articulated skeleton of a female saint, dressed in an intricate costume of silk brocade and gold lace, withered fingers glittering with colorful rubies, emeralds, and pearls―this is only one of the specially photographed relics f
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Jeanette Winterson · 192 pages
"Jeanette Winterson argues in this collection for the importance of art in all our lives. In ten intertwined essays, the acclaimed author of such recent novels as Written on the Body and Art & Lies proposes art as an active force in the world - neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting even those who don't." "An act of courage and effrontery, a uniquely human endeavo
A Place in the Country
W.G. Sebald · 208 pages
W. G. Sebald's meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind--and the last of this great writer's major works to be translated into English.
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Jacques Barzun · 896 pages
"Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.". "In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of
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
The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher
Bruno Ernst, M.C. Escher · 112 pages
Mathematician Bruno Ernst examines the oeuvre of twentieth-century Dutch artist M. C. Escher, as well as the artist's life and his inspirations and techniques.
Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing
Johanna Burton, Jeanine Herman · 352 pages
All His Glamorous American Pin-Ups
Gil Elvgren, Charles G. Martignette, Louis K. Meisel