**A revelatory biography of the Jewish expressionist painter that corrects the myths surrounding his work and proves his importance to the contemporary art world“It’s not often that an art history book comes along so sharply perceptive about its subject and so grippingly written that reading it is akin to the thrilling experience of looking at the paintings themselves. This is what Celeste Marcus has achieved in her transformative account of Chaim Soutine.”—Simon Schama, author of ...

For skeptics, art lovers, and the millions of us who visit art galleries every year—and are confused—What Are You Looking At? by former director of London’s Tate Gallery Will Gompertz is a wonderfully lively, accessible narrative history of Modern Art, from Impressionism to the present day.What is modern art? Who started it? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it such big money? Join BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will ...

One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year“An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Barcelona and Paris” (The Washington Post) and how he achieved his breakthrough and revolutionized modern art through his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.In 1900, eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso journeyed from Barcelona ...

The third volume of Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.Here is Picasso at the height of his powers in Rome and Naples, producing the sets and costumes with Cocteau for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and visiting Pompei where the antique statuary fuel his obsession with classicism; in Paris, creating some of his most important sculpture and paintin...

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays o...

Another fascinating book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism.If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today...

A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-guard. More than 250 color photos.

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —ModiglianiAmedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whis...

Marc Chagall was born into a strict Jewish family for whom the ban on representations of the human figure had the weight of dogma. A failure in the entrance examination for the Stieglitz School did not stop Chagall from later joining that famous school founded by the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and directed by Nicholas Roerich. Chagall moved to Paris in 1910. The city was his “second Vitebsk”. At first, isolated in the little room on the Impasse du Maine at La Ruche,...

This collection of journals, interviews and travelogues by the author of Invisible Cities has "something fascinating on every page" ( The Guardian, UK).This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance durin...

An extraordinary collection--hawk-eyed and understanding--from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life.As Julian Barnes explains: "Flaubert believed 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 it is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only ...

Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter Robert Delaunay, and co-founder of the Orphist school in 1910, was the center of a brilliant circle in Paris. Madsen offers a rich and compelling look at this fascinating and influential woman, the first living female artist to have a retrospective show at the Louvre.