How an enigmatic masterpiece of the French Revolution became a talisman of the revolutionary spirit in our own timeJacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat depicts the painter’s friend and fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat collapsed in his bath after being fatally stabbed by a female assassin who stands just outside the frame. In this fascinating book, Thomas Crow traces the radical legacy of a painting that has been called the Pietà of the Fre...

How California’s counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s profoundly shaped—and was shaped by—West Coast artistsThe 1960s exert a special fascination in modern art. But most accounts miss the defining impact of the period’s youth culture, largely incubated in California, on artists who came of age in that decade. As their prime exemplar, Bruce Conner, reminisced, “I did everything that everybody did in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury. . . . I would take peyote and walk out ...

The first in the new Power Polemics series, Thomas Crow's No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art tackles a pervading blindspot in today's art-historical inquiry: religion.Crow pursues a perhaps unpopular notion of Christianity's continued presence in modern abstract art and in the process makes a case for art's own terrain of theology: one that eschews idolatry by means of abstraction. Tracking from anti-idolatry controversies that stirred the Jansenists, through exploratio...

How social upheavals after the collapse of the French Empire shaped the lives and work of artists in early nineteenth-century EuropeAs the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of ...

Fictions of Art History, the most recent addition to the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, addresses art history’s complex relationships with fiction, poetry, and creative writing. Inspired by a 2010 conference, the volume examines art historians’ viewing practices and modes of writing. How, the contributors ask, are we to unravel the supposed facts of history from the fictions constructed in works of art? How do art historians employ or resist devices of fiction, and wh...

Reveals the change in Western man's conception and acceptance of death as evidenced in customs, literature, and art since medieval times.

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

It is the hiding place of the Holy Grail, or a great secret that will rock the Church. It is a place of hidden treasure and dark knowledge. It is the place where Jesus is buried... These are just some of the many theories now current about the village where a Victorian priest became strangely - and massively - rich, and where he left clues to a great mystery in the very fabric of his church. What is the truth about Father Sauniere and the now-famous village of Rennes-le-Château?Thi...

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent timesJerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early cha...

The international publishing sensation is now available in the United States—two brilliant, controversial authors confront each other and their enemies in an unforgettable exchange of letters.In one corner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, creator of the classic Barbarism with a Human Face, dismissed by the media as a wealthy, self-promoting, arrogant do-gooder. In the other, Michel Houellebecq, bestselling author of The Elementary Particles, widely derided as...

From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650.In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history...