Book picks similar to
Magic in Art by Alexander Sturgis


art
art-history
art-opt
cultural-studies

Home: A Short History of an Idea


Witold Rybczynski - 1986
    Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private lives--and how we really want to live.

The Primary Colors: Three Essays


Alexander Theroux - 1994
    Three interrelated essays on the primary colors presents the artistic, aesthetic, emotional, and economic dimensions of each color in an anecdotal format of poetry and humor.

Leonardo da Vinci


Anna Abraham - 2014
    Best known as one of the world's greatest painters, he sketched the foundations for inventions that would not come to fruition for centuries. Born a bastard in a hillside village in northern Italy, Leonardo became the protégé of princes, popes, and kings. He mastered so many branches of science that scholars still debate whether he was greater as an anatomist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, or naturalist. Nevertheless, he died unhappy, believing he had failed to work the miracles of which he had dreamed. Here, from New York Times bestselling author Anna Abraham, is his extraordinary story.

The Novel: A Biography


Michael Schmidt - 2014
    Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, "Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature," Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but "artist practitioners," men and women who feel "hot love" for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliche--some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages."

Sex, Drugs & Opera


Roland Orzabal - 2014
    With his gorgeous, successful wife, Jenny, his country pile, and gold discs hanging in his plush bathroom, he seems to have it all. But all is not well between Jenny and Solomon; as her business continues to grow, her affection for her husband begins to diminish, and soon divorce is on the cards. To try and win Jenny back, Solomon throws his bruised heart into trying out for a reality TV show that turns lapsed pop acts into opera singers. The ace up his sleeve is an eccentric octogenarian opera coach he employs to get ahead of the competition but, to his surprise, Solomon learns far more than how to improve the quality of his vibrato; especially when his coach asks Solomon to duet with newly single Samantha... Sex, Drugs & Opera is the debut novel of Tears for Fears musician, Roland Orzabal.

Adult Coloring Book: Stress Relieving Designs Animals, Mandalas, Flowers, Paisley Patterns And So Much More: Coloring Book For Adults


Cindy Elsharouni - 2017
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ over a 19,000 reviews! Join the hundreds of thousands of happy colorists that really appreciate good quality artwork.Various Levels Of Intricacy Keeping You Excited and Inspired To Color!So Many Different Themes To Choose From: Garden Designs, Animals, Mandalas, and Paisley Patterns, Decorative Art.Perfect For Every Skill Level: Great For Growing Your Skills.Perfect With Your Choice Of Coloring Tools (Crayon, Gel Pens, Markers, Colored Pencils).High Resolution Crisp Clean Printing Of Illustrations.Each Coloring Page Is On One Sheet. Printed One Sided. Don't Worry About Bleed Through.Frequently Gifted. This Book Makes The Perfect Gift For Christmas Holidays, Birthday and More. Grab a Set of Pencils To Go With It!Create Your Own Frame-Worthy Masterpieces!This adult coloring book from Cindy Elsharouni has over 60 animal patterns and provides hours of stress relief through creative expression. It features small and big creatures from forests, oceans, deserts, and woodland. About Selah Works Selah Works and Cindy Elsharouni create a wide range of coloring books, journal and sketchbooks that help you relax, unwind, and express your creativity. Explore the entire Selah Works collection to find your next coloring or creative adventure.Buy Now & Relax. Scroll to the top of the page and click the Add to Cart button.

Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares


Nils Büttner - 2016
    The creator of expansive tableaus of fantastic and hellish scenes—where any devil not dancing is too busy eating human souls—he has been as equally misunderstood by history as his paintings have. In this book, Nils Büttner draws on a wealth of historical documents—not to mention Bosch’s paintings—to offer a fresh and insightful look at one of history’s most peculiar artists on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death.             Bosch’s paintings have elicited a number a responses over the centuries. Some have tried to explain them as alchemical symbolism, others as coded messages of a secret cult, and still others have tried to psychoanalyze them. Some have placed Bosch among the Adamites, others among the Cathars, and others among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, seeing in his paintings an occult life of free love, strange rituals, mysterious drugs, and witchcraft. As Büttner shows, Bosch was—if anything—a hardworking painter, commissioned by aristocrats and courtesans, as all painters of his time were. Analyzing his life and paintings against the backdrop of contemporary Dutch culture and society, Büttner offers one of the clearest biographical sketches to date alongside beautiful reproductions of some of Bosch’s most important work. The result is a smart but accessible introduction to a unique artist whose work transcends genre.

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology


Rozsika Parker - 1982
    The authors analyze the lives and workd of women in both the fine and decorative arts from the Middle Ages until the 1970s.

The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector


Howard Greenfeld - 1987
    The Devil and Dr. Barnes traces the near-mythical journey of a man who was born into poverty, amassed a fortune through the promotion of a popular medicine, and acquired the premier private collection of works by such masters as Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. Ostentatiously turning his back on the art establishment, Barnes challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of an uninitiated, often resistant and scoffing, American audience. In particular, he championed Matisse, Soutine, and Modigliani when they were obscure or in difficult straits. Analyzing what he saw as the formal relationships underlying all art, linking the old and the new, Barnes applied these principles in a rigorous course of study offered at his Merion foundation. Barnes's own mordant words, culled from the copious printed record, animate the narrative throughout, as do accounts of his associations with notables of the era--Gertrude and Leo Stein, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among them--many of whom he alienated with his appetite for passionate, public feuds. In this rounded portrait, Albert Barnes emerges as a complex, flawed man, who--blessed with an astute eye for greatness--has left us an incomparable treasure, gathered in one place and unforgettable to all who have seen it.

After Art


David Joselit - 2012
    In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house.Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.

This is Pollock


Catherine Ingram - 2014
    His iconic paintings stretch out with the generosity and scale of America's Western landscape where the artist grew up. Pollock said that he painted "out of his conscious": the cathartic dribbled paint reflected his troubled mind.This book traces Pollock's career and discusses how his loose, individual style was used as a political weapon in the Cold War, representing America as the free, democratic nation. Illustrations simplify the theory and reveal the hidden meaning behind the mesh of painted lines.This title is appropriate for ages 14 and up

"A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition


Rosalind E. Krauss - 2000
    Based on the 1999 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, this book uses the work of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers to argue that the specifity of mediums, even modernist ones, can never be simply collapsed into the physicality of their support.

Fucked Up + Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement


Christopher T. Miller - 1999
    Many were created by the musicians themselves and demonstrate the emphasis within the punk scene on individuality and the manic urge of its members to create things new. Images were compiled out of whatever material could be found, often photocopied and, still warm, stapled to the nearest telephone pole to warn the world about next week's gig. One glance and you can sense the fury of live performances by bands such as Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and The Minutemen, and, through the subtext the reader is exposed to the psyche of a generation of musicians stripped bare: The Germs, J.F.A, NOFX, X, The Circle Jerks, Devo, The Exploited, The Screamers, The Cramps, The Dils, The Avengers and more.

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy


Jacob Burckhardt - 1860
    In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

Art and Feminism


Helena Reckitt - 2001
    Widely acknowledged as both beautiful and intelligent, a sourcebook of art informed by feminism from the 1960s to the start of the 21st century, now available in paperback.