Criticism & Theory

The first biography of Roland Penrose, one of the great English-born practitioners of modernism in the twentieth century. James King explores the intricacies of Penrose's life and work, his complex professional and personal lives,...

The definitive collection of artist profiles by legendary journalist and New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins, from the 1960s to today When Calvin Tomkins joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1960, he did not plan to make art and living artists his...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783956795817Author Jenny OdellFormat PaperbackPage Count 80Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 91gDimensions(mm) 179mm * 116mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262611053Author Rosalind E. KraussFormat PaperbackPage Count 366Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 590gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 178mm *...

A panoramic insider's account of the global art industry, revealing the fascinating but mysterious workings of the world of contemporary art. Over the last few decades the contemporary art world has become more globalized and more visible than ever...

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicamentsIn this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late...

In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Martin Kemp examines the major optically oriented examples of artistic theory and practice from Brunelleschi's invention of perspective and its exploitation by Leonardo and Durer to the beginnings of...

In recent years, the rise of research-creation-a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right-has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by...

Margaret Boden presents a series of essays in which she explores the nature of creativity in a wide range of art forms. Creativity in general is the generation of novel, surprising, and valuable ideas (conceptual, theoretical, musical, literary, or...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781838003906Author K Allado-McDowellFormat PaperbackPage Count 232Imprint Ignota BooksPublisher Ignota Books

'One of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.' William Morris, in the Preface. The Nature of Gothic started life as a chapter in Ruskin's masterwork, The Stones of Venice. Ruskin came to lament the 'Frankenstein monsters' of...

Although the arts are often thought to be closer to the rim of education than to its core, they are, surprisingly, critically important means for developing complex and subtle aspects of the mind, argues Elliot Eisner in this engrossing book. In it he...

The definitive statement on aesthetics and the history of modernism from one of France's most renowned philosophers. Composed of a series of scenes that defined modernism, Aisthesis takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the...

A new edition of conversations between the artist Ai Wei Wei and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, coming up to the present dayAi Weiwei - artist, architect, curator, publisher, poet and urbanist - extended the notion of art and is one of the world's most...

This book draws on aesthetic theory, including ideas from the history of painting, music and dance, to offer a fresh perspective on the video game as a popular cultural form. It argues that games like Grand Theft Auto and Elektroplankton are aesthetic...

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship...

A significant new interpretation of the emergence of Western pictorial realism When Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) completed the revolutionary Ghent Altarpiece in 1432, it was unprecedented in European visual culture. His novel visual strategies, including...

The Chinese often use the expression du hua, "to read a painting," in connection with their study and appreciation of such works. This volume closely "reads" thirty-six masterpieces of Chinese painting from the encyclopedic collection of The Metropolitan...

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781621389545Author Edward ClarkeFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Angelico PressPublisher Angelico PressWeight(grams) 381gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781941701898Author Jarrett EarnestFormat PaperbackPage Count 560Imprint David ZwirnerPublisher David ZwirnerWeight(grams) 970g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679743750Author Daniel J. BoorstinFormat PaperbackPage Count 832Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 675gDimensions(mm) 203mm...

In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist "science of imaginary solutions," a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other...

Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) was one of the most pioneering and provocative art historians of our time. In 1971 she published her groundbreaking article, 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?', an impassioned feminist rallying cry that called...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681376615Author Ross FeldFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

Frida Kahlo was an amputee in the last part of her life, but long before that her right leg had been compromised by a childhood bout with polio. Since adolescence, Emily Rapp, herself an amputee since the age of four, felt that there were many things she...

An exploration of Turner's final, vital years, including new readings of some of his most significant paintings The paintings and drawings Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) produced from 1835 to his death are seen by many as his most audacious...

"Like the great German critic Walter Benjamin, Rosenberg is a master of dialectics whose sense of art is continuous with his sense of society, and (also like Benjamin) bears no taint of compromised, out-of-work radicalism. Instead, his radicalism is very...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780954842123Author Richard OsborneFormat PaperbackPage Count 187Imprint Zidane PressPublisher Zidane PressWeight(grams) 294g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780061227974Author Leonard ShlainFormat PaperbackPage Count 496Imprint HarperPerennialPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 534gDimensions(mm)...

"Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world's varied ways of affording itself." -from Thought in the ActCombining...

This volume of essays explores the scope for a further extension of ecocriticism across the environmental humanities. Contributors, who include both established academics and early career researchers in the humanities, were given free rein to interpret...

'A terrific and important book ...it's a great, fresh take on how the 21st century is transforming the way we select everything from food to music' David Bodanis, author of E=MC2 In the past two years humanity has produced more data than the rest of...

The perfect Father's Day giftTolkien's works have inspired artists for generations and have given rise to myriad interpretations of the rich and magical worlds he created.The Illustrated World of Tolkien gathers together artworks and essays from expert...

What can philosophy reveal about painting and how might it deepen our understanding of this enduring art form? Philosophy of Painting investigates the complex relationship between the painted surface and the depicted subject, opening up current debates...

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's...

Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory...

This project addresses the contexts of Practice as Research and how to undertake it. This second iteration updates thinking and practices but sustains a direct and clear approach on how to become a practitioner-researcher. New features include an...

A revised and updated new edition of this best-selling introduction to the study of contemporary popular culture. The book presents an accessible introduction to the range of theories and methods which have been used to study contemporary popular culture...

"Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the...