Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

by Arthur I. Miller

"Miller is an excellent historian...and a fine biographer.... <His> artful arrangement of his conclusions...makes the book something of an intellectual thriller."-- New York Times Book Review . The most important scientist of the twentieth century and the most important artist had their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances. This fascinating... (more)

Still Life With Oysters and Lemon

by Mark Doty

From Mark Doty, one of our finest poets, a delicate and sensual literary essay. Part memoir, part art history, part meditation, this hybrid volume uses the great Dutch still life paintings of the seventeenth century as a departure point for an examination of uestions about our relationships with things, how we invest them with human store, how they hold feeling and hope and history within them. Mark Doty is... (more)

The gift : creativity and the artist in the modern world

The gift : creativity and the artist in the modern world

by Lewis Hyde

By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. Widely available again after twenty-five years, this book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared. An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift ... (more)

The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

"A lucid and highly concentrated analysis of the creative process. . . . <May> describes the requisites for the creative encounter and the moment of the 'breakthrough'."— Saturday Review What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around? In... (more)

Eva Hesse Drawing

Eva Hesse (1936--1970) was a highly experimental artist who continually challenged the conventions of her time. For Hesse, drawing played a unique role, providing the nexus between her works in all media. Eva Hesse Drawing is the first book to explore her drawing process, following her work from drawing to painting and sculpture, and always back to drawing. The book features important, recently rediscovered... (more)

On Photography

by Susan Sontag

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticis m. One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave”essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching... (more)

John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Art

John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Art

by John Updike

These 23 essays on traditional and modern art show John Updike at his most eclectic, entertaining, and enlightening. Originally published in 1989 and until now unavailable in any edition, Just Looking had become one of Updike's rarest and most sought-after titles. It collects the best of the novelist and critic's multifarious musings on art and artists, museums and popular culture, the lives behind the works and... (more)

Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series

Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series

by John Berger

"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 explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" is... (more)

Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

by Dave Hickey

"As enjoyable and provocative a book of criticism as anyone has published in years."--Rolling Stone. "Hickey creates music of his own with the style of a good short-fiction writer and the insight of a first-rate thinker."--The Nation. "...a deliciously democratic style of prose."--The Boston Phoenix. "Air Guitar is naked pleasure, executing an unabashed literary seduction."--Los Angeles Times. Third Printing.

Art & Physics

by Leonard Shlain

Art interprets the visible world, physics charts its unseen workings--making the two realms seem completely opposed. But in Art & Physics, Leonard Shlain tracks their breakthroughs side by side throughout history to reveal an astonishing correlation of visions. From the classical Greek sculptors to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and from Aristotle to Einstein, aritsts have foreshadowed the discoveries of... (more)

After Modern Art 1945-2000 (Oxford History of Art)

After Modern Art 1945-2000 (Oxford History of Art)

by David Hopkins

Modern and contemporary art can be both baffling and beautiful; it can also be innovative, political, and disturbing. This book sets out to provide the first concise interpretation of the period as a whole, clarifying the artists and their works along the way. Closely informed by new critical approaches, it concentrates on the relationship between American and European art from the end of the Second World War to... (more)

Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World

by Natalie Goldberg

Join the bestselling author of Wild Mind and Writing Down the Bones as she explores a new realm of creativity--the world of color--and offers us an intimate view of how everyday life is transformed into art. In twelve high-spirited chapters, Natalie introduces us to her family, her artist friends, her New Mexico home, her painting trips to Europe--always focusing on the questions faced by any creative person,... (more)

De Kooning's Bicycle: Artists and Writers in the Hamptons

De Kooning's Bicycle: Artists and Writers in the Hamptons

by Robert Long

Some of the twentieth century's most important artists and writers--from Jackson Pollock to Saul Steinberg, Frank O'Hara to Jean Stafford--lived and worked on the East End of Long Island years before it assumed an alternate identity as the Hamptons. The home they made there, and its effect on their work, is the subject of these searching, lyrical vignettes by the critic and poet Robert Long. Pollock moved to... (more)

About Looking

by John Berger

here is great stillness in Berger's prose. But after a few pages, his statements start to sing and go on singing." -- New Republic As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning... (more)

Postmodernism (Movements in Modern Art)

by Eleanor Heartney

This volume is an introduction to the intellectual movement known as Postmodernism and its impact on the visual arts. In clear, jargon-free language, Eleanor Heartney situates Postmodernism historically, showing how it developed both in reaction to and as a result of some of the fundamental beliefs underlying Modernism, especially its positivist, universalizing aspects. She then analyzes paradigmatic Postmodern... (more)

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

by Martin Gayford

The mesmerizing true story of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin in the most celebrated cohabitation in art history. From October to December of 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a yellow house in the south of France with Vincent Van Gogh. Never before or since have two such towering artists occupied so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history--one calm, the other volatile--and the denouement of... (more)

Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg

Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg

by Calvin Tomkins

Calvin Tomkins first discovered the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, when he began to look seriously at contemporary art. While gazing at Rauschenberg's painting Double Feature, Tomkins felt compelled to make some kind of literal connection to the work, and it is in that sprit that "for the last forty years it's been <his> ambition to write about contemporary art not as a critic or a judge,... (more)

Keeping a Rendezvous

by John Berger

One of the world's most influential art critics... and one of the most original of contemporary thinkers... Berger's ability to see something clearly, with fresh surprise yet profound understanding, makes his writing singularly moving and informative." -- Washington Times When he stands before Giorgione's La Tempesta, John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost... (more)

The House of the Singing Winds: The Life and Work of T.C. Steele

The House of the Singing Winds: The Life and Work of T.C. Steele

by Selma N. Steele

First published in 1966, this account of the life and work of T. C. Steele, one of Indiana’s most renowned artists, has become a much-sought-after classic. For this reissue, sixty-two of the book’s seventy-six illustrations, including all ten color plates, have been newly photographed and reproduced according to the highest modern standards. The text, unchanged from the first edition, includes a brief biography by... (more)

Shape of Content, TheBen Shahn

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: on art

by Arthur I. Miller

by Mark Doty

by Lewis Hyde

by Rollo May

by Susan Sontag

by John Updike

by John Berger

by Dave Hickey

by Leonard Shlain

by David Hopkins

by Natalie Goldberg

by Robert Long

by John Berger

by Eleanor Heartney

by Martin Gayford

by Calvin Tomkins

by John Berger

by Selma N. Steele

by Ben Shahn