Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
10 best books like Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Alexandra Harris): The Art Museum, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, Duchamp, The Romantic Agony, Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives Of The Pre Raphaelites, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography, A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult, Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron (Revised Edition), In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature
| Author | Phaidon Press |
| ISBN | 0714856525 |
The Art Museum offers the museum experience without the boundaries of space and time. The unique structure of the book has been created by specialists in all fields of art, from institutions worldwide, who have collected together important and innovative works as they might be displayed in the ideal...
| Author | Émile Mâle |
| ISBN | 0064300323 |
Emile Male's book aids understanding of medieval art and medieval symbolism, and of the vision of the world which presided over the building of the French cathedrals. It looks at French religious art in the Middle Ages, its forms, and especially the Eastern sources of sculptural iconography used in...
| Author | Calvin Tomkins |
| ISBN | 0805057897 |
A New York Times Notable Book of 1996
Booklist Editor's Choice, 1996
The celebrated, full-scale life of the century's most influential artist. One of the giants of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp changed the course of modern art. Visual arts, music, dance, performance--nothing...
| Author | Mario Praz |
| ISBN | 0192810618 |
In this now-classic study, Praz describes the whole of Romantic literature under one of its most characteristic aspects, that of erotic sensibility. This wide spread mood in literature had a major effect on 19th-century poets and painters, and the affinities between them and their 20th-century...
| Author | Franny Moyle |
| ISBN | 0719521904 |
Desperate Romantics, a tie-in with a new BBC series, focuses on the scandals, rather than on the group’s ideas, social experiments or artistic development: Ruskin’s loveless marriage and critical championing of Millais, who then went off with Effie Ruskin, Rossetti’s various loves, above...
| Author | Selina Shirley Hastings |
| ISBN | 1400061415 |
He was a brilliant teller of tales, one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century, and at one time the most famous writer in the world, yet W. Somerset Maugham’s own true story has never been fully told. At last, the fascinating truth is revealed in a landmark biography by the award-winning...
| Author | Gary Lachman |
| ISBN | 1560256567 |
The occult was a crucial influence on the Renaissance, and it obsessed the popular thinkers of the day. But with the Age of Reason, occultism was sidelined; only charlatans found any use for it. Occult ideas did not disappear, however, but rather went underground. It developed into a fruitful source...
Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present
| Author | Dan Mazur |
| ISBN | 0500290962 |
Comics, manga, bandes dessinees, fumetti, tebeo, historietas... no matter the name, they have been a powerful medium across four continents for decades. This is the history of comics around the world from the late 1960s to the dawn of the 21st century. Comics is a richly illustrated narrative of extraordinary...
Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron (Revised Edition)
| Author | Spencer Kansa |
| ISBN | 1906958602 |
In the first-ever biography written about her, Wormwood Star traces the extraordinary life of the enigmatic artist Marjorie Cameron (1922-1995), one of the most fascinating figures to emerge from the American Underground art world and film scene. As well as illuminating her early childhood and...
| Author | Christopher Woodward |
| ISBN | 1400030862 |
In this enchanting meditation on ruins, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter...
Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: respectively, the most influential English-language novel and poem of the century. To this day, these two works...
| Author | Arnold Hauser |
| ISBN | 0394701151 |
First published in 1951, Arnold Hauser's commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art, from its origins in the Stone Age through to the "Film Age." This new edition of a classic work explores historical and social movements and the effects these have had on the production...
| Author | Charles Baudelaire |
| ISBN | 0140446060 |
Before publishing the sensuous and scandalous poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) had already earned respect as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. This stimulating selection of criticism reveals him as a worshipper at the altar of beauty, illuminating his belief...
| Author | Zbigniew Herbert |
| ISBN | 0880013206 |
In "Still Life with a Bridle," poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert takes an intriguing look at the cultural, artisitic, and aesthetic legacy of 17th-century Holland. These sixteen essays reveal Hervert's discriminating artistic eye and poetic sensibility, one that revels in irony, humor, and a...
| Author | Peter Murray |
| ISBN | 0500200084 |
The Renaissance began in Italy, but it grew out of European civilization, with roots in Antiquity, in Christian dogma, and in Byzantium. The artistic ferment which had taken hold of Florence by 1420 was also reflected in the regional schools of Siena, Umbria, Mantua and Rome; and the new ideas spread...
| Author | Laura Cumming |
| ISBN | 0007118430 |
Focusing on the art of self-portraiture, this effortlessly engaging exploration of the lives of artists sheds fascinating light on some of the most extraordinary portraits in art history.
Self-portraits catch your eye. They seem to do it deliberately. Walk into any art gallery and they...
| Author | Fiona MacCarthy |
| ISBN | 0571228615 |
From the prize winning author of William Morris comes a new biography of Edward Burne-Jones, the greatest British artist of the second half of the nineteenth century.
The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries - Edward Burne-Jones's...
| Author | Linda Nochlin |
| ISBN | 0140132228 |
Linda Nochlin is intelligent. She probably knows more about Art than 99.9999999% of those on the planet, and she certainly knows more about Art than I ever will. She shared so many insights, brought out so many facets of the many works she described in her book Realism that I was amazed and bored. My bad,...
| Author | Roberto Calasso |
| ISBN | 0374534071 |
A spectacular act of close reading and looking by a great writer
In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso—one of the most original and acclaimed writers on literature, art, culture, and mythology—turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created...
| Author | Gabriel Josipovici |
| ISBN | 0300165773 |
The quality of today’s literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing—a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.
Modernism,...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 0679770046 |
In this gripping book, Holmes takes us from France's Massif Central, where he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and a sweet-natured donkey, to Mary Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Paris, to the Italian villages where Percy Shelley tried to cast off the strictures of English morality...
| Author | William T. Vollmann |
| ISBN | 0061228486 |
“Intrepid journalist and novelist William T. Vollman’s colossal body of work stands unsurpassed for its range, moral imperative, and artistry.”
—Booklist
William T. Vollmann, the National Book Award–winning author of Europe Central, offers a charming, evocative,...
| Author | Adam Phillips |
| ISBN | 0374212570 |
“Balancing acts,” writes Adam Phillips, “are entertaining because they are risky, but there are situations in which it is more dangerous to keep your balance than to lose it.” In these exhilarating and casually brilliant essays, the philosopher and psychoanalyst examines literature,...
