The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I

7 best books like The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (Roger Shattuck): A History of the World in 100 Objects, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers - Revised Edition, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France, The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia

A History of the World in 100 Objects

Author	Neil MacGregor
ISBN	1846144132

Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects takes a bold, original approach to human history, exploring past civilizations through the objects that defined them. Encompassing a grand sweep of human history, A History of the World in 100 Objects begins with one of the earliest surviving objects...

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

Author

Robert Hughes

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.
   As art critic for Time magazine, internationally...

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Author	Deborah Solomon
ISBN	0878466843

No artist ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his disquieting shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Legends about Cornell abound--as the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the...

The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

Author

Kenneth Clark

This is a book for someone who sees Hercules and the Lion and thinks "look at how the artist is evoking the body's movement with the movement in the cloak" and not "I like the gold pubes!"



Bits:
"The drift of all popular art is towards the lowest common denominator, and, on the whole,...

The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers - Revised Edition

Author	T.J. Clark
ISBN	0691009031

The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand-new city, equipped with boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute "modern life." Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic...

The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

Author	Asti Hustvedt
ISBN	1890951072

In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-siecle: crime, pollution, sexually...

The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia

Author	Paul Devereux
ISBN	0140195408

Many people assume that experimentation with hallucinogens began with Timothy Leary and the psychedelic revolution of the fifties and sixties. In fact, as this illuminating study demonstrates, psychedelics have been used by human societies in every part of the world for ritual and spiritual purposes...