The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
10 best books like The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque (Arnold Hauser): Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Orientalism, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Undine, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature & the Inhuman, The Principles of Art, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Michelangelo, A Face to the World: On Self Portraits
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
| Author | Quentin Bell |
| ISBN | 0156935805 |
Virginia Woolf was the fiercely brainy and extremely posh girl I would have been far too shy to even dream of speaking to, had I been around then.
But, in an alternative slipstream of history, it turned out that I was alive at the time, and blow me down, there she was in the Smoke Room at the Old Butcher's...
More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic.
In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism"...
| Author | Walter Benjamin |
| ISBN | 0141036192 |
One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly - and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books...
| Author | Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué |
"Most artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte FouquE. In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it notable in any department...
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,...
| Author | George Steiner |
| ISBN | 0300074719 |
How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as...
| Author | R.G. Collingwood |
| ISBN | 0195002091 |
This treatise on aesthetics begins by showing that the word "art" is used as a name not only for "art proper" but also for certain things which are "art falsely so called." These are craft or skill, magic, and amusement, each of which, by confusion with art proper, generates a false aesthetic theory. In...
The title is not quite right--instead of human rights in history, this is a realist critique since 1945, asking the question I have at the heart of my deep cynicism: rather than lionize the people and documents that talk about human rights, why not ask why no one feels compelled to obey them? With sidelights...
| Author | Howard Hibbard |
| ISBN | 0064301486 |
In this masterly work, Howard Hibbard relates Michelangelo’s art to his life and the times in which he lived, relying on the earliest biographies and the latest scholarly research as well as on Michelangelo’s own letters and poems. What emerges is both a perspective appraisal of his work and a revealing...
| 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 | Clement Greenberg |
| ISBN | 0807066818 |
As far as art criticism goes this is the good stuff, but I have been gradually lowering my expectations of what art criticism can accomplish. Greenberg is the most well known and influential American art critic of the 20th century, as David Sylvester was in the UK. I enjoy reading both of them but I've gradually...
| Author | Yasushi Inoue |
| ISBN | 0804802572 |
Alternative cover edition here.
The Hunting Gun, set in the period immediately following WWII, follows the consequences of a tragic love affair among well-to-do people in an exclusive suburb of the great commercial cities of Osaka and Kobe. Told from the viewpoints of three different women,...
