Best Modern Art

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. (Coincidentally or not, this book appears only briefly after Ilaria Dagnini Brey's The Venus Fixers: The Untold Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II , Reviews, June 1.). Our task, I believe, was truly important - we were restoring to Europe evidence of its own civilization, which the War seemed virtually to have destroyed - and I was lucky to have had a chance to participate. -- Anne Olivier Bell "Highly Readable ... a remarkable history" * Washington Post * "Engaging and inspiring" * Publishers Weekly *.

The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who "burned like a comet" in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler's theorist on the "Jewish question" appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010 : At the heart of Edmund de Waal's strange and graceful family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes , is a one-of-a-kind inherited collection of ornamental Japanese carvings known as netsuke. He's also drawn to the story behind them, and for years he put aside his own work as a world-renowned potter and curator to uncover the rich and tragic family history of which the carvings are one of the few concrete legacies. Beginning with his art connoisseur ancestor Charles (a model for Proust's Swann), who acquired the netsuke during the European rage for Japonisme, de Waal traces the collection from Japan to Europe--where they were saved from the brutal bureaucracy of the Nazi Anschluss in the pockets of a family servant--and back to Japan and Europe again.

From bestselling author Ross King, a brilliant portrait of the legendary artist and the story of his most memorable achievement. Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. National BestsellerWinner of the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fictionFinalist for the 2016 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for NonfictionLonglisted for the 2017 BC National Award for Canadian NonfictionAn Observer (UK) Best Art BookA Boston Globe Best BookA National Post Best BookA Kirkus Reviews Best BookA CBC Best Book "An engaging and authoritative portrait of the aged artist and his travails. The Monet who emerges from King's pages is a sympathetic and vivid character." Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding of Monet's art, about which King is insightful and articulate. And when King animates the colorful politics of Monet's France, the book sparkles." "King, an exhaustive researcher and a pleasing writer, has produced a perceptive chronicle of war and friendship, shifting tastes and lasting art—and of the painted reflections of a pond that became a mirror." — The Wall Street Journal "King consummately meshes biography with art history as he turns the creation of one resounding masterpiece into a portal onto the artist's life. "King elegantly reveals the soul of a great artist, the last Impressionist standing at the end of one of history’s most remarkable art movements.” — Kirkus Reviews , starred review. "Canadian art historian and two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner Ross King turns his finely honed gaze to . "This book, subtitled Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies , deserves a place of pride beside Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 for its engrossing depiction of the Great War era. With impressive deft, King weaves into his narrative the story of the rise, fall, then rise again of Impressionism's reputation, as well as the fate of the Orangerie, the final resting place of Monet's Grande Décoration in Paris." [King] does full justice to the artist's evolution from the pure light of his earlier poplars and wheat-stacks to the brooding, unsettling Monet who became a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism; but it is in the period detail and character portraits that Mad Enchantment really comes to life." "In this enlightening look at Monet's most famous works, King not only illuminates their beauty but examines the harsh realities during which they were created, from the artist's excruciating eye troubles to the devastation of war." — The Boston Globe "An exhaustive researcher and a pleasing writer, [King] has produced a perceptive chronicle of war and friendship, shifting tastes and lasting art." "Readers interested in the bustling Paris art world of the early 20th century will savour King's glance-back not only at a lost time, but at an extraordinary friendship.

Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell). It’s a vanishingly rare pleasure, given the commercial constraints of modern publishing, to handle 600 smoothly weighty pages in which the printed text winds its way seamlessly among more than 200 glorious, often full-color illustrations. And in producing such a gorgeous object, Christopher de Hamel’s publisher has had the courage of his convictions, because its physical and visual delights mirror its commercially unlikely subject matter…[De Hamel] is voraciously completist, recording impressions of each journey, place, building and reading room, as well as every coverage detail of each manuscript’s creation, content and existence as a physical object through time and space… On this archival odyssey, I lost count of the things I learned…[ Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts ], like the volumes that are its subject, is a book of wonders.” - The New York Times Book Review “ Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is miles away from academic dry-as-dust scholarship. "An extraordinary book, a work of scholarship and history salted with the author's excitement...It is full of delights, as well as surprising reminders of the shifting ground of knowledge." When not awed by the sheer scope of his expertise or absorbed by his concerted efforts to decipher script or dissect scripture, we are diverted by his light flourishes and witty evaluations.” – Weekly Standard “Perhaps most important in discussing this magnificent work is to assure you that the overarching erudition is rendered clearly and with great kindness to you, his companion. I am a happier and fuller person because this fine man took me on his Grand Tour and told me so many marvelous things.” -- Helen Hazen, The American Scholar. [and] details each document’s idiosyncrasies while contextualizing its time and place of creation…De Hamel’s delightful book is bound to inspire a new set of medievalists.” – Publishers Weekly , starred review “Interested general readers will appreciate de Hamel’s lucid treatment of the themes and literary techniques that mark these manuscripts as cultural milestones…But they will marvel at the lavish reproductions of the masterful calligraphy and dazzling illuminations that have long made the manuscripts irresistible to collectors. De Hamel, the librarian of Corpus Christi, has spent a lifetime handling, cataloguing and interpreting these gorgeous objects....If I could walk you to your nearest bookshop, take £30 from your wallet, and place this wonderful book in your hands, I would." – Peter Thonemann, Sunday Times One of the cultural highlights of the autumn...Christopher de Hamel has turned a lifelong obsession with ancient literature into a book that critics are comparing to A History of the World in 100 Objects and the wonderful The Hare with Amber Eyes ." De Hamel writes in his introduction of his desire to communicate “the thrill of bringing a well-informed but non-specialist reader into intimate contact with major medieval manuscripts.” He does it brilliantly, and in full color.

An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action , The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. [you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. "Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste--and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. In 1992 a young art student uncovered a clue in an obscure Italian archive that led to the discovery of Caravaggio's original The Taking of the Christ , a painting that had been presumed lost for over 200 years. Broken into short, succinct chapters, the narrative unfolds at a brisk pace, skipping quickly from the perspective of 91-year-old Caravaggio scholar Sir Denis Mahon to that of young, enterprising Francesca Cappelletti, a graduate student at the University of Rome researching the disappearance of The Taking of Christ . But while adept at coordinating dates and analyzing hairline fractures in aged paint, Harr often seems overly concerned with the step-by-step process of tracking down The Taking of the Christ , as if the specific artist who created it were irrelevant.

The story of a painting… The motivation behind the work, Flaming June—Romanticist painter, Lord Frederic Leighton’s magnum opus—a woman sleeping in a chair. Burdened with family skeletons and agonizing guilt, an unwilling Lord Rothvale, one Graham Everley, returns from a long sojourn in Ireland to attend to the obligations awaiting him in England. Graham can’t walk away from her, and so he marries her instead, in spite of an increasingly tangled web of troubles that threaten to destroy the very foundation of his entire existence. In the style and magnificence of Jane Austen, with a naughtytwist, our Author Raine Miller gives us an original story of passion,obsession, and soaring love in The Muse . -KT BOOK REVIEWS Author, Raine Miller, outdoes herself in The Muse , a delicate yethaunting spin on the predecessor of the Rothvale Legacy trilogy and its historicalcompanions, while interweaving intricate themes of love, loss, redemption, andexpressionism through art!

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That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things , by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. '”. - New York Times “In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth.”. - starred review, Publishers Weekly. “In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance...Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible.”. - starred review, Library Journal. “Every tale of the preservation of intellectual history should be as rich and satisfying as Stephen Greenblatt's history of the reclamation and acclamation of Lucretius's De rerum natura from obscurity.”. - John McFarland, Shelf Awareness. In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance...Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible.--starred review.

In this volume, the third in his classic series of texts surveying the history of art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from Impressionism to Abstract Art. He wrote numerous books including Icon , Theories of Art , and Modern Theories of Art I and II, all published by NYU Press.

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In this compact yet comprehensive history of ancient Greece, Thomas R. Martin brings alive Greek civilization from its Stone Age roots to the fourth century B.C. Praise for Ancient Greece , first edition: "In this survey of ancient Greek history and civilization, Martin skillfully blends social, cultural, political, and military data to create a panoramic view of the Greek world. "A limpidly written, highly accessible, and comprehensive history of Greece and its civilizations from prehistory through the collapse of Alexander the Great's empire. A highly readable account of ancient Greece, particularly useful as an introductory or review text for the student or the general reader.

Near the end of the last Ice Age 12,800 years ago, a giant comet that had entered the solar system from deep space thousands of years earlier, broke into multiple fragments. The impacts, from comet fragments a mile wide approaching at more than 60,000 miles an hour, generated huge amounts of heat which instantly liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice, destabilizing the Earth's crust and causing the global Deluge that is remembered in myths all around the world. The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. Deeply immersed in an ocean of new scientific and archaeological discoveries and yet prescient enough to conceive of humanity's mysterious development and humble place in the universe, Hancock weaves a multidisciplinary thread that connects oral traditions, the mystery of place and time with contemporary scientific observations and evidence....A masterpiece of penitentiary distillation, intuitive speculation and multidisciplinary perspective, Magicians of the Gods comes with the highest recommendation." "Magicians of the Gods schools the attentive reader in exotic locales and colourful (often thwarted) characters, dusty ancient knowledge and pristine contemporary science and theory. "Hancock does a magnificent job of proving beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization, which flourished during the Ice Age, was destroyed in global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago."