The visual arts enrich our lives in many ways: bringing innovative ideas and the pleasures of beauty and emotion, but they can also confound. How To Understand Art sets out to enhance the viewer's experience by breaking down the elements of art and sculpture to provide a firm basis for simple enjoyment as well as further investigation. 0With 100 visual examples drawn from across the globe, the stress is on how to assess art objectively - a key skill...

The National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy all saw either radical architectural interventions or rethinks of their mission under Charles Saumarez Smith's leadership, making him uniquely qualified to explore the ways in which art museums have changed over the past century and examine where they might be headed in the future. 0 For this book, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey to art museums across the globe. From...

For decades, artists and architects have struggled to relate to the Holocaust in visual form, resulting in memorials that feature a diversity of aesthetic strategies. In 'Memory Passages', Natasha Goldman analyzes both previously-overlooked and internationally-recognized Holocaust memorials in the United States and Germany from the postwar period to the present, drawing on many historical documents for the first time. From the perspectives of visual...

"An artist's extraordinary challenge to himself reveals the genius of Michelangelo in the making. Many believe Michelangelo's talent was miraculous and untrained, the product of 'divine' genius, but the young Michelangelo studied art like any Renaissance apprentice, learning from a master and experimenting with materials and styles. As a grad student in art history, Alan Pascuzzi won a Fulbright scholarship to 'apprentice' himself to Michelangelo,...

"Interned with thousands of Polish army officers and a handful of civilians in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, the artist Józef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre carried out in the forest of Katyn in April 1940. In prose written while the war still raged, Czapski portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait and others in vivid sketches imbued with a rare combination...

With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque-the first English-language book on the topic-Ünver Rüstem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between...

"Well-to-do, sophisticated couple, Elsa and Michele, have a 20 year-old daughter, Alice, and enough money for Elsa to leave her job and fulfill an old dream of studying art history. After she graduates, however, their lives change. Michele confesses he hasn't worked in two months and was fired by the company he founded years ago. Elsa overcomes her initial shock by pouring extra energy into facing the crisis while Michele, exhausted by an unsuccessful...

"An examination of how individuals strive for social status and how this creates our culture as a whole Contrary to belief, status signaling isn't just the province of the immature or insecure but a fundamental human need to secure social standing. It drives our behavior, forms our tastes, determines what we buy, and ultimately shapes who we are. It's what's behind "cool" and what drives fashion, music, food, sports, slang, travel, hairstyles, and...

The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages...

"This book originates from a major group exhibition curated by Glenn LIgon, one of the most influential American artists of his generation. It features forty-five artists who he refers to in his art and in his writings, or who have been of significance to him more generally, including Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lorna Simpson, Steve McQueen and Zoe Leonard. Literature is a frequent stimulus for...