A generous selection of forthright essays on art and artists. Hughes tackles the lives and works of over 80 artists, from the old masters to our contemporaries, exploring their achievement (or lack of it) and how they altered the history of art for better or worse.

The follow-up to the seminal Ways of Seeing, one of the most influential books on art

Gathers interviews, articles, letters, and manifestos dealing with Postimpressionism, symbolism, fauvism, Expressionism, and cubism.

This work offers a unified field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty. From Emily Dickinson and Medusa to Madonna, it makes a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature.

Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. This title examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

A collection of Baudelaire's critical writings, including the celebrated title-piece essay and extended studies of three of his contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner. It also contains several general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature.

An illustrated 100-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-guard. .

Walter Pater is increasingly seen as an important precursor of modernist aesthetic theory. This work was one of the most influential pieces of cultural criticism of its day, particularly on the work of Oscar Wilde, who described it as my golden book ... the very flower of decadence .

Offers an exploration of the power and the point of art. This book also explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain.

A collection of pieces on modernism, autobiography, style, and painting, arguing the importance of art in our lives. The essays also discuss intimately the author's relationship to her own work and the books that she loves.

An art critic confronts the current art milieu, characterizing it as being without purpose or moral authority, and questions whether allegedly radical artists now reflect the culture of consumerism more than they challenge it.

Rilke examines Rodin's life and work, and explains the often elusive connection between the creative forces that drive timeless literature and great art.

Traces and explores the rise of artistic Modernism, the cultural movement that shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. This book explores the modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms.

Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was one of the most important American art critics of this century. The essays in this book are not limited to the art world, however, as he also discusses poetry, political and cultural theory, and popular culture.

Explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, bringing together philosophy, art theory, and many examples. This work discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, sex, web sites, and research on the brain's role in perceiving art. It is suitable for the public, introductory students, and teachers in the arts.

This is a collection of fragments about time and space by a writer and critic.

Booker wining novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic - even admirers rarely know John Berger in all his literary incarnations. This collection of essays takes a look at his career. Berger's wide-ranging essays emphasise the continuities that have underpinned more than 40 years of tireless intellectual inquiry and political engagement.

Shows how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. This book shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified.