Originally published in 1983, Leo Steinberg's classic work has changed the viewing habits of a generation. After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility. Steinberg...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the art critic Roger Fry introduced English-speaking audiences to modern French art and formalist aesthetic theory".A Roger Fry Reader", edited by Christopher Reed, brings together for the first time a c...

Drawing on Freudian theories of sexuality and Kant's conception of the beautiful, French art historian Hubert Damisch considers artists as diverse as Raphael, Picasso, Watteau, and Manet to demonstrate that beauty has always been connected to ideas o...

Artists and critics regularly enlist theory in the creation and assessment of artworks, but few have scrutinized the art theories themselves. Here, Daniel examines and critiques the norms, assumptions, historical conditions, and institutions that hav...

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in...

Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of "The Collected Essays and Criticism...

Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of "The Collected Essays and Criticism...

In this acclaimed revisionist study, Erika Doss chronicles an historic cultural change in American art from the dominance of regionalism in the 1930s to abstract expressionism in the 1940s. She centers her study on Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Poll...

"Discovering Design" reflects the growing recognition that the design of the everyday world deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation. Victor Margolin, cofounder and an...

Nowhere is evidence of Bernini's unique abillity to unite architecture with sculpture and painting into a beautiful whole more compelling than in the Baroque chapel of Bernini's design: a dark world sealed below by a balustrade, covered by a luminous...