Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Art

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. As Edward Dolnick reveals, his true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism - the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components - has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths.

Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.

Since its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan has captivated millions around the globe with its scope, originality, and compelling characters. In this series companion book, the listener will learn about the exotic beasts used by the Seanchan and hear of the rise and fall of Artur Hawking, and peruse the deeper story of the War of the Shadow. Here is the tale of the founding of the White Tower, and the creation of the Ajahs. The inner workings of the closed country, Shara, are revealed, as is the existence of a hitherto unknown continent, The Land of the Madmen.

Leonardo da Vinci has long been celebrated for his consummate genius. He was the painter who gave us the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and the inventor who anticipated the advent of airplanes, hot air balloons, and other technological marvels. But what was the connection between Leonardo the painter and Leonardo the scientist?

A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. In The Grand Affair, scholar Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

Late one afternoon in the winter of 2003, art critic Richard Dorment answered a telephone call from a stranger. The caller was Joe Simon, an American film producer and art collector. He was ringing at the suggestion of David Hockney, his neighbor in Malibu. A committee of experts called the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board had declared the two Warhols in his collection to be fake. He wanted to know why and thought Dorment could help.

Charlotte Mullins brings art to life through the stories of those who created it and, importantly, reframes who is included in the narrative to create a more diverse and exciting landscape of art. She shows how art can help us see the world differently and understand our place in it, how it helps us express ourselves, fuels our creativity, and contributes to our overall wellbeing and positive mental health.

Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed - street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged - was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, makes him an artist who speaks across the centuries to our own time.

Craig Childs bears witness to rock art of the Colorado Plateau—bighorn sheep pecked behind boulders, tiny spirals in stone, human figures with upraised arms shifting with the desert light, each one a portal to the open mouth of time. With a spirit of generosity, humility, and love of the arid, intricate landscapes of the desert Southwest, Childs sets these ancient communications in context, inviting listeners to look and listen deeply.

Art history encompasses the study of the history and development of painting, sculpture, and the other visual arts. In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Dana Arnold presents an introduction to the issues, debates, and artifacts that make up art history. Beginning with a consideration of what art history is, she explains what makes the subject distinctive from other fields of study and also explores the emergence of social histories of art (such as feminist art history and queer art history).

Cynthia Saltzman's Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture.

A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)—which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible—or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&).

In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews-pillars of an embattled community-invested their fortunes in France's cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country's army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siecle.

When his satirical musings in a college newspaper got him discharged from the Air Force, it became clear to Walt Williams that his destiny in life was to be a writer - he just never thought he'd end up writing video games, let alone working on some of the most successful franchises in the industry - Bioshock, Civilization, Borderlands, and Mafia, among others. Williams pulls back the curtain on an astonishingly profitable industry that has put its stamp on pop culture and yet is little known to those outside its walls.

Before Instagram was an art form, fashion photographers were pop culture royalty. From the postwar covers of Vogue until the triumph of the digital image, the fashion photographer sold not only clothes but ideals of beauty and fantasies of perfect lives. Even when they succumbed to temptation and excess, the very few photographers who rose to the top were artists above all.

Furs are the creative subculture of people who identify with animals. You can find them at furry conventions, furfests, around the world-tens of thousands of people donning their most elaborate fursuit. In costume, at conventions, with friends or alone, furries unleash the animal within, letting their inner beasts roar and their inner cats purr, aware of the power—and joy—to be found in bringing forward one's animal side and encouraging others to do the same.

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. You'll learn that Michelangelo's body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn't stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O'Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you'll never forget!

An inquiry into the creative process from philosophical, psychological, spiritual, and practical points of view, The Creative Path is a welcoming work on the creative process. Carolyn Schlam encourages the listener to embark upon his or her own journey of discovery, identity, and wonder through art. This inspirational book examines why we make art, and though it makes primary reference to visual art, The Creative Path will resonate with all creative practitioners, whatever their chosen discipline.