Schools Books

This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media. Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than ...more

Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock’s drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?             Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics ...more

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 ...more

The mysterious Mona Lisa could use a little grooming—so go ahead and brush her long black hair! Continue with the Old Masters by touching the large, lacy collar of Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier, petting the horse’s tail in Velazquez’s Prince Baltasar Carlos on Horseback, and arranging the snappy elastic ...more

The Cartoon History of the Modern World is a wickedly funny take on modern history. It is essentially a complete and up–to–date course in college level Modern World History, but presented as a graphic novel. In an engaging and humorous graphic style, Larry Gonick covers the history, personalities and big ...more

Klara Hobza's The New Millennium Paper Airplane Book is a collection of some of the artist's favorite paper airplanes and stories by their creators, gathered from The New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest exhibition, held at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, New York, in 2008. This project was ...more

Arshile Gorky (c. 1904–1948) was one of the central figures in American art’s shift toward abstraction during the first half of the 20th century. Accompanying the first major retrospective of his work in almost thirty years, this stunning book traces the evolution of Gorky’s arresting visual style. Nearly 200 paintings, ...more

It’s pop, with a twist—a fun collection of works by such 20th century masters as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Hockney that turns the art world into a fingertip sensation. What could be better than pulling on the lettuce in Claes Oldenburg’s Two Burgers with Everything? Or stroking the fluffy eyelashes on ...more

The last explosive change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world—its increasing professionalization, the pervasive power of the art market, and fundamental shifts in art-making itself in our post-Duchampian era—combined with a revolution in information technology, ...more

Book Description A major reassessment of the most influential and controversial American artist of the second half of the twentieth century To his critics, he was the cynical magus of a movement that debased high art and reduced it to a commodity. To his admirers, he was the most important ...more