Merchants and Masterpieces

Merchants and Masterpieces
Author: Calvin Tomkins
Publisher: Henry Holt
Total Pages: 450
Release: 1989
Genre:
ISBN: 9780805010343

Beautifully written and newly revised to include the museum's most controversial era, this sparkling social history reveals the ideas and financial power behind the Metropolitan's dramatic 12-year history. Photos.

Making the Mummies Dance

Making the Mummies Dance
Author: Thomas Hoving
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1993
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0671880756

The former director of the famed New York museum recounts his activities at the art world's pinnacle, from wooing important patrons to battling for acquisitions.

King of the Confessors

King of the Confessors
Author: Thomas Hoving
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1982
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780345303707

Lives of the Artists

Lives of the Artists
Author: Calvin Tomkins
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010-01-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1429946415

Whether writing about Jasper Johns or Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman or Richard Serra, Calvin Tomkins shows why it is both easier and more difficult to make art today. If art can be anything, where do you begin? For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins's incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins's cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, "the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation." Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist glut and entertainment; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as award-winning film director. Tomkins shows that the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth.

Armenia

Armenia
Author: Theo Maarten van Lint
Publisher: Bodleian Library
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Armenia
ISBN: 9781851244409

Set like a stronghold south-west of the Caucasus mountains, Armenia is caught between East and West. Briefly a great empire in the first century BCE under King Tigranes the Great, Armenia was later incorporated first by the Sasanian and then the Byzantine Empires. Armenian art, literature, religion and material culture have reinterpreted elements of a wide variety of cultures. Spanning over two and a half millennia, the history of Armenia and the Armenian people is a series of riveting tales, from its first mention under the Achaemenid King Darius I to the independence of the Republic of Armenia from the Soviet Union.With the help of the Bodleian Libraries' magnificent collection of Armenian manuscripts and early printed books, this volume tells the story of the region through the medium of its cultural output. Together with introductions written by experts in their fields, close to one hundred manuscripts, works of art and religious artefacts serve as a guide to Armenian culture and history. Gospel manuscripts splendidly illuminated by Armenian masters feature next to philosophical tractates and merchants' handbooks, affording us an insight into what makes the Armenian people truly unique, especially in the shadow of the genocide that threatened their annihilation a hundred years ago: namely their spirituality, language and perseverance in the face of adversity. VISIT THE EXHIBITIONArmenia: Treasures from an Enduring CultureOctober 2015 - January 2016Bodleian Library, Oxford

Living Well is the Best Revenge

Living Well is the Best Revenge
Author: Calvin Tomkins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780870708978

Originally published by Viking Press in 1971; republished vy the Modern Library in 1998 with a new foreword.

The Park and the People

The Park and the People
Author: Roy Rosenzweig
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 642
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801497513

Delineate the politicians, business people, artists, immigrant laborers, and city dwellers who are the key players in the tale. In tracing the park's history, the writers also give us the history of New York. They explain how squabbles over politics, taxes, and real estate development shaped the park and describe the acrimonious debates over what a public park should look like, what facilities it should offer, and how it should accommodate the often incompatible.

Matisse the Master

Matisse the Master
Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2005
Genre: Artists
ISBN: 0679434291

With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse's attempts to counteract the violence of the 20th century in paintings.