• The best books on Albrecht Dürer - Albrecht Dürer by Jeffrey Ashcroft
  • The best books on Albrecht Dürer - Dürer by Jeffrey Chipps Smith
  • The best books on Albrecht Dürer - The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art by Joseph Leo Koerner
  • The best books on Albrecht Dürer - The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution by Pamela Smith
  • The best books on Albrecht Dürer - Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I by Mitchell B. Merback

The best books on Albrecht Dürer, recommended by Ulinka Rublack

Albrecht Dürer was the archetype of the Renaissance man, but also the prototypical artist-merchant, and very much a man of the world, says historian Ulinka Rublack. Dürer’s self-portraits, particularly the Christ-like image from 1500, have branded him as art history’s ultimate narcissist, but this is a view that does justice to neither his work nor to the complex and conflicted creative individual that he was, she says. She recommends books on Dürer’s Renaissance that reveal a much more nuanced artist and a richer sense of the times in which he lived and created.

  • The best books on Modern British Painting - Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century by Lisa Tickner
  • The best books on Modern British Painting - A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55 by David Alan Mellor
  • The best books on Modern British Painting - Francis Bacon by John Russell
  • The best books on Modern British Painting - David Hockney By David Hockney by David Hockney
  • The best books on Modern British Painting - Richard Smith Artworks 1956-2016 by Alex Massouras, Chris Stephens, David Alan Mellor & Martin Harrison

The best books on Modern British Painting, recommended by Chris Stephens

Artists the world over interpreted Modernism in very distinctive ways, explains the expert curator Chris Stephens. In Britain, painters like David Hockney and Francis Bacon worked in transatlantic dialogue with their contemporaries in the US, producing “English-accented echoes.” Here, Stephens selects five of the best books on Modern British painting that illuminate its place within a global movement.

  • The best books on Understanding the Nude - Ways of Seeing by John Berger
  • The best books on Understanding the Nude - The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality by Lynda Nead
  • The best books on Understanding the Nude - Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy by Ruth Barcan
  • The best books on Understanding the Nude - A Brief History of Nakedness by Philip Carr-Gomm
  • The best books on Understanding the Nude - Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism by Brian Hoffman

The best books on Understanding the Nude, recommended by Annebella Pollen

Nudity is not the same as the nude. Nor is nudity the same as nudism, but they tend to overlap quite a lot in people’s minds. Annebella Pollen, an authority on the many varied forms of British nudism in the twentieth century shares key influences on her own research to help us unpack (or undress?) the idea of nudity in western culture, showing the many ways in which nakedness can be a form of dress.

  • The best books on The Sublime - On the Sublime by Longinus
  • The best books on The Sublime - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke
  • The best books on The Sublime - Critique of the Power of Judgement by Immanuel Kant
  • The best books on The Sublime - The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
  • The best books on The Sublime - The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England by Samuel Monk

The best books on The Sublime, recommended by Robert Clewis

Whenever we go in search of rugged landscapes, thundering waterfalls or awesome vistas, we are in search of ‘the sublime’—an aesthetic quality that has been the subject of significant philosophical, artistic and psychological study. Here, philosopher Robert Clewis talks us through the landmark studies of the sublime, and makes some recommendations for those seeking introductory books on the subject.

  • The best books on The Arts and Crafts Movement - The Routledge Companion to William Morris by Florence Boos
  • The best books on The Arts and Crafts Movement - William Morris by Linda Parry
  • The best books on The Arts and Crafts Movement - International Arts and Crafts by Karen Livingstone & Linda Parry
  • The best books on The Arts and Crafts Movement - Views of Albion: The Reception of British Art and Design in Central Europe, 1890 –1918 by Andrzej Szczerski
  • The best books on The Arts and Crafts Movement - National Style and the Nation-State: Design in Poland from the Vernacular Revival to the International Style by David Crowley

The best books on The Arts and Crafts Movement, recommended by Julia Griffin

Originating in 19th-century Britain, the Arts and Crafts movement was an international phenomenon extending across many media to Europe, America and Japan. Julia Griffin, who has examined its impact in Poland, tells us how it advanced notions of national identity and provided roots to modernism by establishing a sensitivity to materials, designs, and forms, a sensibility that is still with us today.

  • The best books on Bohemian Living - Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art by Dan Franck
  • The best books on Bohemian Living - Laughing Torso by Nina Hamnett
  • The best books on Bohemian Living - David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years by Michael Luke
  • The best books on Bohemian Living - The Surrender of Silence: A Memoir of Ironfoot Jack, King of the Bohemians by Jack Rudolph Neave
  • The best books on Bohemian Living - Francis Bacon’s Gilded Gutter Life by Daniel Farson

The best books on Bohemian Living, recommended by Darren Coffield

The bohemian world of London and Paris in the 20th century was a fabled land, where people could go to get lost, reinvent themselves and live life as they wanted. Poverty, alcoholism and misery were often the frequent travelling companions on this journey but, Darren Coffield argues, these marginalised areas of society allowed for a freedom that is almost unimaginable in our own world. He picks the best books on bohemian living.

  • The Best Books by Artists - The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare: Correspondence by Marcel Duchamp & Robert Lebel
  • The Best Books by Artists - Worte Nicht in Giftige Buchstaben Einwickeln by Lisa Wenger & Meret Oppenheim
  • The Best Books by Artists - Diaries by Eva Hesse
  • The Best Books by Artists - Robert Voit: The Alphabet of New Plants by Robert Voit
  • The Best Books by Artists - Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian by Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Best Books by Artists, recommended by Michaela Unterdörfer

Why should we read what visual artists have written? Michaela Unterdörfer, head of publishing for the art gallery Hauser & Wirth, argues that the visual and artistic language of artists makes archival material more immediate and compelling. Artists’ testimonies refer not only to physical archives but above all to the mental archives of artists, their cultural and historic inheritance, which books like these bring to life.