Featured Books

Focusing on the work of 33 artists, this volume examines the ways contemporary Korean art reflects the dynamic changes in the country following the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and 1988 Seoul Olympics, when a newly democratic South Korea opened up to the rest...

Featuring over five hundred masterpieces from around the world, this revised and expanded guide is a beautifully illustrated introduction to the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This updated version of the museum's handbook presents more...

By Felice Fischer and Kyoko Kinoshita Art of Japan presents one hundred highlights of Japanese art from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, dating from the Neolithic period to today. Among them are a temple and a teahouse, acquired in 1928,...

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism...

The twentieth volume in the renowned ekphrasis series, this collection of Virginia Woolf’s writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.   Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the...

There are many myths about the artist Edgar Degas—from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant, to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than Degas and His Model, a short memoir published by Alice...

Mad about Painting collects beautiful new translations of Hokusai’s painting tutorials and related essays written by the artist and his peers—a selection made available in English for the first time.   Best known for his iconic print...

A compilation of esoteric musings, Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty explores Alexandre Kojève’s philosophical approach to the relationship between art and beauty.   A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus,...

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.    In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects...

Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. An early follower of Walter Pater, her...

Bringing together more than forty works from the United States and Europe, this exhibition examines Barbara Chase-Riboud’s artistic career, focusing primarily on her important Malcolm X sculptures. Five works from that series—among them the...

Storied Stone weaves together memories and scholarship to offer an illuminating  perspective on one of the most striking museum spaces. While visiting Madurai,  Tamil Nadu, in 1913, the Philadelphian Adeline Pepper Gibson purchased over sixty...