Leo Steinberg's classic "Other Criteria" comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public" and the "flatbed picture plane" to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and...

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as "this people has already suffered for its past and its future", Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict. Its history, of course, took an even darke...

Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories. Timothy H. O'Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photogr...

Collected essays by a preeminent authority on American Jewish history.

Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and lea...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, in spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West and the rest. The manner in which this split has been imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject...

"Our Musicals, Ourselves" is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many afi...

A profound visual meditation on the trauma that scars twentieth-century Europe, Alan Cohen's "On European Ground" considers the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps, and the Berlin Wall, and records the distance between what we remember...

The concept of mastery straddles a largely unexamined seam in contemporary thought dividing admirable self-control from a reprehensible will to power. Although Joseph Conrad has traditionally been viewed as an admirable master – master mariner, story...

Born of a terrible insomnia – "a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell" – this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self-described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole ci...