Why are certain objects important? This question serves as the gateway through which students enter Readings in Art Appreciation, an anthology dedicated to exploring the history and value of the visual arts. The carefully curated readings explore art created over the past 20,000 years in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. The selections take readers on a chronological tour beginning with the earliest creative pursuits of humankind and ending with modernity and post-modernity. While learning about architectural art in Egypt, the aesthetic sensibility of the Middle Ages, or the oldest sculpture at Tenochtitlan, the reader also becomes familiar with the values of a time and place as manifested in objects, and how this impacts and informs our lives today. Though the articles provide a chronological overview, they can easily be taken out of order and still give students a substantial understanding of the place visual arts hold in the world and in life. Readings in Art Appreciation is ideal for survey courses in art history, and classes in art appreciation or cultural studies. Andrew Svedlow received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and completed a program in management and leadership in education at Harvard University. He has directed and administered programs for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Design and the Museum of the City of New York and was twice selected as a Fulbright Scholar. Currently a professor of art history at Northern Colorado University, his art criticism has appeared in American Artist and New Art Examiner. He has also written numerous research articles and is the author of Thirty Works of Art Every Student Should Know.

Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a deep insight and comprehension of the world of Art. Contents: What is Art? The Structure of Art Significance of Materials Used in Art Describing Art - Formal Analysis, Types, and Styles of Art Meaning in Art - Socio-Cultural Contexts, Symbolism, and Iconography Connecting Art to Our Lives Form in Architecture Art and Identity Art and Power Art and Ritual Life - Symbolism of Space and Ritual Objects, Mortality, and Immortality Art and Ethics

This volume is a basic art text for college students and other interested readers. It offers a broad introduction to the nature, vocabulary, media, and history of art, showing examples from many cultures.

"Together the text and illustrations gradually reveal many of the major themes and characteristics of Chinese painting. To "read" these works is to enter a dialogue with the past. Slowly perusing a scroll or album, one shares an intimate experience that has been repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings that meaning is gradually revealed."--BOOK JACKET.

After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.

Flexible organization, inclusive illustration program, expanded media resources.

National Bestseller The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor. Winner of the Marfield National Award for Arts Writing. Winner of a California Book Award.