Weems’s essay is excerpted from Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces.
Princeton University Press
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Why Early Modern European Artists Were Obsessed With Shells
From Leonardo to Rembrandt, artists were drawn to these soft and glowing forms.
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A Beautiful Guide to Colors in the Natural World, Revisited 200 Years Later
“Nature’s Palette” reproduces the groundbreaking color systems and illustrates them with lush engravings.
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Michelangelo’s Last Two Decades Were His Busiest and Loneliest
William E. Wallace excavates a lesser-known but crucial final chapter of the artist’s approximately 75-year career.
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Analyzing the Biases of Western Art History With Hard Data
Careful and yet compellingly fresh in its approach, Painting by Numbers offers a new kind of methods book.
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Roni Horn’s Memories and Meditations About Weather
Prosaic and profound, Horn’s book “Island Zombie” feels like standing before art again.
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John Chamberlain’s Previously Unknown Poems From Black Mountain College
Here’s a sneak peek of the artist’s previously unknown writings from 1955, to be published by Princeton University Press this month.
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The Complex History of Yellow, a “Mediocre” Color
Considering the evidence of yellow’s constant fluctuation in and out of favor, it is curious to see author Michel Pastoureau wonder if it could be “the color of the future.”
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Putting the Art Back in Art History
Christopher S. Wood’s A History of Art History will be eye-opening for anyone who cares about art.
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Taking Cuteness Seriously
In The Power of Cute Simon May posits that “cute” is a modern-day iteration of the Renaissance archetype of the monstrous.
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The Layered Nature of Artifice in a Book About a 16th-Century Naturalist
Insect Artifice is divided into two parts: one consisting of an intellectual biography of Joris Hoefnagel, and another, which analyzes Hoefnagel’s seminal work Four Elements, a compendium of the known animal world.
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A Close Look at the Art of Genji
The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion serves as a thorough introduction to a work of great literary and art-historical importance.