NONFICTION
Released: Oct. 1, 1999
"A thoughtful and witty little volume whose readership should extend beyond the fly-fishing purist."
An unlikely match of subject, author, and series (this is a volume in the Library of Contemporary Thought) puts art critic and historian Hughes (American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, 1997, etc.) at the other end of a fishing pole.
Read full book review >
NONFICTION
Released: April 30, 1997
"A meaty and illuminating excavation, full of vigor and punch, to accompany a spring PBS series. (330 illustrations and photos, not seen) (First printing of 100,000)"
The ever voluble Hughes tackles 350 years of history with irony and gusto in this eminently readable handbook on American art.
Read full book review >
NONFICTION
Released: April 1, 1993
"Not since John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978) have we had such a pellet-gun shower of right-wing leftism, back-to-basics positivism—and like Gardner's, it settles down more as vanitas than veritas."
It's hard not to be stirred up and entertained by the three jeremiad-essays Hughes (Barcelona, 1992, etc.) offers here.
Read full book review >
NONFICTION
Released: Feb. 28, 1992
"The Gaudí section, which is very good, comes only at a very long book's end, by which time you are weary, and less involved than its great subject merits."
After a rousing introduction that touches on the Spanish Civil War and Miró, Gaudí, and the Barcelonese mania for design and its folk-pride in "seny" (well-proportioned common sense), coexisting with its "tradition of intense, wrenching civic change, of long-shot gambles and risky endeavors," Hughes plunges into the history of the city and of Catalunya entire—and is all but lost in its swamp thereafter.
Read full book review >
NONFICTION
Released: Nov. 10, 2003
"A solid work of art history, though not the revelatory summing-up the author appears to have aspired to. (215 illustrations, 115 in color, color not seen)"
Time's art critic and cultural pundit (
A Jerk on One End, 1999, etc.) finally produces his decades-in-the-making consideration of the Spanish painter.
Read full book review >
NONFICTION
Released: Sept. 25, 2006
"A long, unblinking look in time's mirror, by a writer who has spent his life mastering his subject and his craft."
A sometimes poignant, sometimes nasty, often amusing and always erudite memoir by the historian and art critic (
Goya, 2003, etc.).
Read full book review >
