When Laurel and her family find an old summer house on the far east end of Long Island, they hope also to find peace, as they recover from the sudden death of their young son. Amid the cobwebs and clutter of the old rectory, Laurel comes upon a century-old diary that details the story of a lonely woman who lived in the house, and who wrote about some of the eerie visitors who would call on her at night. Laurel also finds a book that seems to have the power to bring back her son. Is she und...

Louis Kahn was one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, hailed as a master of materials, but also of light. "The plan of a building," he once said, "should be read like a harmony of spaces created in light." Here, in this essay by the legendary art critic Robert Hughes, is Kahn's story.

The Pergamum Collection publishes books history has long forgotten. We transcribe books by hand that are now hard to find and out of print.

A monumentally informed and irresistibly opinionated guide to the most un-Spanish city in Spain, from the bestselling author of The Fatal Shore.In these pages, Robert Hughes scrolls through Barcelona's often violent history; tells the stories of its kings, poets, magnates, and revolutionaries; and ushers readers through municipal landmarks that range from Antoni Gaudi's sublimely surreal cathedral to a postmodern restaurant with a glass-walled urinal. The result is a work ...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This incredible true history of the colonization of Australia explores how the convict transportation system created the country we know today."One of the greatest non-fiction books I’ve ever read ... Hughes brings us an entire world." —Los Angeles Times**Digging deep into the dark history of England's infamous efforts to move 160,000 men and women thousands of miles to the other side of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ...

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking.Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959. From that exhilarating portrait, he takes us...

Beginning with a vivid description of his wedding in the splendid medieval ceremonial chamber in Barcelona's city hall, Hughes launches into a lively account of the history, art, and architecture of the storied city. He tells of architectural treasures abounding in 14th-century Barcelona, establishing it as one of Europe's great Gothic cities, while Madrid was hardly more than a cluster of huts. The city spawned such great artists as Antoni Gaudi, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, a...

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays o...

We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject. If modernity is ...

A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-guard. More than 250 color photos.

Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso. From his relationship with his stern and distant father to his Catholic upbringing and school years; and from his development as an artist, writer, and critic to his growing appreciation of art and his ex...

“You’re not a painter if you haven’t painted gray”, declared Paul Cézanne. The same could be said of philosophers: you’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray. This simple four-letter word signifies much more than a quasi-neutral color lying between black and white: we use the same word to describe moods, November skies, the hair of the elderly, the withered features of faces, dusty shelves, faceless bureaucracies, dreary politicians and hundreds of other things. This plain, un...