Here are 100 books that Willem De Kooning fans have personally recommended if you like
Willem De Kooning.
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As a reader, I’m drawn to characters and subjects I can relate to. Strong women who go their own way, ones who march to their own drummer. There is a raw honesty to their stories with subjects of creativity, grief, and loss. And as a writer of both fiction and personal essay, I write about these same issues as well, subjects I seem to turn to again and again. When I write, I try to tap into the emotions that might be buried but I’m always looking to move my readers whether it’s with tears or laughter, and the women in the books I chose do that for me.
The Loft Generation is unlike any other memoir or autobiography I’ve read. It’s written in short pieces, not exactly essays or chapters but remembrances of painter and writer, Edith Schloss’s, amazing life. Her memories are so vivid. Each person, place, and piece of artwork leaps off the page. It makes one wonder how she recalled all the amazing details that bring this to life. She seemed to collect fascinating people from Willem and Elaine deKooning to John Cage to Fairfield Porter. She met and befriended everyone from the abstract expressionist period in New York and then during her time in Italy where she later settled. A fascinating tale of an unusual woman, artist and writer living in a colorful, changing time.
A bristling and brilliant memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York School of painters and their times by the renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss, who, from the early years, was a member of the group that shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York
The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly is a firsthand account by an artist at the center of a landmark era in American art. Edith Schloss writes about the artists, poets, and musicians who were part of the postwar art movements in America and about her life as an artist…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m a short story reader, reviewer, and writer. Short stories are a powerful form, combining the distilled intensity of poetry with the depth of character development. They allow enough space to get to know a character, feel the pain of their disappointments, to root for their ultimate success. Such moments reflect broader realities of a culture, a society, a people. A single-author collection gives great insight into a writer’s abilities and style. My own debut collection was a finalist for the Alistair MacLeod short fiction prize and is critically acclaimed, so hopefully, that means my careful reading of these collections has taught me a thing or two.
Kerry Lee Powell writes some of the best sentences I’ve ever read. A lot of her opening lines (“Today's the day Mitchell Burnhope gets the royal shit kicked out of him” ... “I took my kung fu instructor off speed-dial today” ... “A dozen of us were dressed up as low-budget ghosts outside Earl’s Court tube station”) are arresting, instantly grabbing my attention, while hinting at something more, posing a question and inviting me to read on.
What was happening was usually much deeper than first expected. She's economic with her words, but in a few pages I came to care about the characters and I miss them now, feel like they're still out there somewhere wheeling and dealing to keep their head above water.
Ranging from an island holiday gone wrong to a dive bar on the upswing to a yuppie mother in a pricey subdivision seeing her worst fears come true, these acclaimed, deftly written stories are populated by barkeeps, good men down on their luck, rebellious teens, lonely immigrants, dreamers and realists, fools and quiet heroes. In Kerry Lee Powell’s skillful hands, each character, no matter what his or her choices, is deeply human in their search for connection. Powell holds us in her grasp, exploring with a black humour themes of belonging, the simmering potential for violence, and the meaning of…
I arrived in New York City from Germany thirty years ago with two suitcases and a typewriter. Since then, I try to combine my background as an art historian – I hold a M.A. in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Tübingen, Germany – with my experiences travelling around the world for seven years, and my love for writing. After a career in museum education (at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Mingei, and the Athenaeum) I founded Konstellation Press, an indie publishing company for genre fiction. The first of my four novels, Spring of Tears, an art mystery set in France, won the San Diego Book Award.
The author of The Killing Art is an artist himself and therefore writes from an insider perspective. The location is New York City and the art movement is the New York School of Art or Abstract Expressionism, which included the artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. The main protagonist is Kate McKinnon, an art historian and former cop, who sets out to write a book about these artists, but is pulled back into solving crimes as the paintings she writes about— and their owners—are slashed. I like the female protagonist in this book as well as the more contemporary setting and art.
History and fiction collide with deadly consequences in the third Kate McKinnon novel—a story of bitter revenge, where the past invades the present and a decades-old secret proves fatal
Kate McKinnon has lived many lives, from Queens cop to Manhattan socialite, television art historian, and the woman who helped the NYPD capture the Death Artist and the Color Blind killer. But that's the past. Now, devastated by the death of her husband, Kate is attempting to quietly rebuild her life as a single woman. Gone are the Park Avenue penthouse and designer clothes. Now it's a funky Chelsea loft, downtown…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
With over 20 years of experience as a professional artist and a successful track record of earning six figures a year from my art, I know firsthand what it takes to build a thriving artistic career. As the host of the Inspiration Place podcast, and founder of the Artist Incubator program, I’ve dedicated my life’s work to helping artists everywhere achieve their full potential and reach their goals. When you overcome the common challenges and mindset blocks that hold so many artists back and learn the practical tools and strategies you need for selling your art, you too find the same success.
This book is a great choice for anyone looking to dive deeper into the creative process and find inspiration for their own artistic journey. The book, written by the well-known art critic and historian Jerry Saltz, offers practical advice and thought-provoking insights into the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. One of the key themes in the book is the idea that every piece of art you create has the potential to make an impact, no matter how big or small, and that it is your responsibility as an artist to keep creating, even if your work may not always be perfect. Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of the creative process and find the motivation to keep pursuing their passions.
From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent times
Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators.…
I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.
If you read one book on the psychology of art, make it this one. Winner gives us a book that celebrates the importance of art even as she remains grounded in experimental data and avoids hyperbole. She asks deceptively simple questions. What is art? Why do we make art? Does art make us better people? The clarity of her logic and the elegance of her prose as she answers these and other incisive questions make this book a delight to read.
There is no end of talk and of wondering about 'art' and 'the arts.' This book examines a number of questions about the arts (broadly defined to include all of the arts). Some of these questions come from philosophy. Examples include:
* What makes something art? * Can anything be art? * Do we experience "real" emotions from the arts? * Why do we seek out and even cherish sorrow and fear from art when we go out of our way to avoid these very emotions in real life? * How do we decide what is good art? Do aesthetic…
I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This book provides the reader with a foundation as to how we think through our bodily experience in the world. It argues that we think through the body and through experience and that bodily engagement with the world (organism-environment interaction) is used to develop more abstract modes of thought.
I find this key to understanding design generally.
In "The Meaning of the Body", Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic "Metaphors We Live By". Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning - including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors - that are all rooted in the body's physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
My name is Polly Schattel, and I’m a novelist, screenwriter, and film director. I wrote and directed the films Sinkhole, Alison, and Quiet River,and my written work includesThe Occultists, Shadowdays, and the novella 8:59:29.I grew up loving fantasy—Tolkien, Moorcock, Zelazny—but phased out of it somewhat when I discovered writers like Raymond Carver, EL Doctorow, and Denis Johnson. Their books seemed more adult and more complex, not to mention the prose itself was absolutely transporting. In comparison, the fantasy I’d read often felt quite rushed and thin, with get-it-done prose. I drifted away from genre fiction a bit, but dove back to it with my first novel, the historical dark fantasy The Occultists.
Mythago Wood is the kind of book that pulls you in and settles you down for a great, blanket-comfy, rainy-day read.
Concerning Ryhope Wood, an ancient, primeval forest in England that seems bigger the deeper in you go, it explores human psychology, both personal and collective, particularly the ideas of Carl Jung.
The forest somehow uses human psychology to create “mythagos,” complex unconscious creations built upon human memories and myths, and our hero Stephen Huxley is compelled to learn the secrets of the wood, whether or not he makes it back out alive.
As psychologically astute as it is thrilling, Holdstock’s book won the World Fantasy Award in 1985 and launched a successful series of fantasies that’s even more widely respected today.
Deep within the wildwood lies a place of myth and mystery, from which few return, and of those few, none remain unchanged.
Ryhope Wood may look like a three-mile-square fenced-in wood in rural Herefordshire on the outside, but inside, it is a primeval, intricate labyrinth of trees, impossibly huge, unforgettable ... and stronger than time itself.
Stephen Huxley has already lost his father to the mysteries of Ryhope Wood. On his return from the Second World War, he finds his brother, Christopher, is also in thrall to the mysterious wood, wherein lies a realm where mythic archetypes grow flesh and…
I’m a historian of emotions, science, and medicine, with more than a decade of experience in meddling in other scientific affairs, especially in the worlds of psychology and neuroscience. I’m fascinated by human emotions in part, at least, because I feel we’re living in a crude emotional age. I’ve worked in five different countries since gaining my PhD in 2005. In that time I’ve written or edited 14 books of historical non-fiction, as well as dozens of articles and reviews. You can freely read my work inAeon or History Today. I live between Canada (my adopted country) and Finland, where I frequently lament the loss of my European citizenship.
I was desperately waiting for Lanzoni’s book to come out, being certain that it would be the key to displacing an all-too-easy tendency, among scientists, scholars and the general public alike, to make empathy the hardwired mechanism that defines humanity.
It frankly amazes me how quickly the fortunes of empathy rose in the second of half of the twentieth century when, fundamentally, nobody has been able to say precisely what it is, where it is, how it works or what its limits might be.
I loved Lanzoni’s book for laying it all out. Down with empathy!
A surprising, sweeping, and deeply researched history of empathy-from late-nineteenth-century German aesthetics to mirror neurons
Empathy: A History tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of empathy in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite the word's ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of Einfuhlung ("in-feeling"), a term in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature.
Remarkably, this early conception of empathy transformed into its opposite over the ensuing decades. Social scientists and clinical psychologists refashioned…
I've been writing since I learned how to write, first poems, then short stories. I spent a decade in the rock music business, writing about and becoming friends with Elton John, John Lennon, Bryan Ferry, among others. But I grew up reading thrillers and wanting to write novels but seemed hesitant to start. One day, I ran into an old high school friend who was writing westerns for Avon Books. I thought if he can, so can I. So I did. I majored in Sociology in college, so the intricacies of individuals within society always fascinated me. After reading The Outsider, I realized I really wanted to write about the people outsideof society.
I discovered Wilson’s seminal book when I was in college.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that The Outsider changed my life. Before I read it I had no idea who I was or where I belonged. I was not a joiner. I wasn’t affected by peer pressure. As a consequence I felt alone and at sea.
At once, I recognized myself in The Outsider.
Wilson could have been writing about me. Suddenly, I understood who I was, why I reacted to certain things the way I did, and what my place in the world was and would be. There is no more desolate feeling of being alone and misunderstood in the world.
Wilson’s book gave me a sense of belonging. Who could ask for anything more?
The classic study of alienation, creativity and the modern mind 'Excitingly written, with a sense of revelation' GUARDIAN
THE OUTSIDER was an instant literary sensation when it was first published in 1956, thrusting its youthful author into the front rank of contemporary writers and thinkers. Wilson rationalised the psychological dislocation so characteristic of Western creative thinking into a coherent theory of alienation, and defined those affected by it as a type: the outsider. Through the works and lives of various artists, including Kafka, Camus, Hemingway, Hesse, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Shaw, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Wilson explored the psyche of the outsider,…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a South African author and avid miner of trivia nuggets. Psychology has always fascinated me and for the past decade, I’ve been lucky enough to make a living writing about the odd and the puzzling, most notably at Listverse.com. I love sharing the most jaw-dropping facts about the human mind, plainly to change the notion that psychology is a dry academic topic. I hope you’ll enjoy the books I’ve suggested - there is something for everyone; from fiction, trivia, and well-being, to a book that puts Batman on the therapy couch!
I chose this book for a trip because it’s compact (easy to pack) and brimming with psychology facts.
Instead of staring at the plane’s ceiling for hours, I disappeared into a fun refresher course on the core ideas of psychology. It’s a great read for anyone who wants to brush up on their foundational concepts in a way that feels natural and entertaining.
Too often, textbooks turn the noteworthy theories, principles, and experiments of psychology into tedious discourse that even Freud would want to repress. Psych 101 cuts out the boring details and statistics, and instead, gives you a lesson in psychology that keeps you engaged - and your synapses firing.
From personality quizzes and the Rorschach Blot Test to B.F. Skinner and the stages of development, this primer for human behavior is packed with hundreds of entertaining psychology basics and quizzes you can't get anywhere else.
So whether you're looking to unravel the intricacies…
