The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser

Liveright Review by David Starkey Last month, I was lucky enough to be in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This was my first visit to that august institution, so I…

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

Simon & Schuster Review by David Starkey What in the world are they thinking, those uniformed museum guards standing in the corners of the galleries, looking alternately stern and bored,…

Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams

Crown Review by Brian Tanguay One anecdote in Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You captures the essence of Lucinda Williams, the acclaimed American singer/songwriter. In 1993, Williams won…

The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century by Owen Hopkins

Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey In The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century, Owen Hopkins, Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University, focuses on three key…

No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk by Gavin Butt

Duke Review by George Yatchisin Polymath producer-musician Brian Eno has this great theory about “scenius” as the corrective to “‘genius,’ which exemplifies what I call the ‘Big Man’ theory of…

Vienna 1900, Edited by Hans-Peter Wipplinger

Review by David Starkey When I visited the Leopold Museum in Vienna this past spring, I must admit that I was wowed. I was familiar, of course, with the creepy…

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl

Review by David Starkey In Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, Jed Perl takes on “the stranglehold of relevance…the extent to which [works of art] line up with…

American Art from the Thyssen Collection by Paloma Alarcó and Alba Campo Rosillo

Review by David Starkey Before visiting Madrid this past February, I must admit that I had no idea that the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum even existed. But exist it does, and…

Edvard Munch in Dialogue by Dieter Buchhart, Antonia Hoerschelmann and Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Review by David Starkey “Much is suggested. Little is defined,” writes Margaret Dumas of Norway’s most famous painter. One of the contemporary painters represented in Edvard Munch in Dialogue, Dumas…

Joan Mitchell Edited by Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel

Review by David Starkey I’m not sure when I realized that Joan Mitchell was my favorite abstract painter, but I do know it was a gradual process. Partly that time-lag…