Audiobooks About Art, Famous Painters & Artists

We recommend the following audio book titles on art, artists and the lives of famous painters:

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc
Author : Laurie Lisle
Narrator : Grace Conlin
Duration : 14 hours 30 minutes (Unabridged)

Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of 98. Her vivid visual vocabulary, sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century.

O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvasses. Here is the first full account of her exceptional lifefrom her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher. . .to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde, Alfred Stieglitz. . .to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death.

And here is the story of a great romance between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, Georgia O'Keeffe is a twentieth century legend. Her dazzling career spans virtually the entire history of modern art in America.

Buy Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe

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Lives of The Artists Vol. 1

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc
Author : Giorgio Vasari, translated by George Bull
Narrator : Nadia May
Duration: 19 hours (Unabridged)

Georgio Vasari's original vision of the arts was to see the artist as divinely inspired. He describes the lives of forty-five artists, including Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, with striking immediacy conveyed through character sketches, anecdotes, and detailed recording of conversations.

Although Vasari was at times inaccurate, prompting some dry remarks from Michelangelo, Michelangelo did praise the work for endowing artists with immortality. Vasari's shrewd judgments and his precise pinpointing of the emotions aroused by individual works of art bear out his predictions that he would have a worldwide influence on the history of art.

Volume One includes the lives of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and fourteen more.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) , born in Tuscany, studied in Florence with Michelangelo while he was still a boy. When his patron, Duke Alessandro, was assassinated, Vasari wandered round Italy filling his notebooks with sketches; during this period, he conceived the idea of the Lives. By his thirties, Vasari was a highly successful painter; when his Lives were published they were received enthusiastically. He returned to Florence in 1555, where he was appointed architect of the Palazzo Vecchio. After a grand tour of Italian towns he published the revised and enlarged edition of his Lives in 1568. Vasari was knighted by Pope Pius V in 1571.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives ...

Buy Lives of The Artists Vol. 1

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The Lives of the Great Artists

Publisher : NAXOS
Author : Giorgio Vasari
Narrator : Neville Jason
Duration : 7 hours 50 minutes

The Lives of the Great Artists was the first truly comprehensive history of art. Originally published in 1550, it remains our greatest source of information about that explosion of artistic creativity in 16th century Italy, the Renaissance. Vasari, himself a painter and architect of renown, was a personal friend of such major figures as Michelangelo and Titian, and his accounts of the lives of his contemporaries have an authenticity and immediacy which is unique. In this selection, 40 of the greatest artists of the period are featured ...

Buy Lives of the Great Artists, The

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Living Biographies of Great Painters

Publisher :  Blackstone Audio Inc
Author :  Henry and Dana Lee Thomas
Narrator :  Pat Bottino
Duration :  11 hours 30 minutes (Unabridged)

To appreciate the meaning and beauty of great works of art, we must be familiar with the lives of the geniuses who created them. For in the personalities and life-stories of great artists is the key to their masterpieces.

Here are vivid stories of men who dreamed, struggled and suffered so that they might give expression to their divine gifts. And here are also frank stories of human beings, many of whom lived exciting lives of romance and adventure. These are Living Biographies and they have the fascination of fiction illumined and strengthened with the permanent appeal of historical fact.

Buy Living Biographies of Great Painters

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Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc
Author : Roger Kimball
Narrator : Christopher Lane
Duration : 8 hours (Unabridged)

In this series of essays written over the past twenty years, Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator, illuminates some of the chief spiritual itineraries of modern art. His wide range of subjects includes Vincent van Gogh, Clement Greenberg, the Barnes Foundation, Matthew Barney, Mark Rothko, and the Whitney Biennial, as well as the way in which Gilbert and George demonstrate the psychopathology of current cultural influences.

Roger Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion and an art critic for the Spectator (London). He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement, National Review, Public Interest, Modern Painters, Art and Antiques, and Museum and Arts Washington. He lives in South Norwalk, Connecticut.

Christopher Lane is an award-winning actor, director, and narrator. Earning rave reviews on every book he has narrated for Blackstone, he received the coveted Audie Award in 2004. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Buy Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity

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