Books like The art of rivalry by Sebastian Smee

A curated collection of the daily habits and routines that powered some of history’s most influential artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers.

Olivia Laing examines urban loneliness through the lens of Manhattan’s cultural scene, weaving memoir, biography, and criticism around artists like Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, and David Wojnarowicz.

A catalog of Pablo Picasso’s Blue and Rose Period works, featuring ten color plates—including a front cover illustration—offering a visual overview of his early artistic development.

The Bully Pulpit traces the complex friendship and bitter rivalry of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, showing how their 1912 presidential battle reshaped the Republican Party and weakened progressivism.

Max Hastings illuminates the frantic opening year of World War I, tracing diplomacy’s collapse, the early battles of the Marne, Ypres and Tannenberg, and the brutal Eastern Front, while assessing leaders and ordinary soldiers to explain why Germany’s defeat saved Europe.

""What are we to make of those cultural figures, many with significant international reputations, who tried to find accommodation with the Nazi regime?" Jonathan Petropoulos asks in this exploration of some of the most acute moral questions of the Third Reich. In his nuanced analysis of prominent German artists, architects, composers, film directors, painters, and writers who rejected exile, choosing instead to stay during Germany's darkest period, Petropoulos shows how individuals variously dealt with the regime's public opposition to modern art. His findings explode the myth that all modern artists were anti-Nazi and all Nazis anti-modernist. Artists Under Hitler closely examines cases of artists who failed in their attempts to find accommodation with the Nazi regime (Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde) as well as others whose desire for official acceptance was realized (Richard Strauss, Gustaf Gründgens, Leni Riefenstahl, Arno Breker, Albert Speer). Collectively these ten figures illuminate the complex cultural history of Nazi Germany, while individually they provide haunting portraits of people facing excruciating choices and grave moral questions"--

"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--

"In architectural terms, the twentieth century can be largely summed up with two names: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson. Wright (1867-1959) began it with his romantic prairie style; Johnson (1906-2005) brought down the curtain with his spare postmodernist experiments. Between them, they built some of the most admired and discussed buildings in American history. Differing radically in their views on architecture, Wright and Johnson shared a restless creativity, enormous charisma, and an outspokenness that made each man irresistible to the media. Often publicly at odds, they were the twentieth century's flint and steel; their repeated encounters consistently set off sparks. Yet as acclaimed historian Hugh Howard shows, their rivalry was also a fruitful artistic conversation, one that yielded new directions for both men. It was not despite but rather because of their contentious--and not always admiring--relationship that they were able so powerfully to influence history. In Architecture's Odd Couple, Howard deftly traces the historical threads connecting the two men and offers readers a distinct perspective on the era they so enlivened with their designs. Featuring many of the structures that defined modern space--from Fallingwater to the Guggenheim, from the Glass House to the Seagram Building--this book presents an arresting portrait of modern architecture's odd couple and how they shaped the American landscape by shaping each other"--

Explore Paris in the roaring 1920s, where art, architecture, music, literature, fashion, entertainment, and everyday life underwent dramatic transformation.

A definitive biography of Elsa Schiaparelli, the surrealist couturier whose avant‑garde designs reshaped 20th‑century fashion.