The best art books to read for free on NYPL’s new eBook app

The New York Public Library has just released an iPhone and Android app that allows anyone with a library card to freely download any of the 300,000 eBooks in its collection. Called SimplyE, it allows texts to be “borrowed” for a period of 13 days, after which they are automatically returned (no late fees!).

Reading on a small screen is unbeatable when flipping through hard copies of large, glossy art books with full color illustrations. But the app allows you to read tiny versions of those bulky books on the subway, or while in line at the grocery store, or while waiting for the Pokemon Go servers to start working again. For art history buffs with long journeys, here are five art ebooks available for free download through NYPL’s SimplyE app.

Women artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, edited by Maura Reilly (Image via Thames & Hudson)

Women artists: Linda Nochlin’s reader

The first comprehensive anthology of the work of maverick art historian Linda Nochlin, published last year by Thames & Hudson, includes 29 essays from the classic 1971 feminist tract not had great women artists? To thoughts on Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi and Sophie Calle.

Dave Hickey, “Air Guitar” (Image via Amazon)

Dave Hickey, Imaginary guitar

Regarded as an outspoken art critic, the 23 Hickey essays (or “love songs” as Hickey calls them) in this volume reflect a “vast and invisible underground empire” of record stores, galleries and galleries. art, jazz clubs and surf shops, and the offer is directed at Norman Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Perry Mason.

Robert Hughes, “Shock of the New” (Image via Thames and Hudson)

Robert Hugues, The shock of the new and The Show of Skill: Selected Writings

“I am completely elitist, in the cultural sense but absolutely not in the social sense,” said Robert Hughes, who was an art critic for Time magazine for 30 years, written in The spectacle of skill, respond to accusations of snobbery from fellow Australians. “I prefer good to evil, articulate to mumble, developed aesthetics to simply primitive, and mindfulness to partial awareness.” I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter cutting dovetails, or someone attaching a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think it is as nice to be around stupid or poorly literate people as it is with wise and perfectly literate people… Therefore, most of the human race does not matter to me, outside of the normal and necessary framework of civility and the obligation to respect human rights. I don’t see any reason to squirm to apologize for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the bad. “

This mark of brutal honesty is found throughout this compilation of Hughes’ writings on art, architecture, religion and culture. The shock of the new, Illustrated with 250 color photos, is a century-old history of modern art, ranging from cubism to avant-garde pop art, which accompanied the BBC Hughes animated documentary series of the same name.

Toby Lester, “The Da Vinci Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image” (Image via Simon and Schuster)

Toby Lester, The ghost of Da Vinci: genius, obsession and how Leonardo created the world in his image

Historian Toby Lester tells the story of Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, one of the world’s most famous images, inspired by Roman architect Vitruvius, who suggested that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, associated with the earthly and the profane. Placing a man within these two forms at the same time, he believed, would imply that the human body could be a model for the mysterious workings of the universe. Da Vinci believed that if the human body were divine, more study of anatomy (and illegally) than ever before would yield unprecedented knowledge of the cosmos. Lester follows Da Vinci’s quest to understand the riddle of the Vitruvian man.

The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett (Image via Penguin)

Andy Warhol’s Diaries

From the mid-1970s to just days before his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s Diaries compiles more than twenty thousand pages of the artist’s diary, which he dictates daily to his friend Pat Hackett. This is largely a list of the names of “everyone” he has spent time with, including Jackie O, who “thinks she’s so big she doesn’t even owe the public. to have another great marriage with someone great; “Yoko Ono (” We called FUCKYOU and LOVEYOU to see what happened, we had so much fun “) and” Princess Marina from, I guess, Greece. “

Also available in the art ebook section of the app: a guide to Tibetan calligraphy, that of Steven Heller The training of a graphic designer, Judy Chicago Institutional time (an autobiographical and critical look at higher education in art), etc.

SimplyE is available as a free download from the App Store.