And just now the sky was blue. Texts about art

A collection of articles and lectures by the German art historian Florian Illies, who speaks about art like no other, in a fascinating and inspiring way. The book includes his main texts on art and literature, written between 1997 and 2017. In them, Illies describes his personal heroes: from Max Friedländer to Gottfried Benn, from Count Harry Kessler to Andy Warhol. He explores why the best artists of the 19th century preferred to look at the sky and paint clouds, and what made them travel to the small Italian village of Olevano; he asks whether romance is curable, and addresses a passionate love letter to Caspar David Friedrich. In these texts, the past feels like the present, the paintings appear in movement and color, and historical figures turn out to be living and loving people.