Howard Stern: The King of All Media: The Unauthorized Biography of Howard Stern

A feast for connoisseurs, this delightfully informal, ravishingly illustrated survey recreates the Aesthetic Movement, which swept England, France and the U.S. in the 1870s and '80s, proclaiming the supremacy of the artist as innovator and arbiter of style. Beginning with the cult of beauty of Baudelaire and Swinburne, Lambourne, former head of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, follows a movement that began with William Morris's crafts revival and touched the work of Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters centered around Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Hundreds of intriguing color illustrations delineate the Aesthetic influence in furniture, ceramics and other decorative arts; its imprint on posters, book illustration, cartoons, sculpture; and themes of sensuality, languor, mystery, death and romantic yearning in painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Odilon Redon and James McNeill Whistler. Aestheticism gave birth in the 1890s to Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement and the ""decadence"" of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Paul Verlaine, all captured here with great verve as Lambourne records artists' feuds, scandals, obsessions, friendships, affectations and cross-pollinations. (July)