Schools, Periods & Styles

The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern

This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media.

Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible—even at a cursory reading.

From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.

Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

Ideal for students studying visual culture for the first time, Practices of Looking explores the ways we use and understand images. Truly interdisciplinary, this comprehensive and engaging introduction can be used in courses across a range of disciplines including media and film studies, communications, art history, and photography. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright examine the diverse range of recent approaches to visual analysis and lead students through key theories on visual culture, providing explanations of the fundamentals of these theories and presenting visual examples of how they function. Using over 175 illustrations, they examine how images--paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, news images, the Internet, digital images, and images from science--gain meaning in different cultural arenas, from art and commerce to science and the law. They also consider how these images travel globally and in distinct cultures; how they are an integral and important aspect of our lives. The images are analyzed in relation to a range of cultural and representational issues (desire, power, the gaze, bodies, sexuality, ethnicity) and methodologies (semiotics, marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial theory). Central topics such as ideology, the concept of the spectator, the role of reproduction in visual culture, the mass media and the public sphere, consumer culture, and postmodernism are explained in depth.

Wall and Piece

Banksy, Britain's now-legendary "guerilla" street artist, has painted the walls, streets, and bridges of towns and cities throughout the world. Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable—with prints selling for as much as $45,000.

History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography (5th Edition)

Authoritative and insightful, Arnason's History of Modern Art remains the definitive source of information on the art of the Modern Era from modernism's mid-nineteenth century European beginnings to today's divergent art trends. Now full-color throughout, this Fifth Edition has been completely redesigned to make it even more elegant and easy-to-use. New heads, subheads, and a glossary have been added to help the reader navigate the material and quickly identify areas of interest.

Norton Recorded Anthology of Western Music, Fifth Edition, Volume 1: Ancient to Baroque (6 CDs)

The Norton Recorded Anthology of Western Music includes professional recordings (many brand new) of all works in the anthology on two six-CD sets, of which this is volume 1.

Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas

This popular anthology of twentieth-century art theoretical texts has now been expanded to take account of new research, and to include significant contributions to art theory from the 1990s.

• New edition of this popular anthology of twentieth-century art-theoretical texts.
  
• Now updated to include the results of new research, together with significant contributions from the 1990s.
  
• Includes writings by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures.
  
• The editors provide contextual introductions to 340 texts.
  
• Complements Art in Theory 1648-1815 and Art in Theory 1815-1900 to create a complete survey of the theories underpinning the development of art in the modern period.

Since it was first published in 1992, this book has become one of the leading anthologies of art theoretical texts in the English-speaking world. This expanded edition includes the fruits of recent research, involving a considerable amount of newly-translated material from the entire period, together with additional texts from the last decades of the twentieth century. The features that made the first edition so successful have been retained: The volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians, and literary figures. The content is clearly structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting with the legacy of symbolism and concluding with contemporary debates about the postmodern. The editors provide individual introductions to each of the 371 anthologized texts. Material new to this expanded edition includes texts on African art, on the Bauhaus and on the re-emergent avant-gardes of the period after the Second World War. Post-modernist debates are amplified by texts on gender, on installation and performance art, and on the increasing globalization of culture.

Reality Through the Arts (6th Edition)

This introductory exploration of basic artistic concepts and terms applies them to a skeletal multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural history of artistic styles. It treats all the arts–painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, music, theatre, dance, film, architecture, literature–uniformly, and uses a common outline to reinforce the relationship of terms and concepts to the perceptual process. The book also ties both artistic media and history to the theme of art as a reflection of human reality This examination focuses on the media of the arts, pictures, sculpture, music, theatre, cinema, dance, architecture, literature, the styles of the arts, ancient approaches, artistic reflections in the pre-modern world, as well as artistic styles in the emerging modern world and, the beginnings of modernism, pluralism in a post-modern age. For art enthusiasts and others interested exploring how artists express themselves.

Modern Art, Revised and Updated (3rd Edition)

Richly illustrated and clearly focused, this book surveys the genesis, development, and culmination of modern European/American painting, sculpture, architecture, and conceptual art—from Post-Impressionism through the most recent developments in the 1990s. It avoids the typical encyclopedic approach of surveys in favor of examining selected but highly representative works in greater depth and from an enlarged spectrum of critical discourse. Organized along chronological lines, topics explore the ideas, forms, events, artists, and works—with each chapter devoted to a style, movement, or decade—from Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh through Minimalism and the general reaction known as Post-Modernism. Ideal for readers with a general interest in art.

The Art of Mesoamerica (World of Art)

"An essential guide to the art and architecture of ancient Central America."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review

Mary Ellen Miller evocatively surveys the artistic achievements of the high Precolumbian civilizations—Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Aztec—as well as those of their less well-known contemporaries. Their pyramids and palaces, jades and brightly colored paintings emerge from these pages as vividly as when they first astonished Cortes's men in 1519.

The fourth edition of this standard work includes exciting new discoveries, from Palenque, Mexico, where architecture and sculpture reveal a dramatic eighth century, to San Bartolo, Guatemala, where Maya paintings have riveted an international audience. Continuing hieroglyphic decipherments provide fresh insights. The revised edition of the Art of Mesoamerica is the ideal companion for art historians, students, and travelers alike. 220 illustrations, 136 in color.