History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography (5th Edition)
by H. H. Arnason
from Prentice Hall
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.
The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern
by Carol Strickland
from Andrews McMeel Publishing
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
by Edward Dolnick
from Harper
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.
Theories of Modern Art A Source Book by Artists and Critics (California Studies in the History of Art)
by Herschel B. Chipp
from University of California Press
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
from Wiley-Blackwell
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.
After Modern Art 1945-2000 (Oxford History of Art)
by David Hopkins
from Oxford University Press, USA
Modern and contemporary art can be both baffling and beautiful; it can also be innovative, political, and disturbing. This book sets out to provide the first concise interpretation of the period as a whole, clarifying the artists and their works along the way. Closely informed by new critical approaches, it concentrates on the relationship between American and European art from the end of the Second World War to the eve of the new millennium.
Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst are among many artists discussed, with careful attention being given to the political and cultural worlds they inhabited. Moving along a clear timeline, the author highlights key movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and performance art to explain the theoretical and issue-based debates that have provided the engine for the art of this period.
Modern Art, Revised and Updated (3rd Edition)
by Sam Hunter
from Prentice Hall
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.
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (California Studies in the History of Art ; 35)
from University of California Press
Ambitious and interdisciplinary, this long-awaited collaboration is a landmark presentation of the writings of contemporary artists. These influential essays, interviews, and critical and theoretical comments provide bold and fertile insights into the construction of visual knowledge. Featuring a wide range of leading and emerging artists since 1945, the collection--while comprehensive and authoritative--offers the reader some eclectic surprises as well.
Included here are texts that have become pivotal documents in contemporary art, along with writings that cover unfamiliar ground. Some are newly translated, others have never before been published. Together they address visual literacy, cultural studies, and the theoretical debates regarding modernism and postmodernism. The full panoply of visual media is represented, from painting and sculpture to environments, installations, performance, conceptual art, video, photography, and virtual reality. Thematic concerns range from figuration and process to popular culture, art and technology, and politics and the media. Contemporary issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are also addressed.
Kristine Stiles's general introduction is a succinct overview of artists' theories in the evolution of contemporary discourse around art. Introductions to each chapter provide synopses of the cultural contexts in which the texts originated and brief biographies of individual artists. The text is augmented by outstanding photographs, many of artists in their studios, and vivid, contemporary art images.
Reflecting the editors' shared belief that artists' own theories provide unparalleled access to visual knowledge, this book, like its distinguished predecessors, Hershel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (with Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor) and Joshua Taylor's Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary art.
"In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation."--Marcel Duchamp (1961)
"Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women."--Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer (1978)
"I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana modernism and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the Nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago."--Shigeko Kubota (1976)
"Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space."--Maya Lin (1983)
"Artists often depend on the manipulation of symbols to present ideas and associations not always apparent in such symbols. If all such ideas and associations were evident there would be little need for artists to give expression to them. In short, there would be no need to make art."--Andres Serrano (1989)
Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s-1990s
by Linda Weintraub
from Art Insights, Inc.
In this highly accessible introduction to American art since the 1970's, Linda Weintraub offers a musem goers a readable exploration of some of the most important artists and movements of the past decades.
Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin
by Ruth Butler
from Yale University Press
Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. The names of these brilliant nineteenth-century artists are known throughout the world. But what is remembered of their wives? What were these unknown women like? What roles did they play in the lives and the art of their famous husbands?
In this remarkable book of discovery, art historian Ruth Butler coaxes three shadowy women out of obscurity and introduces them for the first time as individuals. Through unprecedented research, Butler has been able to create portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuret—the models, and later the wives, respectively, of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin, three of the most famous French artists of their generation. The book tells the stories of three ordinary women who faced issues of a dramatically changing society as well as the challenges of life with a striving genius. Butler illuminates the ways in which these model-wives figured in their husbands’ achievements and provides new analyses of familiar works of art. Filled with captivating detail, the book recovers the lives of Hortense, Camille, and Rose, and recognizes with new insight how their unique relationships enriched the quality of their husbands’ artistic endeavors.
+++
