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 Art of Mesoamerica (World of Art)
by Mary Ellen Miller
from Thames & Hudson
"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.
The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists
by Gregory Curtis
from Anchor
The Cave Painters is a vivid introduction to the spectacular cave paintings of France and Spain—the individuals who rediscovered them, theories about their origins, their splendor and mystery.
Gergory Curtis makes us see the astonishing sophistication and power of the paintings and tells us what is known about their creators, the Cro-Magnon people of some 40,000 years ago. He takes us through various theories—that the art was part of fertility or hunting rituals, or used for religious purposes, or was clan mythology—examining the ways interpretations have changed over time. Rich in detail, personalities, and history, The Cave Painters is above all permeated with awe for those distant humans who developed—perhaps for the first time—both the ability for abstract thought and a profound and beautiful way to express it.
World Views : Topics in Non-Western Art
by Laurie Adams
from McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
This text comprises eleven chapters, each focusing on a discrete area of non-Western or Native American art. With nearly 180 illustrations (many in full color) and an accessible 8 1/2 x 11 format, students are introduced to important subjects and artworks outside of the Western tradition.
The Codex Borgia: A Full-Color Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript
by Gisele Diaz
from Dover Publications
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
by David Lewis-Williams
from Thames & Hudson
The breathtakingly beautiful art created deep inside the caves of western Europe has the power to dazzle even the most jaded observers. Emerging from the narrow underground passages into the chambers of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, visitors are confronted with symbols, patterns, and depictions of bison, woolly mammoths, ibexes, and other animals.
Since its discovery, cave art has provoked great curiosity about why it appeared when and where it did, how it was made, and what it meant to the communities that created it. David Lewis-Williams proposes that the explanation for this lies in the evolution of the human mind. Cro-Magnons, unlike the Neanderthals, possessed a more advanced neurological makeup that enabled them to experience shamanistic trances and vivid mental imagery. It became important for people to "fix," or paint, these images on cave walls, which they perceived as the membrane between their world and the spirit world from which the visions came. Over time, new social distinctions developed as individuals exploited their hallucinations for personal advancement, and the first truly modern society emerged.
Illuminating glimpses into the ancient mind are skillfully interwoven here with the still-evolving story of modern-day cave discoveries and research. The Mind in the Cave is a superb piece of detective work, casting light on the darkest mysteries of our earliest ancestors while strengthening our wonder at their aesthetic achievements. 87 illustrations, 26 in color.
Subway Art
by Martha Cooper
from Holt Paperbacks
Native Arts Of North America, Africa, And The South Pacific: An Introduction (Icon Editions)
by George A. Corbin
from Westview Press
The Nature of Paleolithic Art
by R. Dale Guthrie
from University Of Chicago Press
With a natural historian's keen eye for observation, and as one who has spent a lifetime using bones and other excavated materials to piece together past human behavior and environments, Guthrie demonstrates that Paleolithic art is a mode of expression we can comprehend to a remarkable degree and that the perspective of natural history is integral to that comprehension. He employs a mix of ethology, evolutionary biology, and human universals to access these distant cultures and their art and artifacts. Guthrie uses innovative forensic techniques to reveal new information; estimating, for example, the ages and sexes of some of the artists, he establishes that Paleolithic art was not just the creation of male shamans.
With more than 3,000 images, The Nature of Paleolithic Art offers the most comprehensive representation of Paleolithic art ever published and a radical (and controversial) new way of interpreting it. The variety and content of these images—most of which have never been available or easily accessible to nonspecialists or even researchers—will astonish you. This wonderfully written work of natural history, of observation and evidence, tells the great story of our deepest past.
Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind
by Randall White
from Harry N. Abrams
While some prehistoric sites--notably the painted caves at Lascaux in France and at Altamira in northern Spain--are familiar, many more such places are almost unknown. In fact, remains left by prehistoric men and women are far more numerous, and have been found over a much greater territory--including Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas--than most people are aware. These remains include paintings and engravings in caves and rock shelters, but also decorated tools, weapons, statuettes, personal ornaments, and even musical instruments made of stone, ivory, antler, shell, bone, and fired clay.
In Prehistoric Art, anthropologist Randall White presents a global survey, starting with the first explosion of imagery that occurred approximately 40,000 years ago but also including the creations of essentially "prehistoric" peoples living as recently as the early 20th century. Drawing on the most up-to-the-minute research, White places these discoveries in context and discusses possible uses and meanings for the objects and images, opening a fascinating new window onto the history of creative expression.
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