Synopsis
The definitive visual guide to over 2,500 paintings and sculptures from around the world, from prehistory to the 21st century. Accessible, engaging, and thoroughly comprehensive, Art shows you how to look at — and understand — works of art, before guiding you chronologically through the milestones of art history.
The book opens with a short section detailing how artists use color, composition, light and shade, perspective, and different media to bring their ideas to fruition. Graphics and overlays explain the simple steps required to analyze, and inform your enjoyment of, any work of art.
Each artistic movement — from the Italian Renaissance to Impressionism and Pop Art — is clearly explained, alongside its origins and influences, styles and techniques, and typical subject matter. A visual timeline of key works gives an overview of the scope of each major movement.
More than 700 artists from all periods and cultures — Western and non-Western, right up to the present day — are profiled alongside key examples of their work. Picture-packed pages help you to identify the characteristics of each artist’s work, and follow how it changed through his or her lifetime. Contextual information deepens your understanding of artists’ work, life, and times.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper to Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, 22 key works are analyzed at full-page size in terms of composition, story, and techniques. What the artists did to create each work — and how — is revealed with the help of graphics, overlays, and detailed close-ups. Never before has it been so easy to understand artistic aims and methods.
Interspersed through the book, double-page features show how different artists have approached the same popular themes. Covering subjects as diverse as love, war, work, and children, these beautiful galleries show how attitudes, styles, and techniques change from one era and culture to another.
More than 2,500 works of art are reproduced in Art’s stunning chronological catalog. Collaborating with Bridgeman Art Library, the world’s most comprehensive source of culture and historical art images, Art brings the world’s best images into your home.
Reviews
What must a big book of art contain to make it a great big book of art? Many color reproductions, including close-ups. A fluid mix of art history and interpretation set against the larger panorama of world history. Lots of brief artist bios. Clear and concise explanations of media, techniques, aesthetics, styles, and intent. A sense of continuity and stories of radical departures and infamous scandals. Works and artists the reader has never encountered before. A jump-starting foreword by an eloquent art historian, such as Ross King, who opens this exemplary volume, one that surpasses all the criteria above, by declaring, “Great art, more than anything else, is the benchmark of human achievement.” From the genuinely informative introductory primer, “Looking at Art,” to in-depth scrutiny of seminal works to overviews of universal and timeless themes, and a phenomenal array of artists past and present, this grand and exciting survey of the art of Europe and the U.S. with forays into Africa, Asia, India, South America, and Australia, should be the anchor for art collections of all sizes. --Donna Seaman
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