Art of the 20th Century - Softcover

Honnef, Klaus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3822859079 ISBN 13: 9783822859070

Publisher: Taschen America Llc, 2000

Synopsis

Art of the 20th Century

No art lover should be without this book, and now that this new version is available you have no more excuses!

An undertaking as immensely ambitious as this one deserves to be owned by everyone, which is why we decided to shrink the original huge two-volume hardcover set down to a manageable size and price-for those of you with small coffee tables or smaller budgets. Now you'll find in one flexi-cover volume the world's best overview of 20th century art.

Who could possibly have forecast on New Year's Eve 1899 that, one hundred years later, painting and sculpture would be only options, not prerequisites? The term "art" has been defined and redefined so many times over the last 100 years that it has gained entirely new social, political, and technological meanings.

Ranging across the full spectrum of disciplines available, including photography and new media, and thematically chaptered to highlight relationships between works and movements, this readable and encyclopaedic masterwork does just what it says on the cover. Whether you want Surrealism or Land Art, Fluxus or Bauhaus, this is your be-all, end-all guide to art of the past 100 years.

The authors:
Karl Ruhrberg, exhibition curator and museum director, proves that writing about art can be as compelling as the art itself.

Manfred Schneckenburger, artistic director of two documentas, describes the changes in the Plastic Arts and shows the identity crisis of the century to be the driving principle in the art-work of our time.

Christiane Fricke explores the diverse arenas of the New Media, from Happenings to Fluxus, and Live Art to Video.

Klaus Honnef, co-curator of documenta 5 and 6 and renowned director of photography exhibitions, examines the history of photography.

The editor:
Ingo F. Walther, born in Berlin in 1940, edited this volume and wrote the biographies in the glossary. He studied literature and art history at Frankfurt am Main and Munich and has written and edited numerous studies of 19th and 20th century art, among them "Pablo Picasso" (with C.-P. Warncke, 2 vols., TASCHEN).

About this title

Review:

This exhaustive look at a long century of art making and art questioning is, understandably, more broad than it is deep. A massive, boxed, two-volume set, it's divided into sections on painting, sculpture, new media (performance art, video art, earth art, etc.), and photography, with a 150-page biographical appendix of all of the 780 artists whose works are illustrated in the main sections of the book. The original German text, written by a team of writers and art historians, has been fluidly translated by John William Gabriel. The authors are very much of their own time and place: there are more works from after World War II than before it, and many more German artists--including mediocre and derivative ones--make the cut than if the book had been written by, say, an English or a French team. In fact, the English seem slightly shortchanged here. William Tucker, still a vital influence, is represented by a 1967 minimal sculpture and a four-word mention, and painter Howard Hodgkin is omitted entirely. And while American sculptor-entrepreneur Jeff Koons is given more than his due, the thoughtful and significant Rachel Whiteread is not mentioned at all. But Art of the Twentieth Century is an unquestionably useful reference guide to a period that swings dramatically from the impressionists all the way to Nam June Paik.

About the Author:

Ingo F. Walther was born in Berlin and studied medieval studies, literature, and art history in Frankfurt am Main and Munich. He has published numerous books on the art of the Middle Ages and of the 19th and 20th centuries, including TASCHEN's Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Codices illustres.

About this edition

• Publisher: Taschen America Llc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 3822859079
• ISBN 13: 9783822859070
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 840