Art History Textbooks ReviewsArt History Textbooks Reviews

As is sometime the case with Amazon, they group reviews for different editions of a book together. For the record there are several editions of ART NOW:

"ART NOW 137 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium", ISBN 382281444X (pub June 2002)

This reasonable size book, it measures 25.5cmm x 20cm (10"x8"), 640 pages, and is packed full if images. It covers the work of 137 different artists from the areas of painting, photography, film and video, sculpture, performance art and installation. Each artist is allotted four pages, has a brief introduction of one paragraph (printed in English, German and French), along with a thumb-nail photograph of the artist and a short list of selected exhibitions and bibliography. The pictures fill the pages, sometimes several to a page; in total I estimate there are around 750 illustrations almost entirely in colour. The book concludes with a glossary and brief biographical notes on the authors, plus a section entitled The Art Newspaper which provides art market details and facts about leading art cities in the world.

It covers many well known names including Jeff Koons, Damien Hurst, Luc Tuymans, John Currin, Peter Doig, Tracey Emin to mention a few, plus some less familiar, providing a very useful if brief summary of art today

"ART NOW Artist at the rise of the new Millennium" ISBN 9783822840931 (pub April 2005)

A scaled down version of the above; this is fairly compact book with around 360 pages, it measures 22.5cmm x 18cm (8.75"x7"). It covers the work of just 81 of the artists from the original edition, exactly as they appear there. There are over 500 illustrations almost entirely in colour. The book concludes with a glossary and brief biographical notes on the authors, but there is no "Art Newspaper"

"ART NOW VOL 2 137 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium" ISBN 3822839965 (pub Dec 2005)

This edition I have not seen, but I understand that the format is the same as before; however all the artists covered are entirely new, none is repeated from previous issues. It is listed as having 640 pages and as being the same size as the original edition.

Without doubt it's the best visual reference available for those of us who can't afford to pay models. There's a good selection of body types,male and female, and they can be rotated and enlarged with excellent resolution.There is a good selection of poses with excellent lighting too . I've been doing artwork since I was a child and this has proved to be a valuable tool for the artistic study of human anatomy. Buy it, you can't go wrong on this one.