Art History Textbooks ReviewsArt History Textbooks Reviews

At the turn of the last century, the Arts and Crafts movement transformed not only how objects looked but also how people looked at objects. It provided a framework for essential issues that are still debated today: the conflict between standardization and individuality, the question of whether a one-of-a-kind handcrafted object is superior to a mass-produced one, and the problem of defining what kind of design most benefits society.

As the most industrialized country, Britain was also the first to generate a movement to counter what was seen as the malevolent effects of mass production. Protagonists such as John Ruskin and William Morris championed "joy in labor"—the moral and spiritual uplift that would come with the revival of making objects by hand. The improvement of working conditions, integration of art into everyday life, and an "honest" aesthetic resulting from the use of indigenous materials and native traditions were also central to the movement's philosophy. At the end of the nineteenth century, these Arts and Crafts ideals were appropriated and adapted by the young avant-garde throughout Europe and the United States.

With 260 objects—furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, and works on paper—from Britain, Ireland, the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Scandinavia, and Finland, this is a visually stunning, definitive survey. The book features masterworks by the best-known designers of the period, such as William Morris, M. H. Baillie Scott, Henry Van de Velde, Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, Eliel Saarinen, Gustav Stickley, Greene and Greene, and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as lesser-known examples that have never been displayed together. 360 illustrations, 300 in color.

With contributions by: Alan Crawford, Rüdiger Joppien, Juliet Kinchin Amy F. Ogata. Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark, Christian Witt-Dörring.

Nineteen forty-five marked a historical moment in the figurative arts, with new trends related to changes in the cultural climate caused in large part by the war. This book presents an in-depth overview of the arts from the postwar period in Europe and the United States to today, from analysis of the pictorial languages of the leading masters of the second half of the 20th century, including the avant-gardes of the 1950s, to consideration of the trends that have inaugurated the third millennium, breaking the traditional borders between painting and sculpture.

In the immediate postwar period, a situation strongly marked by the tragedies of war, Europe and the United States entered a period in art marked by upheavals and the creations of highly original personalities. The international art scene came to be populated by generations of anti-conventional underground artists who explored new territories in artistic communication. These artists pushed past the social realism and abstract art of preceding decades to adopt daring new expressive languages that swept over the traditional borders between painting and sculpture. From postwar existential tension came Art informel along with abstract expressionism, leading to the definitive break with tradition. There are then Lucio Fontana's poetics, Mark Rothko's use of color, Andy Warhol's serial images and pop art, leading to the most recent developments in the postmodern avant-gardes.

Contemporary art has become the site of cultural exchanges during our time, with global materials and contexts. External space has itself become part of art, leading to such extremes as Land Art. Postmodern Art, with more than 400 color images, explores the currents, themes, and names that are part of the artistic heritage of today, from Art Informel to New Dada to body and video art. Its sixteen chapters present painters, sculptors, photographers, and architects with their most important works, many of them results of the close identification between art and life.

Weinberg begins by discussing Whistler's famous portrait of his mother in terms of maternal metaphors for painting. He follows with a discussion of the familial relationships forged by artists like Pollock and Mann with their imagined tradition. He next focuses on the role of love in photographs by Stieglitz as well as O'Keeffe's attempts to find autonomy from the overwhelming attention of her partner Stieglitz. Weinberg also reveals that artistic fame is usually a matter of competition, and he examines the impulse of artists like James Agee and Evans and Basquiat and Warhol to work together. The book concludes with a rumination on the NAMES Project Quilt and the problem of what becomes of those who die in obscurity.