Art History Textbooks ReviewsArt History Textbooks Reviews

A solid, useful one-volume survey of Mesoamerican art. Miller is a noted expert in the field, and she does a commendable job of presenting a large amount of information in a short space without resorting to superficiality. The text is clear and the photographs are both copious and well-chosen, with numerous color plates adding to the enjoyment.Almost of necessity, however, the writing style tends to be fairly dense. Those looking for a readable "History of Mesoamerica" should probably go elsewhere. Nonetheless, most readers will find this book rewarding -- after which they will want to turn to more specific and detailed volumes by Linda Schele and Michael Coe, among others.

In his book Oceanic Art, Nicholas Thomas goes beyond the eye's view of the artwork produced from Oceania, giving the reader the background information and reasons why the distinct works of art were created. Thomas goes through each culture, giving and explaining examples to match the history of each respective culture. I was impressed by the thoroughness of Thomas, not only showing ancient artwork, but photos from Oceania today, as the respective cultures are being preserved. His analysis of the artwork was very well done as he not only explains the artwork, but gives the reader a sense of the culture also. Having studied art, I was impressed with all the examples and pictures in the book, then relating art with history. I would highly suggest this insightful book.

I am an avid reader about contemporary art and I found this book pushed buttons and raised questions I had never even thought of... it's clear that the internet is a defining medium, especially for younger generations, and this book helped me think about the net in a more critical and expansive way. I love the World of Art series and recommend its titles to those trying to get their minds around art and art history. This book was great and I especially liked author's use of the non-net art examples including Tiravanija, Valie Export, and Cindy Sherman.

This really is a wonderfully done book. It's well written, beautifully illustrated, nicely laid out and it's printed on a slick, glossy paper that allows for decent reproductions of the art being discussed. The volume starts out at the dawn of art with Paleolithic man when "art is fused with the erotic and sacred." The book covers art from the so-called "prehistoric Venuses," cave paintings and carvings and takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the whole of western art (with a few diversions to eastern art such as the Japanese Shunga woodblock painting "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife") and arrives safely in the present time. It's one heck of a complicated subject to cover and the author does is superb at keeping the work interesting. Of course, sex has always been a subject of great interested to most humans as well as artists throughout history. Even artists such as Rembrandt produced tiny prints of humorous erotic subject matter(soft-porn) that also made fun of such subjects as monks and the French. He made his engravings tiny so that a buyer could easily carry his dirty pictures around in his pocket in order to share it with other dirty old men friends. His prices for these tiny forerunners of "French Post Cards" wasn't cheap however and now they sell for truly astronomical prices because all those engravings were made during the artist's life.
Throughout much of the history of Western Art the nude had to be wrapped in the invisible cloak of respectability by recreating the scenes of classical art and mythological subjects as vehicles for sexual portrayals. Respectability was also often achieved by illustrating the evils of the world, such as slave markets, rapes and harem life so that the so-called enlightened western audience and their government censors could justify the nudity and blatant sexual symbolism as having a higher moral purpose.
Smith does a terrific job of illustrating his insightful and scholarly discussions with numerous examples of the trends he is explaining. Chapter 12 was particularly interesting because it dealt with "Pleasurable pains." It examines "one deviant sexual fantasy" that "is so frequently and urgently expressed in European art that it calls for a more detailed treatment here. This fantasy concerns the plight of the bound and helpless victim." The chapter is illustrated by works of Jacques Callot's "The Wheel, from Miseries of War," various works by Titan, Rubens, Valentin, Rembrandt, Bachiacca, Allori and other masters. Frequent subject matter of the illustrations for this chapter include "Judith," "David with the Head of Goliath," "Head of Medusa," "Salome," and the "Beheading of John the Baptist." This is only one of many fascinating chapters, but definitely the goriest one, included in this coherent and comprehensive overview of the subject.
A reader doesn't have to be an art historian or collector to enjoy this book. Because of the material discussed, the reader will never be bored--just as artists over the history of mankind have not become bored with the subject for their own works.
I found the chapter dealing with prehistoric art one of the most interesting, but I'm certain every reader will have their own favorites. Some of them deal with humor and sex and provide a pleasant change of pace from the heavy concentration of religious art.

This is one of the most important books of my life, and I know for a fact that I am far from alone in this. Richter taught me that it is not only possible to achieve something beautiful, but very easy; you simply have to actually want to. It is the first book I recommend, lend, or give to a friend; Bradley Chriss keeps extra copies on hand for those who need to read it; Warren Fry and David Beris Edwards have both been deeply inspired by it. What I was officially `taught' concerning Dada, and what I took for accurate for many years, was essentially that it was the cheeky use of the Readymade, and was basically synonymous with Marcel Duchamp. When I finally realised that there may have been something to it that I had missed, a particular image recurred to me, one that had been flipped past for not more than five seconds in a slideshow several years earlier, a man inside a large awkward cardboard costume, looking like a cross between the Tin Man, a stovepipe, and a lobster, with a very earnest, very direct, and at the same time very lost look on his face. It was most certainly not Marcel Duchamp. And I decided that there must be something else, and that I needed to track it down. Going to the bookstore, Chance--which that day vouchsafed to me its devious kind of (Anti-)trustworthiness--led me to Hans Richter. Richter was, in many ways, the most grounded of the core Dada group; among the least `absurd', the least polemic, and most importantly in his later role as scribe of the movement, the least histrionic and least given to post-mortem internecine strife. He was also, and perhaps for these very reasons, perhaps the nicest. The result is that Dada: Art and Anti-Art is not, like Ball's history, one of otherworldly mysticism; like Huelsenbeck's, one of political upheaval and ideological combat; like Tzara's version, one of impersonal destruction of all personal and social guarantors of subjective comfort; like Duchamp's, one of formal innovation or `artistic' concerns. Richter's history is the history of a group of friends, some of whom had never personally met, who galvanized that friendship into a force that profoundly transformed hundreds of lives, made all of those other histories thinkable and achievable, and in the process established the groundwork for a programme of joyous, deep-seated social revolt upon which we are still attempting build new ways of living; and, as Richter shows, they did this simply by actually caring. The most essential thing to be gleaned from Art and Anti-Art is not anything unique to Dada, it is the realisation that the Institution has somehow managed to dupe us all into thinking that we need it; Richter, in his generous, humble, unassuming way, taught me that a `movement' is not something that one assembles like an army of ready-made Heroes to launch on the grand battleground of Art History; it is the experience of a few dedicated friends who love nothing more than what they are doing, finding other dedicated friends who all make each other into something none could have imagined on their own, until one day they all look around, realise with astonishment what has come into existence through them, and get back to what they love to do together, as that intangible thing that has evoked itself between them continues to grow.

Gray provides an excellent introduction to Russian artists who are less well-known in the West only because of the Cold War and the lack of marketing on the part of the Russian museums. If Western museums had owned paintings by these artists, they would have been splashed across every screen saver, coffee mug and calendar. Gray does an admirable job of putting these artists into their fascinating historical context. If anyone is planning a trip to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow or the Russian States Museum in Petersburg, this book is well worth reading.