Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century

by Edward Lucie-Smith

This work examines the historical, social and intellectual contexts that have underlain individual creativity. With a chronological structure, it allows the reader to find affinities between aproaches to 20th-century art normally regarded as separate, such as Pop Art and Conceptualism. Front Cover

Genres: Art, History

400 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 1996

About the author

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith, known as Edward Lucie-Smith, was an English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read History at Merton College, Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

After serving in the Royal Air Force as an Education Officer and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer). He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.

At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3. He is also a regular contributor to The London Magazine, in which he writes art reviews. A prolific writer, he has written more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

In addition he has curated a number of art exhibitions, including three Peter Moores projects at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; the New British Painting (1988–90) and two retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He was a curator of the Bermondsey Project Space.

Edward Lucie-Smith died in July 2026, at the age of 93.

Information about Lucie-Smith's death from Wikipedia