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A Brief History of Art
A Brief History Of Art - The World's Greatest Art
384 pages
First published January 1, 2006
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December 31, 2020
This brief history of art poses a serious dilemma to the reviewer as it is truly a book of two halves (or two-thirds to one-third): the first section, covering all pre-modern art from Giotto to Waterhouse, is dire. The second section - covering art from 1900 onwards including Kandinsky, Klee, Warhol and company - is everything I had hoped the book would be and is a delight to read. The three star review simply reflects my awarding the first 2/3 of the book a 2 star review and the final 1/3 of the book a five star review (2/3 x 2 + 1/3 x 5 = 3). I have never had to award a review score mathematically before; that said I have never encountered a book which is so internally polarised before.
Let me explain. The book as a whole consists of around 180 double-page spreads, with the left side holding the discussion and the right side a full-page image of the artist's work. It is in the nature of the discussion that the two 'halves' of the book really differentiate themselves.
The first two-thirds of the book wastes the space for discussion entirely. Artist after artist is described in dry, biographical terms. Picking three consecutive painters arbitrarily (I really did just open the book at random) we hear in the opening sentences of each:
A French painter, specialising in still life and genre scenes, Chardin was born in Paris where he spent most of his life. His father was a carpenter and, initially, he seemed destined to ...
Originally named Giovanni Antonio Canale, Canaletto was the son of a scene-painter in whose footsteps he at first followed. In 1719 he went to Rome to study architecture ...
A French painter and designer, Boucher was one of the greatest masters of the Rococo style. Born in Paris, Boucher was the son of a versatile, not particularly successful, artist and craftsman.
These are three consecutive entries in the book, each with the same excessive detail (the full name of Canaletto, the precise year he went to Paris) and repetitive descriptions (all three of these arbitrarily chosen entries mention the painter's father).
The discussions do not improve beyond the first sentence: we hear far too much about each painter's life and far too little about their paintings, what made them tick and their motivations and passions. An additional gripe I have is that the pictures accompanying the text are seldom referenced. The entry for Correggio, for instance, describes in detail a painting called The Ascension - but the painting we are shown is Noli Me Tangere - why on Earth is the image not aligned with the text? This happens again and again. In discussing the less well known Pietro da Cortona, we are treated to a discussion of The Allegory of Divine Providence while looking at an image of the Allegory of the Arts.
In short, the text tells us nothing except the details of the artists' lives and the images are illustrative of their work at best, not being worked into the discussion at all.
This was a deep disappointment. Given the ostensible nature of the book, I was looking forward to the text outlining the history of art and its evolution which would be exemplified by the pictures chosen to accompany it. I was fully prepared to batter this book in review for abjectly failing in this regard until I got to the final segment entitled The Modern Age, 1900-present. The longest of the book's five chapters by far, this section absolutely delivers on the book's promise as a brief history of art. Following my arbitrary sampling of three artists above, let's repeat the experiment here:
Although Man Ray had, with Marcel Duchamp, set up New York Dada movement in 1921, it was short-lived with the realisation that Paris was where it was happening.
The fusion of styles that became a feature of Picasso's work are evident in Mandolin and Guitar - Juan les Pins. The stringed musical instrument played a vital role as a motif in the Analytical Cubism of his work during the period 1910-11.
[Jean Dupas] During the Art Deco period, the rise of the artist-decorator led to the development of a new area of design. Artist-decorators often began their careers in ...
The improvement is astonishing: each entry begins in the middle of things not with tedious biography, describing the artist's collaborators or influences and the movements to which they belonged. We are given valuable context - such as of Art Deco - that succinctly sets the scene. And, in the case of the Picasso entry, the text immediately interweaves with a discussion of the actual image in front of us.
These features are fully representative of the final chapter on the modern era. Even from the very first entry we see the change in approach: "André Derain was a friend of Henri Matisse, and had for a time shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck, so it was inevitable that he should have been one of the founding Fauves. A work like this one [to the right] reminds us that, however 'wild' their palette and however untamed their technique, the Fauves were amiability itself in their relationship with their viewer ..." .
This has all the elements I was seeking in the previous chapters: it dives straight into the art, it outlines a key term - Fauvism ("wild", "untamed") - unlike elsewhere where jargon is thrown around without explanation; and it links the analysis of the movement with the painting in front of us. It is telling that I began a list of artists to look out for in galleries while reading the modern chapter (literally beginning with Derain), such was the engaging nature of this section of the book and the excitement it (re)instilled in me for art in general. For the first part of the book, by contrast, I was simply reading to get to the end of my 52nd book of the year (yes, it is New Year's Eve - I made it).
How does such a bifurcation come about between two parts of the same book? There are several contributors to the book and my guess is that those writing the modern chapter were simply much more in tune with what the book was supposed to be (at least in my opinion). An editor isn't listed, but someone must have choreographed this work and set the authors the parameters for their work. Whoever this person is, they failed in my opinion. It should have been crystal clear that the two sections of the book were utterly different in style; the 'ask' of the authors should have been much clearer so as to preclude the tedious biographies the reader is treated to in the first four chapters.
The editing falls down in other ways too. I didn't check many, but in a couple of instances the painting shown is just wrong. The Sir Joesph Noël Paton image claims to be that of the Quarrel of Oberon and Titania but is not (I cannot identify what the image actually is); I realised this when, reading about a later painting of the same scene, several comments simply didn't make sense. Man Ray's picture is also wrong - again it was clear from the text that we were looking at the wrong image. Some internal page references are wrong as well (e.g. that to Helen Frankenthaler on page 340).
This all suggests to me that the good bits of the book are down to a few inspired authors, while the fact that there are clear quality-control issues coupled with around two thirds of the book being very disappointing indicates issues with the editor(s) of the overall project. My advice is no doubt very much what you would expect: read the final chapter on the modern age and ignore the rest. This, at any rate, a fantastic visual guide to paintings from André Derain to Terry Frost; just go elsewhere to learn your Pieter Claesz from your Peter Paul Rubens.
Let me explain. The book as a whole consists of around 180 double-page spreads, with the left side holding the discussion and the right side a full-page image of the artist's work. It is in the nature of the discussion that the two 'halves' of the book really differentiate themselves.
The first two-thirds of the book wastes the space for discussion entirely. Artist after artist is described in dry, biographical terms. Picking three consecutive painters arbitrarily (I really did just open the book at random) we hear in the opening sentences of each:
A French painter, specialising in still life and genre scenes, Chardin was born in Paris where he spent most of his life. His father was a carpenter and, initially, he seemed destined to ...
Originally named Giovanni Antonio Canale, Canaletto was the son of a scene-painter in whose footsteps he at first followed. In 1719 he went to Rome to study architecture ...
A French painter and designer, Boucher was one of the greatest masters of the Rococo style. Born in Paris, Boucher was the son of a versatile, not particularly successful, artist and craftsman.
These are three consecutive entries in the book, each with the same excessive detail (the full name of Canaletto, the precise year he went to Paris) and repetitive descriptions (all three of these arbitrarily chosen entries mention the painter's father).
The discussions do not improve beyond the first sentence: we hear far too much about each painter's life and far too little about their paintings, what made them tick and their motivations and passions. An additional gripe I have is that the pictures accompanying the text are seldom referenced. The entry for Correggio, for instance, describes in detail a painting called The Ascension - but the painting we are shown is Noli Me Tangere - why on Earth is the image not aligned with the text? This happens again and again. In discussing the less well known Pietro da Cortona, we are treated to a discussion of The Allegory of Divine Providence while looking at an image of the Allegory of the Arts.
In short, the text tells us nothing except the details of the artists' lives and the images are illustrative of their work at best, not being worked into the discussion at all.
This was a deep disappointment. Given the ostensible nature of the book, I was looking forward to the text outlining the history of art and its evolution which would be exemplified by the pictures chosen to accompany it. I was fully prepared to batter this book in review for abjectly failing in this regard until I got to the final segment entitled The Modern Age, 1900-present. The longest of the book's five chapters by far, this section absolutely delivers on the book's promise as a brief history of art. Following my arbitrary sampling of three artists above, let's repeat the experiment here:
Although Man Ray had, with Marcel Duchamp, set up New York Dada movement in 1921, it was short-lived with the realisation that Paris was where it was happening.
The fusion of styles that became a feature of Picasso's work are evident in Mandolin and Guitar - Juan les Pins. The stringed musical instrument played a vital role as a motif in the Analytical Cubism of his work during the period 1910-11.
[Jean Dupas] During the Art Deco period, the rise of the artist-decorator led to the development of a new area of design. Artist-decorators often began their careers in ...
The improvement is astonishing: each entry begins in the middle of things not with tedious biography, describing the artist's collaborators or influences and the movements to which they belonged. We are given valuable context - such as of Art Deco - that succinctly sets the scene. And, in the case of the Picasso entry, the text immediately interweaves with a discussion of the actual image in front of us.
These features are fully representative of the final chapter on the modern era. Even from the very first entry we see the change in approach: "André Derain was a friend of Henri Matisse, and had for a time shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck, so it was inevitable that he should have been one of the founding Fauves. A work like this one [to the right] reminds us that, however 'wild' their palette and however untamed their technique, the Fauves were amiability itself in their relationship with their viewer ..." .
This has all the elements I was seeking in the previous chapters: it dives straight into the art, it outlines a key term - Fauvism ("wild", "untamed") - unlike elsewhere where jargon is thrown around without explanation; and it links the analysis of the movement with the painting in front of us. It is telling that I began a list of artists to look out for in galleries while reading the modern chapter (literally beginning with Derain), such was the engaging nature of this section of the book and the excitement it (re)instilled in me for art in general. For the first part of the book, by contrast, I was simply reading to get to the end of my 52nd book of the year (yes, it is New Year's Eve - I made it).
How does such a bifurcation come about between two parts of the same book? There are several contributors to the book and my guess is that those writing the modern chapter were simply much more in tune with what the book was supposed to be (at least in my opinion). An editor isn't listed, but someone must have choreographed this work and set the authors the parameters for their work. Whoever this person is, they failed in my opinion. It should have been crystal clear that the two sections of the book were utterly different in style; the 'ask' of the authors should have been much clearer so as to preclude the tedious biographies the reader is treated to in the first four chapters.
The editing falls down in other ways too. I didn't check many, but in a couple of instances the painting shown is just wrong. The Sir Joesph Noël Paton image claims to be that of the Quarrel of Oberon and Titania but is not (I cannot identify what the image actually is); I realised this when, reading about a later painting of the same scene, several comments simply didn't make sense. Man Ray's picture is also wrong - again it was clear from the text that we were looking at the wrong image. Some internal page references are wrong as well (e.g. that to Helen Frankenthaler on page 340).
This all suggests to me that the good bits of the book are down to a few inspired authors, while the fact that there are clear quality-control issues coupled with around two thirds of the book being very disappointing indicates issues with the editor(s) of the overall project. My advice is no doubt very much what you would expect: read the final chapter on the modern age and ignore the rest. This, at any rate, a fantastic visual guide to paintings from André Derain to Terry Frost; just go elsewhere to learn your Pieter Claesz from your Peter Paul Rubens.
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November 21, 2009None
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