This text provides students with a wonderfully written introduction to art that emphasizes critical thinking and visual literacy.Developing Visual Literacy. The Themes of Art. Seeing the Value in Art. Line. Space. Light and Color. Other Formal Elements. The Principles of Design. Drawing. Printmaking. Painting. The Camera Arts. Sculpture. Other Three-Dimensional Media. Architecture. Design. The Ancient World. The Christian Era. The Renaissance Through the Baroque. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Twentieth Century.For anyone looking to develop an appreciation for a diverse range of art.

A gorgeously illustrated and engaging guide to the world of art. Immerse yourself in the amazing world of art in this beautiful book with text by Helena Hunt, stylishly illustrated by the inimitable print-maker James Brown. What is art, and how have we used it to express ourselves throughout history? From cave painting right up to pop art; the Renaissance to twentieth-century sculpture, discover the stories behind great movements, processes and artists - both the household names and the perhaps not-so-familiar. Covering thirty topics, including printing, pigment, ceramics and pattern and photography, as well as Impressionism, Romanticism and Surrealism, this is a thoughtful and easily digestible approach to a huge subject.

More than 500 large-size photographs of paintings, chronologically arranged, provide a journey through Western art, from the Gothic to the Renaissance to Neo-Classicism. Full-color.

"The definitive reference for art lovers of any level of knowledge and understanding. Packed with paintings by popular and essential artists from all over the world, this comprehensive new book is organized by era to reveal the development of art over time."--p. [4] of cover.

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.

From a world authority on impressionism and nineteenth-century French art comes this new addition to the World of Art series on the art and life of Claude Monet. One of the most famous and admired painters of all time, Claude Monet (1840– 1926) was the architect of impressionism—a revolution that gave birth to modern art. His technique of painting outside at the seashore or in city streets was as radically new as his subject matter: the landscapes and middle-class pastimes of a newly industrialized Paris. Working with unprecedented immediacy and authenticity, Monet claimed that his work was both natural and true, and therefore, entirely novel. In Monet, James H. Rubin, one of the world’s foremost specialists in nineteenth-century French art, traces Monet’s development, from his early work as a caricaturist to the late paintings of water lilies and his garden at Giverny. Rubin explores the cultural currents that helped shape Monet’s work, including the utopian thought that gave rise to his politics, his interest in Japanese prints and gardening, and his relationship with earlier French landscape painters and contemporaries such as E´douard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Featuring more than 150 color illustrations of his key works, Rubin establishes Monet as the inspiration for generations of avant-garde artists and a true patriarch of modern art.

An introduction to the art of the Internet examines key works, events, and technological developments that show how artists have employed online technologies to engage with the traditions of art history, focusing on the themes of intellectual property, identity, economics, and power in the networked age. Original.

Presents an overview of the use of new intellectual and scientific technologies in modern art, discussing the creations of such influential artists as Eadweard Muybridge, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bill Viola and incorporating into the latest edition coverage of new developments in digital work. Original.