Another History of Art
Art is so much more than just an aesthetic experience or an intriguing concept. Art also is an instrument of politics and religion, a catalyst of revolutions, a trigger of extreme reactions, a lab for new technologies. Art is a blueprint of an era, a carrier of intangible meaning. Art represents enormous sums of money, but also a vast sea of poignancy.
How did art evolve in a span of 2.500 years from the pursuing of representing the ‘ideal’ human to painting a black square on a white canvas. Why has a can full of ‘Merda d’artista’ on the contemporary art market more value than a beautiful seventeenth-century landscape painting?
He explains how artists do not choose autonomously a certain style or aesthetics, but how the circumstances in which they work define how their art looks like. Political, scientific, economical and religious contexts also hold the brush of the painter.Radio 1
‘Another history of art’ paints the story of the visual arts in Western Europe from Antiquity to modernism in five chapters that each use a different point of view. Other than usual, the focus in these chapters is not directed to the succession of famous artists who each stretched the boundaries of Western art, but to a complex interplay between human knowledge and imagination and fast changing historical circumstances.
This new reference work definitively offers a new vision on the history of art.
... nothing but praise for this author, who thanks to his specific points of view, his detailed observations, his treasure of data and his enthousiastic, vivid language knows how to captivate the attention of not only the starting student of art history, but every reader who shows interest in European art.De Witte Raaf
