Art Across Time Volume One

Book Description: 30,000 years of art -- one engaging guide. Can't tell a Manet from a Monet? Not sure why you should want to? Let scholar and author Laurie Adams introduce you to the story behind the history of art. Based on her art survey textbook of the same name, this edition of Art Across Time serves as an entertaining and readable introduction to the history of art. Providing biographical notes and historical context, Adams has created a vivid narrative. Each illustration has been carefully reviewed for color accuracy, and the large percentage of full-page reproductions presents a rare opportunity for readers to examine details of brushwork and texture that are lost in smaller images. All in all, this colorful book is an ideal gift that will compliment any library and interest any reader.

This volume seeks to inspire students in their study of art through a combination of large-scale reproductions, extensive use of colour photographs and incorporation of contextual material.

Art across Time combines sound scholarship, lavish visuals, and a lively narrative to provide students with a comprehensive, accessible, and engaging introduction to Art History. Popular with majors and non-majors alike, the text offers readers more than a chronology of art by placing each work within the time-and-place context within which it was created. Encountering and interpreting a work of art in context offers the reader the richest possible experience of it. Large scale and high quality visual reproductions of artworks are often presented from multiple perspectives to enhance visual appeal and allow students to view details and elements of composition with greater ease. A thoughtful pedagogical approach helps students consider what they are viewing.

Since the nineteenth century, when art history became an established academic discipline, works of art have been 'read' in a variety of ways. These different ways of describing and interpreting art are the methodologies of artistic analysis, the divining rods of meaning. Regardless of a work's perceived difficulty, an art object is, in theory, complex. Every work of art is an expression of its culture (time and place) and its maker (the artist) and is dependent on its media (what it's made of). The methodologies discussed here (formal analysis, iconology and iconography, Marxism, feminism, biography and autobiography, psychoanalysis, structuralism, race and gender) reflect the multiplicity of meanings in an artistic image. The second edition includes nineteen new images, new sections on race, gender, orientalism, and colonialism, and a new epilogue that analyzes a single painting to illustrate the different methodological viewpoints.

. . . Focuses on the lesser-known comic works by celebrated icons of the industry, like H.G. Peter (the artist behind Wonder Woman), John Stanley (the writer and artist for Little Lulu), Harry Lucey (one of the artists behind Archie), Jesse Marsh (the artist for Tarzan), and Bill Everett (best know for his characters Sub Mariner and Dr. Strange).

This is a book about time--about one's own journey through it and, more important, about enlarging the pleasure one takes in that journey. It's about memory of the past, hope and fear for the future, and how they color, for better and for worse, one's experience of the present. Ultimately, it's a book about freedom--freedom from despair of the clock, of the aging body, of the seeming waste of one's daily routine, the freedom that comes with acceptance and appreciation of the human dimensions of time and of the place of each passing moment on life's bounteous continuum. For Robert Grudin, living is an art, and cultivating a creative partnership with time is one of the keys to mastering it. In a series of wise, witty, and playful meditations, he suggests that happiness lies not in the effort to conquer time but rather in learning to bend to its curve, in hearing its music and learning to dance to it. Grudin offers practical advice and mental exercises designed to help the reader use time more effectively, but this is no ordinary self-help book. It is instead a kind of wisdom literature, a guide to life, a feast for the mind and for the spirit.

From the Publisher: Art across Time combines sound scholarship and lively prose, engaging students with both its narrative and its lavish visual program. Popular with majors and non-majors alike, Art across Time offers readers more than a chronology of art; it discusses political, economic, social, and personal concerns that influence the artists and inform their work, uniquely conveying the ideas, beliefs, and circumstances that inspire creativity. Visual reproductions in the text are larger in scale and higher in quality than those in other art history texts, enhancing visual appeal and allowing students to view details and elements of composition with greater ease. The new third edition is enhanced by new visual connections between works, more use of color and architectural diagrams, an enhanced map program, new boxed readings, and more. In addition, the text's illustration program is now available to adopting instructors in digital format via The Image Vault--McGraw-Hill's new Web-based presentation manager. Instructors can incorporate images from The Image Vault in digital presentations that can be used in class offline, burned to CD-ROM, or embedded in course Web pages.