Art & Visual Culture

"Exploring Art and Visual Culture: A Reader" brings together essential primary texts by artists, critics and art historians ranging from the medieval period right through to our own times. There is no other reader available that covers such an extensive period. Selected by leading academics in their field, and published in conjunction with the Open University, the reader will be an essential sourcebook for every student of art history as well as all those seeking a greater understanding of art and of the cultural and historical context in which it is made. "The Reader" is organised in three parts. The first section, Medieval to Renaissance, 1000 - 1600, includes extracts from the writings of the Venerable Bede, Vasari, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aristotle, Erwin Panofsky, Nikolaus Pevsner, Erasmus and Walter Pater, among others, and sections on sacred art, Gothic architecture, the art of the crusades and the Renaissance. The second part Patronage to the Public Sphere, 1600 - 1850 includes texts by W.J.T. Mitchell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Crowe, Richard Shiff and Caspar David Freidrich and examines the city and the country, the golden age of Dutch painting, London and Paris, landscape design, exploration, neoclassicism and the birth of Romanticism. The section on Exploring Art from Modernity to Globalisation, 1850 - 2010 includes writings by Marinetti, Gauguin, John Ruskin, William Morris, John Berger, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Miwon Kwon examining modernism, the rise of abstraction, conceptual art and globalisation.