The Visual Arts - a History (Art Ebook).pdf

Pdf / English / 1982 / 639 pages / 158 MB / Hugh Honour, John Fleming

This richly illustrated book, with 345 plates in full color and 607 in monochrome, including plans and maps, provides an up-to-date history of the visual arts from the ice-age to the present day—from statuettes carved in eastern Europe some 30,000 years ago to a building in Portland, Oregon, begun in 1980. It covers painting, mosaic, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and architecture. Coins, textiles, pottery, enamels, and gold and silver are also included. The scope is world-wide, embracing the arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific Islands as well as Europe. The temples of India and south-east Asia, the landscape paintings of China, the religious and secular arts of Japan, Islamic architecture, the sculpture of pre-Columbian America, of Africa and Melanesia are all set in the same chronological framework. As a result,
some modern European ideas about art and its purpose and meaning are questioned, especially those about its 'progress' and its being intended primarily for aesthetic enjoyment.