The Visual Arts: A History

The most up-to-date and wide-ranging history of art ever published in a single volume, "The Visual Arts: A History" presents art as an integrated dimension of human activity. With insight and elegance, it offers an authoritative, balanced, and stimulating account of the arts - ranging from a statuette carved in central Europe some 30,000 years ago to contemporary installation pieces by Jenny Holzer and Gary Hill. The scope is international, including the art of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The fine arts are represented of course, by painting, mosaic, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, architecture, and photography. But so are other arts: textiles, coins, pottery, enamels, gold and silver work, Earth and Land Art, Body and Video Art, to name a few.