Modern art : painting, sculpture, architecture

Almost a half century ago, the painter Willem de Kooning said: "There's no way of looking at a work of art by itself; it's not self-evident -- it needs a history, it needs a lot of talking about". The great works of modern art get talked about in this highly literate narrative overview, which traces modernism's radical essence -- from its origins in the late 19th century right through the 1990s -- with thoroughness, zest, and an engaging sense of adventure. The Revised Third Edition of this popular text contains four substantial new chapters -- illustrated by some 200 new plates, most in full color -- depicting "a new fin de siecle almost exactly one hundred years after the revolutionary works of Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh left no doubt that the art of the 20th century would be unlike anything known before".