David Lewis-Williams proposes that the explanation for this lies in the evolution of the human mind. Cro-Magnons, unlike the Neanderthals, possessed a more advanced neurological makeup that enabled them to experience shamanistic trances and vivid mental imagery. It became important for people to "fix," or paint, these images on cave walls, which they perceived as the membrane between their world and the spirit world from which the visions came. Over time, new social distinctions developed as individuals exploited their hallucinations for personal advancement, and the first truly modern society emerged.Illuminating glimpses into the ancient mind are skillfully interwoven here with the still-evolving story of modern-day cave discoveries and research. The Mind in the Cave is a superb piece of detective work, casting light on the darkest mysteries of our earliest ancestors while strengthening our wonder at their aesthetic achievements.

    Ceram visualized archeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship, and this book, a chronicle of man's search for his past, reads like a dramatic narrative. We travel with Heinrich Schliemann as, defying the ridicule of the learned world, he actually unearths the remains of the ancient city of Troy. We share the excitement of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter as they first glimpse the riches of Tutankhamen's tomb, of George Smith when he found the ancient clay tablets that contained the records of the Biblical Flood. We rediscover the ruined splendors of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of the ancient wold; of Chichen Itza, the abandoned pyramids of the Maya: and the legendary Labyrinth of tile Minotaur in Crete. Here is much of the history of civilization and the stories of the men who rediscovered it.From the Paperback edition.

    In his own time, Kilmt (1862-1918) was a highly successful painter, draftsman, muralist, and graphic artist; in the intervening years, iconic works such as The Kiss have been elevated to nothing less than cult status. Klimt's unfading popularity attests to the appeal of not only his aesthetic sensibilities but also that of the recurrent universal themes in his work: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death. He once wrote, "I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me...ought to look carefully at my pictures." With this overview of Klimt's work, readers will delight in taking up that challenge.About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

    He takes us with him on his own journey of discovery, making us see the astonishing sophistication and power of the paintings, telling us what is known about their creators, the Cro-Magnon people who settled the area some 40,000 years ago.Beginning in 1879 with Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who found the astonishing paintings on the ceiling of a cave at Altamira, Curtis takes us among the scholars of prehistory, the archaeologists, the art historians who devoted their lives to studying and writing about the paintings. Among them: the famous Abbé Henri Breuil, who lay on his back in damp caves lit only by a lantern held patiently aloft by his faithful—and silent—female assistant, to produce the exquisite tracings that are the most reproduced renderings of the art; Max Raphael, the art historian who first understood that the animals on the walls were not single portraits but part of larger compositions; the beautiful Annette Lamming-Emperaire, resistance fighter turned archaeologist, whose doctoral thesis was so important that all theory since has flowed from her work; Jean Clottes and others still working as new caves and information come to light. In his own search for the caves’ meaning, Curtis takes us through the major theories—that the art was part of fertility or hunting rituals, or used for religious or shamanistic purposes, or was clan mythology—examining the ways in which ethnography, archaeology, and religion have influenced the thinking about the cave paintings over time.The Cave Painters is rich in detail, personalities, and history—and permeated with the mystery at the core of this art created so many thousands of years ago by human beings who had developed, perhaps for the first time, both the ability for abstract thought and a profound and beautiful way to express it.

    Focusing in Part I on the Olmec heads of early Mesoamerica, the colossal statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, and the nudes of classical Greece, Beard explores the power, hierarchy, and gender politics of the art of the ancient world, and explains how it came to define the so-called civilized world. In Part II, Beard chronicles some of the most breathtaking religious imagery ever made—whether at Angkor Wat, Ravenna, Venice, or in the art of Jewish and Islamic calligraphers— to show how all religions, ancient and modern, have faced irreconcilable problems in trying to picture the divine. With this classic volume, Beard redefines the Western-and male-centric legacies of Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark.

    Using detailed annotation of 45 works from the world's greatest artists, Art provides a deeper understanding and richer enjoyment of the masterpieces of painting.Great Art Made Accessible. This fascinating book takes an original approach to interpreting the lost language of art, using annotation to highlight everything you need to know to appreciate the world's favorite paintings, from Botticelli's The Birth of Venus to Picasso's Guernica. Art explains the artist's techniques and intentions and clarifies the meaning of obscure subjects, decoding the mysterious symbolism that can make even the most familiar painting elusive.Art is like a gallery full of the world's most spectacular paintings, including the devotional icons of the Gothic period and early Renaissance and the awe-inspiring achievements of the High Renaissance. It shows the splendor of the Baroque and Rococo, and scrutinizes the drama of the Neoclassicists and the Romantics. The enchantment of the Impressionist school and the complexities of the Cubist movement are also revealed in glowing color. Biographical notes on the artist place each work in its true personal and historical context.The book's generous size and faithful color reproduction allow every painting to be displayed accurately and in detail. At last, art lovers can truly enter the world of their favorite paintings.

    "The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality. . . ."With the same disarming force, The Power of Art propels us on an eye-opening, breathtaking odyssey, zooming in on eight extraordinary masterpieces, from Caravaggio's David and Goliath to Picasso's Guernica. Jolting us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art forever.The embattled heroes—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko—each in his own resolute way, faced crisis with steadfast defiance, pitting passion and conviction against scorn and short-sightedness. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world.With vivid storytelling and powerfully evocative descriptive passages, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of Civil War Spain.Most compelling of all, The Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight "eye-popping" world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works "tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that, they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript . . . 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"

    Each turning point and breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism is explored in depth, as are the frequent anti-modernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art in a way that enables them to comprehend the many “voices” of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

    A new version of Phaidon classic published in 1937, this evocative and fascinating book presents 500 of the world's greatest self portraits, arranged in a simple chronological sequence from ancient time to the late 20th century.

    

    The place: Europe. The time: 25,000 years ago, the last Ice Age. In reality, you live in an open-air tent or a bone hut. But you also belong to a rich culture that creates art. In and around your cave paintings are handprints and dots, x’s and triangles, parallel lines and spirals. Your people know what they mean. You also use them on tools and jewelry. And then you vanish—and with you, their meanings.Join renowned archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger on an Indiana Jones-worthy adventure from the open-air rock art sites of northern Portugal to the dark depths of a remote cave in Spain that can only be reached by sliding face-first through the mud. Von Petzinger looks past the beautiful horses, powerful bison, graceful ibex, and faceless humans in the ancient paintings. Instead, she’s obsessed with the abstract geometric images that accompany them, the terse symbols that appear more often than any other kinds of figures—signs that have never really been studied or explained until now.Part travel journal, part popular science, part personal narrative, von Petzinger’s groundbreaking book starts to crack the code on the first form of graphic communication. It’s in her blood, as this talented scientist’s grandmother served as a code-breaker at Bletchley. Discernible patterns emerge that point to abstract thought and expression, and for the first time, we can begin to understand the changes that might have been happening inside the minds of our Ice Age ancestors—offering a glimpse of when they became us.

    From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.

    There is no question that Robert Frank's The Americans is the most famous and influential photography book ever published. It was 1959 when the book first came out: a series of deceptively simple photographs that Frank took on a trip through America in '55 and '56, pictures of normal people, everyday scenes: lunch counters, bus depots, cars, and the stangely familiar faces of people we don't quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures that saw the "American way of life" as we hadn't yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condensed the entire life of a nation in classic images that still speak to us today, forty years and several generations later.

    Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

    What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder?Eco's encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling skills combine in this ingenious study of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we're most attracted to subliminally. Topics range from Milton's Satan to Goethe's Mephistopheles; from witchcraft and medieval torture tactics to martyrs, hermits, and penitents; from lunar births and disemboweled corpses to mythic monsters and sideshow freaks; and from Decadentism and picturesque ugliness to the tacky, kitsch, and camp, and the aesthetics of excess and vice. With abundant examples of painting and sculpture ranging from ancient Greek amphorae to Bosch, Brueghel, and Goya among others, and with quotations from the most celebrated writers and philosophers of each age, this provocative discussion explores in-depth the concepts of evil, depravity, and darkness in art and literature.