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olysavra's review against another edition
5.0
If you want to get a framework on how to look at modern art, to think about it and get closer to appreciating and enjoying - it is very good book for you.
For me it served as an ideal start, providing an overview for all branches and main personas, along with stories, a bit of philosophy and simple admiration of a good art piece along the way. I am more confident now while looking at some modern stuff. I feel that the other books and articles will add to the story depth developing it with more granular details.
I enjoyed this book a lot.
One note, better buy paper version, the kindle seems to miss some supporting plates and the quality of them are not the best.
For me it served as an ideal start, providing an overview for all branches and main personas, along with stories, a bit of philosophy and simple admiration of a good art piece along the way. I am more confident now while looking at some modern stuff. I feel that the other books and articles will add to the story depth developing it with more granular details.
I enjoyed this book a lot.
One note, better buy paper version, the kindle seems to miss some supporting plates and the quality of them are not the best.
nikiforova's review against another edition
5.0
That's exactly the kind of modern art book that I needed.
laboriada's review against another edition
4.0
Para aquell@s que critican el arte moderno y contemporáneo sin haber leído un libro de Historia del Arte o simplemente se pasan el contexto histórico por el arco del triunfo, este es un buen camino donde empezar a romper con los estigmas que rodean a todo aquello que se sale de lo normativo y figurativo del mal denominado arte “de verdad”.
rejena's review against another edition
This book was exactly what I was looking for. A survey of modern art, that provides a firm foundation for interpreting the different periods. It also confirmed that I still have no interest in conceptual art. Absolutely none.
thearbiter89's review against another edition
5.0
This is a fun and educational romp through the Western modern art canon from early modernity to the present, although it's unlikely to change most people's minds about the subject.
All art derives significance and aesthetic value from its social, cultural and historical context. But this is especially true of modern art, as it moves farther and farther away from the allegorical and representational objectives of its more literal forebears. This can make modern art seem impenetrable, even vaguely fraudulent, to the contemporary layperson who looks at Cy Twombly's blackboard scribbles and thinks that their 5-year old could do it (to be fair, I think this actually holds true for Cy Twombly).
Will Gompertz is here to tell you that the story of modern art is an interesting one, and if he can give you a broad overview of the broad themes guiding the evolution of modern art, you will be able to understand how modern art got to the point it is and appreciate the intentions of some of its more recondite practitioners.
And it starts off really well and interestingly. The first on the scene were the French Impressionists, epitomised by Monet and friends, whose sketchy, light-focused paintings of the ordinary (as opposed to the mythic-historical or religious) represented a genteel rebellion against the oppressive aesthetic restrictions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Impressionism led to post-Impressionism, represented by Van Gogh and Cezanne and their attempts capture the feeling of a place, rather than its faithful representation, through the liberal experimentation with color and perspective.
Cosmopolitanism and a hint of orientalist exoticism crept into the scene with the advent of Primitivism and Fauvism, in which artists like Paul Gauguin borrowed or stole from exotic cultures to fuel their art; but this synthesis only spurred modern art into new directions.
Cubism, led by Picasso, drew from the studies of perspective undertaken by Cezanne and represented a significant break from representational art, in its attempts to introduce new ways that painting could represent the ways in which people perceived the world in its full, multi-faceted dimensionality.
It was around this time - the 1930s, that politics intruded into art, with movements such as Futurism arising that took shape from ideologies of strength, action and supremacy, that cast in another light could almost be taken for Fascism. And indeed, many of its proponents, like Marinetti, were dyed-in-the-wool Fascists.
If Futurism represented an attempt to break from the strictures of the past, then it also ushered in an era where artists started to realise that art need not be representational at all; it need not depict the real world, but instead could celebrate the media with which it was created on its own terms. Movements like Orphism and Kandinsky's Blue Rider group were the vanguard of this new form of abstract art, which favored the materiality of the piece and the feelings it instilled in the viewer, rather than what it purported to depict or represent (which, often, was nothing). In this regard, art was supposed to mimic music in how it could evince emotion through the pure painting, much like music could elicit frisson through the arrangement of notes in a pure, abstracted melody.
Later still, many started to see art as a tool for achieving social objectives, or to mobilise people towards some end. This was the time of Constructivism, pioneered by the Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin of Monument to the Third International fame, of art that sought to influence peoples and start movements. But this was not limited to Communist agitprop, but percolated over to capitalism as well - Bauhaus and similar movements which sought to introduce design into production, to use technology to mass produce beautiful yet functional products for the betterment of consumers.
After the ruination visited upon the world by the First World War, it was understandable also that many movements started out of rage and a desire to mock and destroy the very structures that had allowed such devastation to occur in the first place. These included Dadaism (exemplified by folks like Duchamp and his irreverent passing off of a urinal as high art), and initially, Surrealism.
But Surrealism became something more - a way for artists to tap on the unconscious, dreams, and alternate mental states to generate their art. And from that, we get masterpieces like Dali's The Persistence of Memory and a great deal of Rene Magritte's weird but wonderful paintings.
The development of techniques to tap on the unconscious to paint was brought to a head by the Abstract Expressionists, whose art had lost all semblance of representational intent and instead used techniques like action painting to translate the unconscious impulse onto the canvas, to make the viewer feel the emotions that the artist felt when painting it, to overwhelm the sensoria with creations that seem to bleed from the canvas into reality.
Pop Art, in contrast, was the total opposite - the impulse, in an age of renewed consumerism, to reflect that state of affairs in art, through mass production (or the facsimile thereof, cf Roy Liechtenstein's hand-painted matrix dots), found objects, and the feeling of crass advertising, sexual desire, and self-promotion common in such works.
Finally, in the past decades, art has taken all these developments and produced contemporary movements like minimalism - which take the abstraction of traditional media and sculpture to logical extremes to produce simple, elegant forms that are meant only to evoke pure feeling in the observer; Fluxus and conceptual art, in which the boundaries of what constitutes art are pushed to the limits, with emphasis of the process of art over any actual piece - indeed, performance art is all about the process and often the product, captured on tape, is only a shadow of the actual experience, more so than usual.
And finally, the world of today, where Art is more popular and accessible than ever before, but also commoditized by the rich and gawked at by the masses, having reached a point where so much is required to even begin understanding it that most people throw up their hands in futility.
Gompertz gives it a valiant go, and is mostly successful at really trying to create a compelling historical narrative of how we got to where we are today. But, in a sense, he still speaks from a position of the insider, trying to get people to understand what the big deal is. He's the art world's great proponent, but his enthusiasm for the art that he describes sometimes feels misplaced - as if he's reading too much into the art, or perhaps he is so inured to art criticism that he sees things in the art that the layman will not.
Either way, there is still a kind of perceptual divide between book and reader, and without an open mind, many who open this book may be enthralled by Gompertz's flair for describing the broad currents of art evolution and the larger-than-life personalities that shaped it. But many may, perversely, feel that continuing disconnect, and as a result see the book as only reinforcing the notion in their heads that, indeed, art isn't really their thing.
I give this book: 4 out of 5 pieces of fruit in Cezanne's Still Life with Apples and Peaches (1905)
All art derives significance and aesthetic value from its social, cultural and historical context. But this is especially true of modern art, as it moves farther and farther away from the allegorical and representational objectives of its more literal forebears. This can make modern art seem impenetrable, even vaguely fraudulent, to the contemporary layperson who looks at Cy Twombly's blackboard scribbles and thinks that their 5-year old could do it (to be fair, I think this actually holds true for Cy Twombly).
Will Gompertz is here to tell you that the story of modern art is an interesting one, and if he can give you a broad overview of the broad themes guiding the evolution of modern art, you will be able to understand how modern art got to the point it is and appreciate the intentions of some of its more recondite practitioners.
And it starts off really well and interestingly. The first on the scene were the French Impressionists, epitomised by Monet and friends, whose sketchy, light-focused paintings of the ordinary (as opposed to the mythic-historical or religious) represented a genteel rebellion against the oppressive aesthetic restrictions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Impressionism led to post-Impressionism, represented by Van Gogh and Cezanne and their attempts capture the feeling of a place, rather than its faithful representation, through the liberal experimentation with color and perspective.
Cosmopolitanism and a hint of orientalist exoticism crept into the scene with the advent of Primitivism and Fauvism, in which artists like Paul Gauguin borrowed or stole from exotic cultures to fuel their art; but this synthesis only spurred modern art into new directions.
Cubism, led by Picasso, drew from the studies of perspective undertaken by Cezanne and represented a significant break from representational art, in its attempts to introduce new ways that painting could represent the ways in which people perceived the world in its full, multi-faceted dimensionality.
It was around this time - the 1930s, that politics intruded into art, with movements such as Futurism arising that took shape from ideologies of strength, action and supremacy, that cast in another light could almost be taken for Fascism. And indeed, many of its proponents, like Marinetti, were dyed-in-the-wool Fascists.
If Futurism represented an attempt to break from the strictures of the past, then it also ushered in an era where artists started to realise that art need not be representational at all; it need not depict the real world, but instead could celebrate the media with which it was created on its own terms. Movements like Orphism and Kandinsky's Blue Rider group were the vanguard of this new form of abstract art, which favored the materiality of the piece and the feelings it instilled in the viewer, rather than what it purported to depict or represent (which, often, was nothing). In this regard, art was supposed to mimic music in how it could evince emotion through the pure painting, much like music could elicit frisson through the arrangement of notes in a pure, abstracted melody.
Later still, many started to see art as a tool for achieving social objectives, or to mobilise people towards some end. This was the time of Constructivism, pioneered by the Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin of Monument to the Third International fame, of art that sought to influence peoples and start movements. But this was not limited to Communist agitprop, but percolated over to capitalism as well - Bauhaus and similar movements which sought to introduce design into production, to use technology to mass produce beautiful yet functional products for the betterment of consumers.
After the ruination visited upon the world by the First World War, it was understandable also that many movements started out of rage and a desire to mock and destroy the very structures that had allowed such devastation to occur in the first place. These included Dadaism (exemplified by folks like Duchamp and his irreverent passing off of a urinal as high art), and initially, Surrealism.
But Surrealism became something more - a way for artists to tap on the unconscious, dreams, and alternate mental states to generate their art. And from that, we get masterpieces like Dali's The Persistence of Memory and a great deal of Rene Magritte's weird but wonderful paintings.
The development of techniques to tap on the unconscious to paint was brought to a head by the Abstract Expressionists, whose art had lost all semblance of representational intent and instead used techniques like action painting to translate the unconscious impulse onto the canvas, to make the viewer feel the emotions that the artist felt when painting it, to overwhelm the sensoria with creations that seem to bleed from the canvas into reality.
Pop Art, in contrast, was the total opposite - the impulse, in an age of renewed consumerism, to reflect that state of affairs in art, through mass production (or the facsimile thereof, cf Roy Liechtenstein's hand-painted matrix dots), found objects, and the feeling of crass advertising, sexual desire, and self-promotion common in such works.
Finally, in the past decades, art has taken all these developments and produced contemporary movements like minimalism - which take the abstraction of traditional media and sculpture to logical extremes to produce simple, elegant forms that are meant only to evoke pure feeling in the observer; Fluxus and conceptual art, in which the boundaries of what constitutes art are pushed to the limits, with emphasis of the process of art over any actual piece - indeed, performance art is all about the process and often the product, captured on tape, is only a shadow of the actual experience, more so than usual.
And finally, the world of today, where Art is more popular and accessible than ever before, but also commoditized by the rich and gawked at by the masses, having reached a point where so much is required to even begin understanding it that most people throw up their hands in futility.
Gompertz gives it a valiant go, and is mostly successful at really trying to create a compelling historical narrative of how we got to where we are today. But, in a sense, he still speaks from a position of the insider, trying to get people to understand what the big deal is. He's the art world's great proponent, but his enthusiasm for the art that he describes sometimes feels misplaced - as if he's reading too much into the art, or perhaps he is so inured to art criticism that he sees things in the art that the layman will not.
Either way, there is still a kind of perceptual divide between book and reader, and without an open mind, many who open this book may be enthralled by Gompertz's flair for describing the broad currents of art evolution and the larger-than-life personalities that shaped it. But many may, perversely, feel that continuing disconnect, and as a result see the book as only reinforcing the notion in their heads that, indeed, art isn't really their thing.
I give this book: 4 out of 5 pieces of fruit in Cezanne's Still Life with Apples and Peaches (1905)
prappleizer's review against another edition
5.0
As someone that has enjoyed modern and contemporary art for a while without always being able to describe why, I thought Gompertz does a fantastic job quickly and succinctly (but with humor and personality) summing up how the artistic movements of the last century fed into and influenced one another. For those who have taken art history courses before (but are rusty, like me), this is a perfect light read --- not academic and overly detailed, but a refreshing narrative of the time, along with some fun anecdotes from the artists' perspectives (pseudo-fictional) and some readings of specific pieces by Gompertz that gives a nice framework for approaching new art. He is also, thankfully, candid about where modern art -- and curators like himself -- often slip into presumptuous, academic language, and the book is a good faith effort to avoid this.
There are only two main drawbacks to the book. The first is that the number of pieces discussed vastly outnumbers those presented in figures or plates, meaning that my reading of this book was spent next to an open computer so I could look things up. His written descriptions of the pieces are accurate to a fault, but for anyone but an expert, you really need to see the piece to get it. I didn't hugely mind this, but I would honestly pay for a "coffee table" version of this exact book but with every substantively discussed piece present in at least a figure.
The only other drawback, narratively, is that a degree of favoritism is definitely present throughout. It's less present in the book's first half, which does a thorough and even job describing the impressionists up through cubism, etc. But for more recent works, he digs much deeper into the artists he seems to aesthetically prefer, and gives little space or quickly rushes through all others. In particular, the Abstract Expressionists get short shrift compared to the Pop Art artists who followed (and derided) them. A shame, since I love both and especially AE.
Still, for a book packed with a ton of raw information and art history, I tore through the book like a thriller, and making that subject matter that engrossing at a public level is a considerable achievement. I'd highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the last 150 years of art!
There are only two main drawbacks to the book. The first is that the number of pieces discussed vastly outnumbers those presented in figures or plates, meaning that my reading of this book was spent next to an open computer so I could look things up. His written descriptions of the pieces are accurate to a fault, but for anyone but an expert, you really need to see the piece to get it. I didn't hugely mind this, but I would honestly pay for a "coffee table" version of this exact book but with every substantively discussed piece present in at least a figure.
The only other drawback, narratively, is that a degree of favoritism is definitely present throughout. It's less present in the book's first half, which does a thorough and even job describing the impressionists up through cubism, etc. But for more recent works, he digs much deeper into the artists he seems to aesthetically prefer, and gives little space or quickly rushes through all others. In particular, the Abstract Expressionists get short shrift compared to the Pop Art artists who followed (and derided) them. A shame, since I love both and especially AE.
Still, for a book packed with a ton of raw information and art history, I tore through the book like a thriller, and making that subject matter that engrossing at a public level is a considerable achievement. I'd highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the last 150 years of art!
fahrenheit's review against another edition
3.0
A pesar de que lleva ya unas cuantas reediciones en castellano y supongo que muchas más en el inglés original, había leído malas críticas acerca de la poca "academicidad" del libro. Bien, definitivamente no es un libro para especialistas en arte, es decir, gente que ha estudiado y sabe de arte, el lenguaje es sencillo, no específico ni técnico, cita anécdotas y cotilleos que a un erudito le sobran, pero que agilizan el desarrollo del texto. Digamos que es todo lo contrario a un rollo de ensayo.
¿Eso es bueno o malo? Pues depende de lo que se busque.
A mi me ha gustado, me ha servido para entender y aprender sobre arte moderno, para recordar obras que había visto y que me gustaban sin más y que ahora tienen un significado más amplio, para desear acercarme a la Miró y al Picasso que parece que hayan programado a posta a Duchamp y el cubismo de Picasso.
En resumen: expertos abstenerse, inquietos adelante.
¿Eso es bueno o malo? Pues depende de lo que se busque.
A mi me ha gustado, me ha servido para entender y aprender sobre arte moderno, para recordar obras que había visto y que me gustaban sin más y que ahora tienen un significado más amplio, para desear acercarme a la Miró y al Picasso que parece que hayan programado a posta a Duchamp y el cubismo de Picasso.
En resumen: expertos abstenerse, inquietos adelante.