Great Artists Explained

by Robert Cumming

Book Overview

Discover a refreshingly new approach to exploring the lives of 50 major painters in Great Artists. Using detailed annotation of key works as well as other contemporary images, Great Artists provides... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0756628709
• ISBN13: 9780756628703
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 11.3"

Customer Reviews

Not for elementary children

Take the Young Adult age recommendation seriously. I purchased an updated copy of this book at an elementary school book fair. I'm not squeamish about nudity in art, but the text includes lots of words like "erotic", "homoerotic", "prostitute", "ravished", and "rape". Be aware that this could create a lot of questions that you may not be ready to answer, and your child may not be ready to hear. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed it and would recommend the book for older teens, college students, and adults.

Great Artists: Lives of 50 painters

This art book is a great bargain for the quality of the reproductions is very good. The writing is excellent.

A gorgeous and informative book!

This oversized book has dovoted 2 pages to each important artist from the 1400's to Jackson Pollock. As with all D-K books, the reproductions are wonderful and the information is fascinating. The arthor gives a mixture of facts about the artist's life, painting of the period, key works of the painter, and other events happening in the world at the time. I love this book!

Attractive Overview

Teachers commonly say that they learn more about a subject from teaching it than from being a student. In part this is because so much of what we practice is unspoken and intuitive, while teaching requires a certain explicitness and may be most effective when the essence of a subject is portrayed in a simple, impassioned, and powerful way. As a result, one can often learn a lot from brief, introductory overviews of a subject, as is the intention of this attractive, large-format picture book. Several years ago, the author (who is head of the education division at ChristieÕs) wrote Annotated Art (1994), a companion volume in which diagrams, close-ups, and marginal notes were used to analyze 45 key paintings; and, since then, a similar book was produced by the same publisher about the history of architecture (Neil Stevenson, Architecture (1997)). In this third volume in the series, 50 more paintings (different from those in the earlier book), are arranged chronologically, displayed, and discussed in annotations, using introductory paragraphs, marginal notes, biographical highlights, related works, quotes by and about the artists, and short lists of non-art concurrent events. While the result is necessarily superficial, it is also a welcoming, valuable way to be introduced to art history. (Review from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol 14 No 2, Winter 1998-99)