Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century

by Chris Murray

Book Overview

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on the most important twentieth century writers and thinkers and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to key approaches and analytical tools used in the study of contemporary art. It discusses writers such as Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Freud, Greenberg, Heuser, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415222028
• ISBN13: 9780415222020
• Release Date: January 2011
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A useful resource for art history students

The previous reviewer asserts that there are no "key writers on art" represented in this volume, which is an inexplicable statement. Sure, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida did not write primarily about art, but their ideas about visual production and reception had a profound impact on the way the discipline of art history developed in the twentieth century. The book also includes many people who were indisputably "key writers on art," such as the critics Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Clement Greenberg, or the art historians Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Michael Baxandall, and T.J. Clark. The book is organized into individual biographies, and gives a select bibliography of primary and secondary sources about each writer for those who want to read more. It attempts to provide a reasonably comprehensible list of twentieth-century writers whose ideas helped to shape the theories or methodologies of art history. For students of this discipline, who should be familiar with most of the figures covered in the book, it would be a valuable reference.