Suggested Readings: Art and Culture

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present
By Jacques Barzun
ISBN: 0-06-017586-9

"This masterful, provocative, and highly readable assessment of the last half-millennium of Western culture is the perfect antidote to the dumbed-down consumerism of our times. It is hard to imagine anyone other than Jacques Barzun as the writer of this engaging history. Reading it is akin to participating in a fast-paced seminar with one of the liveliest and best informed minds of the day."
— Diane Ravitch, New York University

The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art
By Ernst Gombrich
ISBN:0-7148-41544

"In [Gombrich's] view, the development of art is predicated on technical improvements in the creation of illusions; the newer, more realistic forms are thus superior to the older ones. . . . [Thus,] in Gombrich's view, the artists of the twentieth century, with their deliberate turn away from illusionistic techniques, inexplicably rejected 'progress': it is as if they underwent surgical operations to make their thumbs unopposable."
— Susannah Rutherglen, associate editor, Yale Review of Books

The World of Art
By Robert Payne
ISBN: 0-385040-415-5

"[Payne] offers consistently penetrating insights into the visual arts—insights not only informed by wide-ranging scholarship but infused with the passionate enthusiasm of his own responses and communicated in a prose that is often breathtaking in its lucidity and grace."
— Michelle Marder Kamhi, co- editor, Aristos

Art: A New History
By Paul Johnson
ISBN: 0-06-053073-8

"Johnson is unafraid of 'great man' history. In his view, art history is a story of alternation between 'intervals of canonical calm' and occasional 'climactic moments' in which radically creative innovators are thrust to the forefront. The account of these innovators—'gifted, obstinate, willful'—forms the heart of this book. It is a model peculiarly suited to Johnson's discursive style, love of the telling anecdote, and chatty biographical asides."
— Michael J. Lewis, The New Criterion