NEW WAY OF SEEING: The History of Art In 57 Works

A heavyweight and very glamorous Thames & Hudson publication, a book that asks with a restless and sensitive eye what it is that makes masterpieces sing across the centuries. There are endless nuggets of ancillary information which are worth reading in this mammoth task by the feature writer for BBC Culture. Kelly Grovier devotes himself to this radical new art history, stepping away from biography, style and chronology of 'isms' to focus on the artworks themselves. He identifies an 'eye-hook', the part of the artwork that 'bridges the divide between art and life, giving it palpable purpose and elevating its value beyond the visual to the vital.' He encourages us to squint through this narrow aperture to perceive the work's truest meanings. From Botticelli's Birth of Venus to Picasso's Guernica, from a carved mammoth tusk c40,000BCE to Duchamp's Fountain 1917 and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-10) to Louise Bourgeois's Maman (1999), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto cultural consciousness. He includes Parthenon sculptures from 444BC, the Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor c210BC, the Book of Kells AD800, the Bayeux Tapestry c1077, Universal Man 1165 by Hildegard of Bingen, the Ghent Altarpiece by Van Eyck, the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, Las Meninas, Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Hay Wain, Whistler's Mother, The Scream, The Kiss, The Dance, among the 57 chosen works, some very famous others not so much, each given special treatment, with full and close up images in colour on glossy white paper. 256 pages, 20 x 27.7cm, 200 illustrations in glorious colour.