CREATION: Art Since the Beginning

BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, this beautiful book tells the history of art from the earliest times with a focus on the impulse to create. Why do we do it, and what unites the leaping horses, mammoths and rhinoceroses of the Chauvet Cave from 30,000 years ago with the geometrical precision of a Piet Mondrian or the phantasmagorical visions of Hieronymus Bosch? The emergence of city states, writing, and what we know as civilisation happened in the fourth millennium BC, with Egypt taking the lead in creating monuments that would last until our own time. Art reflected not only the godlike status of rulers, but also the creativity of ordinary people making sense of their lives, and the same is equally true of Greek kouroi and the Nok figures of Nigeria. The first monumental carvings of human heads are the Olmec boulders from Mexico which bear remarkable similarities to jade carvings in China on the other side of the world. Greek and Roman architecture was expressive of power, and the art of the Christian west adopted and adapted many of its conventions, for instance the imperial mosaics in San Vitale Ravenna with their ordered hierarchies. The whole future of art was at stake during the 8th century Byzantine iconoclasm, with John of Damascus forging a way through with the belief that art is an image of divine creation. The great mosque of Cordoba is a striking example of Muslim art from the same period. In the medieval period the human-based artistry of Cimabue and Giotto preceded Renaissance masterpieces by Michelangelo and Leonardo, and enigmatic works such as Giorgione's Tempest. Painting now expressed the emotions of individuals, and portraiture was a leading genre in Italy and the Netherlands. Everyday people made their appearances in crowded paintings by Brueghel and the exquisite domestic interiors of Vermeer, with the Enlightenment, Romantic Movement and Modernism taking their place alongside their different cultural counterparts in China and Japan. The art of indigenous peoples was brought to Europe by Gauguin, Kahlo and their contemporaries, and the book takes us up to examples of ephemeral art such as a drawing by a Kiowa artist on America's Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting and on to Rachel Whiteread's House. 19.4 x 25cm, 464pp, many colour reproductions