During the 1870s and 1880s, a group of French artists, including Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, adopted a style of painting and subjects that challenged the art of the Academie Francaise where "official" assumptions about the meaning of painting prevailed. This compact, well-priced survey of the movement features sixty reproductions of some of the most renowned works, and a highly readable introductory text....

From the classical ideal to contemporary icons, the male body is a symbol of perfection in art. This pocket-size volume, which offers a fascinating visual survey of the nude, features nearly sixty paintings, sculptures, and photographs spanning classic to contemporary art....

Mass culture, popular taste, and kitsch were the inspiration for and provocative themes of pop art, a movement that enjoyed great prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s. This super-condensed book shows the development of pop art, from its roots to its rise in popularity as an art form that celebrated the glamour and hedonism of the newly commercialized Western world....

Paris, February 1909. An article by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Martinetti appears in Le Figaro. It is the ‘Manifesto of Futurism,’ the movement that expressed concepts of movement and speed through simultaneous visions and dynamic lines and interpreted in an all-embracing way the new collective myth of modernity....

Still life is an art form which gives us valuable insights into changes of mentality and philosophy. Each still life is emblematic of a specific time and place and of a certain metaphysical perspective. This overview features sixty works from antiquity to the present and analyzes the history and significance of each....

A heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe l’oeil flourished from the Renaissance onward. Both witty and serious, trompe l’oeil is a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception....