A century of modern painting (Libro en inglés)

From Manet to the avant garde art of the ‘80s A century of modern painting draws a clear picture of the development of art in the last 100 years. Packed with over 500 full color illustrations, the book gives the general reader a clear and understandable overview of the major artists and significant trends that have influenced the development of modern art to the present day. A century of modern painting is divided into two sections. The first, by Joseph Emile Muller, covers the late 19th century and the first forty years of this century, from Impressionism to Cubism to the first abstract painters. The text is organized in a series of monographs that discuss the individual artists as masters in their own right and the roles they played in the evolution of art. By focusing on individual artists, Muller enables the reader to appreciate and understand the major events and movements affecting the course of modern art up to the Second World War. Included in these discussions are: the inventive experimentation with light and form of the Impressionists from Manet to Cézanne; the embracing of bright and strident colors of Fauvism as represented by Matisse and Vlaminck; the reduction of the world into fundamental geometric forms by the Cubists Braque and Picasso; the expressionists who distorted the form of visible reality in order to externalize their most profound feelings, as characterized by the tormented images of Munch or the restrained simplification of form by Modigliani. In the second section of the book, Ramon Tio Bellido gives an overview of the direction art has taken since 1945: the dripping brush of Pollock, which “changed the face of painting,” the chromatic intensity of Rothko, and the celebration of everyday life by Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein. He describes the conceptual art of the ‘70s as a “many sided investigation into the nature of art itself.”