History of Modern Art: Painting Sculpture Architecture Photography

Rating:
Summary: Needs More & Better Color; Not Really Improved Over 4th Ed.
Review: I borrowed the 1998 4th edition, which got generally excellent reviews here at Amazon and elsewhere, for comparison. Like the previous edition, this fifth edition is big (9"x12"x2") and heavy (9 pounds). The chapters, bibliography, glossary, index, and credits take up 832 pages, about the same as the previous edition. Arnason died in 1986; for this edition, Peter Kalb is given as the "revising author," although the preface states that Michael Bird revised chapters 1-24. I couldn't find either Kalb's or Bird's institutional affiliation listed on the book or the dust jacket, which is odd since the 4th edition had a photo of and a paragraph about revising author Marla F. Prather on its jacket.

The chapter titles are largely unchanged: 1 The Sources (was "Prehistory") of Modern Painting; 2 Realism, Impressionism, and Early Photography; 3 Post-Impressionism; 4 The Origins of Modern Architecture and Design; 5 Art Nouveau and the Beginnings of Expressionism (was just "Art Nouveau"); 6 The Origins of Modern Sculpture; 7 Fauvism; 8 Expressionism in Germany; 9 The Figurative Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century Sculpture; 10 Cubism; 11 Futurism, Abstraction in Russia, and de Stijl (was "Towards Abstraction"); 12 Early Twentieth-Century Architecture; 13 From Fantasy to Dada and the New Objectivity; 14 The School of Paris After World War I (was "...Between the Wars"); 15 Surrealism; 16 Modern Architecture Between the Wars; 17 International Abstraction Between the Wars; 18 American Art Before World War II; 19 Abstract Expressionism and the New American Sculpture; 20 Postwar European Art; 21 Pop Art and Europe's New Realism; 22 Sixties Abstraction; 23 The Second Wave of International Style Architecture; 24 The Pluralistic Seventies; 25 Postmodernism in Architecture; 26 The Retrospective Eighties (25 & 26 were swapped); 27 Resistance and Resolution (was "Epilogue").

As pluses, I have been unable to find any other book of this scope from the 1800s to the present, and the text is perhaps somewhat easier to read than in the previous edition. As minuses: (1) There is little discussion of artists with heavy non-Western influences, with some exceptions (such as Cai Guoqiang [China], Ghada Amer [Egypt], Shirin Neshat [Iran], Mariko Mori [Japan], Yinka Shonibare [Nigeria], Shazia Sikander [Pakistan], Mona Hatoum [Lebanon], and Yasumasa Morimura [Japan], the last two having been in the previous edition). (2) The 4th edition had color plates on pages separate from the black-and-white plates, with two distinct types of paper. All pages of the current book are on the same type of paper, obviating the need for separate color plates; however, many of the plates that were B&W in the 4th ed. are still B&W, which leads to an odd effect. What is the purpose of having two Matisses in color and one B&W on page 274; one work by Jasper Johns in color and one B&W on page 486; etc.? I would have liked to see less B&W. (3) Although the paintings are reproduced well, the quality of some color photographs is pathetic. Case in point: Jeff Wall's "A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) on page 760, which looks pretty much the same in the previous edition. It's as though someone deliberately underexposed the photo and gave it a green color cast, compared with reproductions in other books. Other bad examples of color correction (guys, use some Photoshop!) can be found on pages 98, 341, 451, 490, 543, 544, 564, 614, and 633.

(4) Finally, I don't see a definite improvement in coverage over the 4th edition. Let's take chapter 26 ("The Retrospective Eighties") as an example. Compared with the corresponding chapter in the 4th edition, the following artists were deleted: Arneson, Burton, Greenblat, Hodgkin, Hunt, Kapoor, Otterness, Saar, Snyder, and Wilmarth. The following artists are still in the chapter, but with fewer works of art reproduced: Arnajani, Baselitz, Bleckner, Chia, Clemente, Cragg, Cucchi, Fischl, Haring, Holzer, Levine, Lipski, Lupertz, Murray, Penck, Pfaff, Puryear, Scharf, Scully, Sherman, and Spero. The following artists have been added: Antoni, Bickerton, Fleury, McCollum, Osorio, Prince, Steinbach, Taaffe, and Wong. So although this edition is "different," it's not necessarily "better." If you already have the 4th, you don't necessarily need the 5th ed.

But if you have only the 3rd edition, or have never had a previous edition, buy the book from Amazon.com!

BTW, it's unclear whether the Prentice-Hall people have read their own book. Their Web site says the book uses "full color throughout," that chapter 27 on Resistance and Resolution "includes a section on Feminism," and that the "Section in Chapter 24 on Art and Politics brings the story of modern art up to the year 2000." None of these statements is entirely true. The first I've already discussed; feminist art is largely covered on pages 599-604 in chapter 24, with only one feminist artist (Amer) in chapter 27; and pages 683-684 in chapter 25 cover post-9/11 work from 2002, with the sections on politics in chapters 24 and 27 dealing with the 70's and 90's respectively.