The Books That Shaped Art History provides an invaluable roadmap of the field by reassessing the impact of the most important texts of art history published during the 20th century. Each of the sixteen incisive chapters, focusing on a single book, is written by a leading art historian, curator or one of the promising scholars of today. In bringing these cross-generational contributions together, the book presents a varied and invaluable overview of the history of art, told through its most enduring literature. Each essay - with writers including John Elderfield, Boris Groys, Susie Nash and Richard Verdi - analyses a single major work, mapping the intellectual development of its author, setting out the premises and argument of the book, discussing its position within the field of art history, and looking at its significance in the context both of its initial reception and its legacy. Enlivening debates and questioning the very status of art history itself, this is a concise and brilliant study of the discipline and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in visual culture and its histories.

**SELECTED AS A BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE SUNDAY TIMES** 'Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness' LITERARY REVIEW 'A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art' SUNDAY TIMES 'This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... Lucid and thoughtful' COUNTRY LIFE _____________________________________ A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse. Fifty thousand years ago on an island in Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a pig on a limestone cave wall. Around the same time in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from a fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind. Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around them, and to thrive. Now, art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art - from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist on America's Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting and on to Rachel Whiteread's House. Brilliantly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Stonard's Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse, and asks how - and why - we create.

Combining a highly expressive graphic style and a deep sensitivity to colour, Ernst Wilhelm Nay's intense painting is surveyed in this first English-language overview of his varied life and career. For Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-68), painting was an entrance to a world beyond the visible, a world more real and more vital that lay beneath the surface of appearances. Beginning his career as the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic became the dark years of the Third Reich, it was natural that he should look to art for an alternative reality. One of Germany's most important abstract painters, this fully illustrated publication offers a fresh approach to the Nay's work. This comprehensive monograph is accompanied by an overview of his life and work by John-Paul Stonard and in-depth history of Nay's reception in Britain and the United States by Dr Pamela Kort, and a foreword by Sir Norman Rosenthal.

Germany Divided explores a selection of unpublished and unseen works from some of the leading names in contemporary art. Showcased are key works from six artists who re-defined art in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century: Georg Baselitz; Marcus Lupertz; Blinky Palermo; A.R. Penck; Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. In-depth biographical essays on each artist show how the division of Germany into separate states affected their work; and the importance of the experience of migration from East to West. The new consumer culture in the West contrasted starkly with the planned economy of the East. Artists on both side of the Wall were faced with the difficult emotional task of negotiating with the past; not only the recent history of the Third Reich, but the 'lost' traditions of German painting, particularly Expressionism, from which they had been cut adrift. Germany Divided explores the work of these artists in the broader historical context of Germany and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how these debates placed crucial emphasis on the creation and display of art. Graphic traditions, reaching back through Expressionism to older traditions of print-making in Germany, were an essential part of the reconstruction of artistic life, and a basis for the phenomenal international success of German art on an international stage in the decades to follow.

A stunningly original portrait of one of England's grandest country houses No house embodies the spirit of one dynasty better than Chatsworth. Set in an unspoilt Derbyshire valley, surrounded by wild moorland, and home to the Cavendish family for sixteen generations, this treasure house is filled with works of art and objects - from Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds and Antonio Canova's Endymion to great contemporary paintings by Lucian Freud and David Hockney - which have all, in their time, represented the very best of the new. As Stoker Cavendish, the twelfth Duke of Devonshire, likes to point out: 'Everything was new once.' Following the completion of a decade-long programme of renovations, the exterior of Chatsworth is gleaming, its stone facade newly cleaned and its window frames freshly gilded. Inside, through the inspired juxtaposition of old and modern, its rooms fizz with creative energy. Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now tells the story of this extraordinary place through seven scenes from its life, alongside a stunning photographic portrait of the house and its collections, captured at a moment of high optimism in its long history. With a foreword by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.