What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

by Will Gompertz
What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

by Will Gompertz

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Overview

For skeptics, art lovers, and the millions of us who visit art galleries every year—and are confused—What Are You Looking At? by former director of London’s Tate Gallery Will Gompertz is a wonderfully lively, accessible narrative history of Modern Art, from Impressionism to the present day.

What is modern art? Who started it? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it such big money? Join BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art.

You will learn: not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cézanne is better); Pollock is no drip; Dali painted with his moustache; a urinal changed the course of art; why your 5-year-old really couldn't do it. Refreshing, irreverent and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? cuts through the pretentious art speak and asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask. Your next trip to the art gallery is going to be a little less intimidating and a lot more interesting.

With his offbeat humor, down-to-earth storytelling, and flair for odd details that spark insights, Will Gompertz is the perfect tour guide for modern art. His book doesn’t tell us if a work of art is good; it gives us the knowledge to decide for ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781101561133
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/25/2012
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 862,455
File size: 24 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

WILL GOMPERTZ was a director at the Tate in London for seven years and is now the BBC arts editor, where he writes, presents, and produces programs about the arts. In the summer of 2009, he wrote and performed a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe called Double Art History, a light-hearted lecture on the story of modern art. Recently named one of the world’s top fifty creative thinkers by Creativity magazine, he lives in Oxford.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xiii

Introduction: What Are You Looking At? xv

1 The Fountain, 1917 1

2 Pre-Impressionism: Getting Real, 1820-70 11

3 Impressionism: Painters of Modern Life, 1870-90 31

4 Post-Impressionism: Branching Out, 1880-1906 52

5 Cézanne: The Father of Us All, 1839-1906 78

6 Primitivism, 1880-1930/Fauvism, 1905-10: Primal Scream 91

7 Cubism: Another Point of View, 1907-14 118

8 Futurism: Fast Forward, 1909-19 137

9 Kandinsky / Orphism / Blue Rider: The Sound of Music, 1910-14 150

10 Suprematism / Constructivism: The Russians, 1915-25 164

11 Neo-Plasticism: Gridlock, 1917-31 186

12 Bauhaus: School Reunion, 1919-33 199

13 Dadaism: Anarchy Rules, 1916-23 220

14 Surrealism: Living the Dream, 1924-45 235

15 Abstract Expressionism: The Grand Gesture, 1943-70 263

16 Pop Art: Retail Therapy, 1956-70 287

17 Conceptualism / Fluxus / Arte Povera / Performance Art: Mind Games, 1952 Onward 313

18 Minimalism: Untitled, 1960-75 334

19 Postmodernism: False Identity, 1970-89 350

20 Art Now: Fame and Fortune, 1988-2008-Today 366

Artworks by Location 396

Acknowledgments 406

Illustration Credits 408

Index 413

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher


Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 “Gompertz has an uncanny knack for making difficult art (and ideas) easy…A lively, witty account of the major moments and movements of the past 150 years.”
–Associated Press

“An insightful love letter to modern art and an irreverent rejection of the notion that its pleasures are reserved for a chosen few… Each [chapter] hums with engaging history and entertaining anecdotes, cheeky asides and accessible, illuminating criticism.”
–NPR

“Gompertz is determined to dispel the layman's fear of the modern art world and those who inhabit it. What Are You Looking At?, which comes out this week, does a very good job of this—replacing isolating esotericism with witty and chatty commentary.”
–Interview

“A deeply enlightening and buoyant history of modern art and beyond.”
–Booklist (starred review)

“[A] highly lucid, lively, and buoyantly composed history…while his tone is breezy and conversational, [Gompertz] astutely and often wittily describes the core of every movement and its key artists.”
–Publishers Weekly
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