Art History: The Basics

Diana Newall is a Staff Tutor and an Associate Lecturer in Art History at The Open University and a Consultant Lecturer for Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She is co-author of The Chronology of Pattern (2011), has published on Cretan art and is editor of Art and Its Global Histories, A Reader (2017).Grant Pooke is an Honorary Senior Fellow in Art History of the University of Kent and teaches for The Open University. He is the author of Francis Klingender: A Marxist Art Historian Out of Time (2008), co-author of Fifty Key Texts in Art History (2012) and Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand (2016).

The second edition of Art History: The Basics continues the authors’ investments in making art history accessible to a variety of 21st-century readers. Clear and cogent, it reconsiders who and what "the basics" of art history are by freshening up the canon of intellectual debates, methodologies, and interpretations that form art history’s discourse in the west and incorporating more recent and urgent conversations about gender, sexual orientation, de-colonialization, and "otherness" that continue to impact the discipline in radical and transformative ways. Predicating a text on a transformative model, as Newall and Pooke have done, reminds readers that art history is an inherently living discourse demanding new revisions as it adheres to new and changing contexts now and into the future. Jordan Amirkhani, Professorial Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History, American University, Washington, DCFew art history textbooks today address so comprehensively the underlying issues and histories of art history the way this book does. Without a doubt, this book is the new companion of every serious art history professor and instructor.May F. El-Hage, art historian and curator, Beirut, Lebanon

• Introduction to the second edition ; 1. Art histories and art theories ; 2. Formalism, modernism and modernity ; 3. Marxist and social art histories ; 4. Semiotics and poststructuralism ; 5. Psychoanalysis, art and the fractured self ; 6. Representations of gender, sex and sexualities ; 7. Art and art histories since the 1960s ; 8. Postcolonialism, globalisation and art histories