The Annotated Mona Lisa ~ Paperback ~ Carol Strickland

'Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge.' First published in 1992, this backlist best-seller presents new material including the latest trends since 1990: video art, new media (digital & internet), photo based work, figurative imagery and neo-expressionism, conceptual art, installations, artist cooperative collaborations, and the resurgence of traditional craft in painting (the Leipzig group). It takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible. From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages. 'I tried to make this book as reader-friendly as possible. No technical jargon, just a basic introduction to the subject of art history. My mandate was to make the important interesting.'Author BiographyCarol Strickland has a doctorate in American culture from the University of Michigan. She is the Christian Science Monitor's art critic and contributes feature stories on the arts to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Art and Antiques. She is the author of The Annotated Arch: A Crash Course in the History of Architecture, The Illustrated Timeline of Art History, and numerous artists' monographs. Carol lives in New York City and Long Island.