Description: Now available from Routledge, Moshe Barasch's classic series, Theories of Art, offers a comprehensive analysis and reassessment of major trends in European art theory and its development from the time of Plato to the twentieth century. In the first volume, From Plato to Winckelmann, Barasch expertly guides the reader from the interwoven traditions of antiquity, through the aesthetic values of the Middle Ages, to the branching out of several disciplines -- art history, art criticism, abstract aesthetics -- in the late Renaissance. From Winckelmann to Baudelaire surveys the development of modernism from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, which saw a radial transformation in theories of painting and sculpture and laid the intellectual foundation for our modern views on the arts. The final volume, From Impressionism to Kandinsky, brings this fascinating history well into the twentieth century. Barasch details the radical social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art and explores the new ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures, making for arguably the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism.

Clearly outlining the development of art theory and exploring the central issues of each historical period, Theories of Art is a valuable resource for the art historian as well as a stimulating introduction for the general reader.

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