Reading: Art Visionaries by Mark Getlein & Annabel Howard

A good primer on some of the major artist’s of our times, and their ideas and innovations.

It is an easy read, with a democratic 3-4 pages dedicated to each artist, even ones with incredibly long and illustrious careers like Picasso. Each artist is covered with a portrait, a timeline, a page condensing key points about their biography, career and innovations, and 3 or 4 representative images of work.

I would recommend this book to beginners interested in getting a crash course in art since the beginning of the modernist period. However, even as an artist familiar with the western canon and art since the beginning of the modern period, I found fresh insights on the work of familiar artists.

One critique of this book would be that despite it’s recent publication (2016) the youngest artists profiled are Damien Hirst and Olafur Eliasson. Could it be that titles for Art Visionary have yet to be settled for the artists of Generation X and beyond?