Description
Book SynopsisFrom distinguished critic and curator John-Paul Stonard, a dazzling, panoramic world history of art from ancient times to the present for the twenty-first century reader.
Creation tells the extraordinary story of how people all over the globe, from prehistory to the present day, have created images in order to understand the world they inhabit. It explores the remarkable endurance of this creative impulse, and by tracing the diversity of artistic forms through the ages, offers a comprehensive and exhilarating introduction to world art.
Historian, critic, and curator John-Paul Stonard has assembled a dazzling array of paintings, sculptures and artifacts to tell a story of vitality and renewal. Fully illustrated, each chapter of Creation allows intimate access to key works of art and the conversations surrounding them, from the earliest cave paintings of the Palaeolithic Era to the conceptual art of today. Stonard has written a captivating an
Trade Review
A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art * Sunday Times, Best Art Books 2021 *
Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness ... In sheer scope and ambition, Creation finds a precedent in Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950) ... Stonard both emulates and expands upon Gombrich’s masterly and ubiquitous account. But he also offers something distinct, substituting the grand narrative with a pluralistic, incidental and shifting approach. It leads into the near present in the style of a prolonged ellipsis – a promise of "more to come" -- James Cahill * Literary Review *
If The Story of Art were written today, it would look very much like Creation … This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections … [Stonard has a] lucid, thoughtful style ... He manages to show both how the great names of Western art and their peers elsewhere in the world were driven by the same forces, but above all that making art is "part of what it means to be human" -- Michael Prodger * Country Life *
Creation has moments of delight and insight * The Critic *
