Product: Book ISBN-10: 0-7893-1524-6 ISBN-13: 9780789315243 Publisher: Universe Country: Year: March 20, 2007 Size: 16.76 x 21.08 x 6.10cm Number of pages: 960 Weight: 2,041gr Binding: Hardcover
Product Description From Ancient Egyptian frescoes to the Renaissance masters, from French Impressionists to American Abstract Expressionists, this highly browsable guide embraces all cultures and every style of painting from 4,000 BC to the present. A visually arresting reference for art lovers and students, it provides a truly comprehensive worldwide gazeteer of paintings organized chronologically by date of completion. Each entry includes the history of the painting, information about the artist or artistic movement, the current location of the painting (all are on view to the public), as well as other details. The works are also indexed by artist and by title, making for easy cross-referencing. Included are popular paintings, key works that are the most breathtaking for their extraordinary power and beauty, paintings that were turning points in the history of art, and rediscovered masterpieces, making 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die an art museum in its own right.
reviews
Relaxing Retreat into Art.
I am enjoying this book. I wish the paintings were of a larger scale, stil you can see the pictures well enough for recognition. There are many best parts but I enjoy the alpahbetical index that I am using to highlight my more appreciated works. I enjoy the explanation of the artist and style beneath the paintings. Each painting is pictured in this book in color. Great buy!
Art i s Life
What an amazing compilation of some of the world's most beautiful works of art through the ages! As a museum geek, I've seen many beautiful paintings in my life and have been very fortunate to have traveled in Europe and was exposed to major art museums in countries than my own. This book has »filled in the blanks« if you will, and has opened my eyes to more modern art, as well as the old masters. I am now studying art history and plan on broadening my horizons by visiting many more museums and galleries throughout the world. I bought a copy for my mom and my girlfriend, and they love it too.
Pretty good! Many images too small though.
I bought this book based on the reviews here, I thought the book was pretty good.
My main problem was with the size of the images. Someone here said most images are one to a page, or two to a page … and that the smallest images are an inch by an inch.
I'd expected all the images to be a lot bigger. Many of the images, maybe even 25% – 50% weren't much bigger than an inch by an inch. This is a real problem if you are looking at the book as an artist and want to see how the brushstrokes were made a little bit etc. at least on some of them. But the images were too small for this, and no detail views were shown (except a very smalll number at the start of each section).
I found it really hard to look at all the small images and take in the painting properly too. Many were just too small for me.
I'd rather have had less white space and 30% bigger images, this could easily have been done without sacrificing much text or design quality. (The cover art was awful too!)
I also bought '1000 Masterpieces of European Painting: From 1300 to 1850' at the same time and this book was so much better at having larger images and showing details than this book (despite the book being far SMALLER and having far less pages than this one too!). It had a nicer feel too, the arrangement of the images and text was far less uniform than in this book and therefore much more interesting. It did have less white space but was actually far more elegant despite this.
The selection of images seemed very good though (despite the bad graphic design of the book) and it was well-made. It weights an absolute TON but then it would!
Pleasant shopping experience
Vendor provided very quick delivery and product arrived as advertised. Would do business with this vendor again.
wanted to love it
After reading the product description, all the reviews and reviewing several other books here at Amazon, I settled on this. I bought it primarily to introduce my daughters to fine art and for that purpose I guess it's okay. There are tons of lovely paintings and the descriptions indeed helpful, but I feel like the book could have been made a wee bit bigger so that we could see them a little better –- on the plus side, hoisting this 78lb book up to your eyes every couple of minutes is probably good exercise!
Also, there are several sexually explicit paintings –- I don't mean nudes, I could live with those –- that I do wish they had been put into their own little section (101 Pornographic Paintings-Thinly-Disguised-as-Art You Must See Before You Die) so that I could censor or not as I chose without losing perfectly wonderful stuff on the flip side. As it is, we ran across the most graphic –- »L'Origine du Monde«/Gustave Courbet, which is a fully nude close-up of female genitalia, one breast and her disarrayed gown(done by a truly loving hand!) –- sitting around the dining room table during Sunday dinner at my parents … ouch!
All in all, and without having another of similar type to compare it to, I say this book lives up to it purpose with flaws of varying degrees depending upon your intent. Cheers!