by Jon Lackman | 10 March 2008 | Books, Teaching
Phaidon is not the only book publisher with a new mega-survey out. Thames & Hudson has recently published Mirror of the World: A New History of Art by Julian Bell:
I see art history as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is continually reflected back at us — rather than as a window which opens onto some independent aesthetic realm.
Bell is himself a painter, and in his conclusion he writes:
What is beautiful in a work of art, what changes the life of the viewer, lies far beyond the range of such a description. Go in closer, to finer-grained art histories. Better, get closer to the work itself. Best, make things. What happens next in art is up to you.
