Read Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting

Frederick A. Praeger, 1959. — 378 p.During the past half-century, an extremely complex change has taken place in the manner in which men have expressed themselves through the medium of painting. But this change does possess a unity of intention that completely distinguishes it from the painting of earlier periods—an intention defined by the painter Paul Klee as an effort "not to reflect the visible but to make visible." It is this criterion of modernity that Herbert Read, one of the pre-eminent art critics and historians of our time, has adopted for his Concise History of Modern Painting. Sir Herbert begins his study with the French painter Paul Cezanne. It was the single-minded determination of Cezanne to see the world objectively—to penetrate the shimmering and ambiguous surface of things to the unchanging reality—that heralded what we call the modern movement in art. The movements following Cezanne—Fauves, Cubists, Expressionists, Constructivists, and Tachistes—continued in their separate ways the new interpretation of painting; collectively, they constitute modern art. Sir Herbert devotes a chapter to each movement, discussing in detail the men who shaped it: Seurat, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Matisse, Duchamp, Chagall, Miro, Arp, and Kandinsky.