Phaidon's 30,000 Years of Art, a follow-on from bestseller The Art Book, is an ambitious venture.
It tackles a grand subject � the complete history of art, from a carved ivory sculpture c. 28,000 BC to James Turrell's Roden Crater, a massive land art piece in an extinct volcano. The first piece was found in a cave in Southern Germany; the last is a complex, intellectual piece whose location inside a mountain, echoes that earlier work.
The whole book is full of such deliciously witty jokes � compare the second piece, a curvy palaeolithic 'venus' with an Egyptian mourning figure from c.3500BC, an Italian goddess c.350 BC, a Mexican Chupicuaro figure from c.100BC, a female figure from Peru c.1150, and and Henry Moore's Recumbent Figure of 1938. They're all abstract, exaggerated, expressive female figures. It's a world history of the depiction of women in art, every image incredibly beautiful.
Or work the other way, from Francis Bacon's Pope of 1953 back to a depiction of St Matthew, from the Ebbo Gospel of 830AD. They share a religious zeal and a manic energy, a power and a passion. Find dozens of Buddhas, countless saints, anonymous gods and goddesses from almost every continent. Even when we've lost the religion and have no idea who the god or goddess is, the power is there. Take another example; follow the line through a dozen portrayals of Christ from around the globe, and as you get a global picture you start to sense just how little respect art has for borders.
Look at funerary heads from Sudan, a Russian death mask, or an expressionistic funeral portrait of a Roman soldier c.150AD and compare them to a Joseph Beuys performance from 1974 to see how artists have always tackled tough subjects like our own mortality.
It's a massive task, cataloguing the complete history of creativity, but this book pulls it off beautifully. Every page is a delight, the images perfect, some scaled to fill the page and some left with breathtaking white space. A Jun Ware Bowl from Japan glows because it's left in so much space; Munch's The Scream is more intense because it takes up the whole page.
It's also an example of another trick this book plays � The Scream from 1893 sits alongside a carved mask from Equatorial Guinea from 1895, and the two faces are almost identical in shape and style. This book, unlike any history of art published previously, breaks down barriers and allows us to compare work from across the planet. It's a truly multi-cultural undertaking and doesn't follow any art establishment definition of what is or isn't 'true' art. This is history, art, culture and religion brought together as one.
As you'd expect when undertaking such a massive task � it's also a massive book. 30cm square and at over 1000 pages, it's 8cm thick! And at over 6kg, it's nearly twice the average weight of a new-born baby.
Thankfully, the price is low so there's no reason not to buy this. The copy in our studio has already been used for school homework, research on a series of paintings, and started a dozen conversations. An essential book, then, for home, studio or school; serious enough for the study, beautiful enough for the coffee table. And as such, probably the most important art book you'll buy this year.
http://www.artistsandmakers.com/article.php/20071017113721466