Stonard, John-Paul Creation (1408879689)

<p><b>From distinguished critic and curator John-Paul Stonard, a </b><b>dazzling, panoramic world history of art from ancient times to the present for the twenty-first century reader. </b><br><br><i>Creation</i> 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.<br><br>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 <i>Creation</i> 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

**SELECTED AS A BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE SUNDAY TIMES**'Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness' LITERARY REVIEW'A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art' SUNDAY TIMES'This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... Lucid and thoughtful' COUNTRY LIFEA fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse.Some fifty thousand years ago, on an island in modern-day Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a native pig on a limestone cave wall. Around the same time, across the globe in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from an old fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind.Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around us, and to thrive. Now, the art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art - from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist from the Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting. Lavishly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia.Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse, and asks how - and why - we create.