What Is Painting? Representation and Modern Art

What is art? Is that art? At the end of the twentieth century, these questions continue to provoke and to bedevil discussion. The uncertainty that prompts them can be productive for artists, who may thrive on such a state of tension. Yet uncertainty can also shade into the suspiciousness with which many people approach the work of those artists. Reasonable questions deserve articulate answers, and Julian Bell provides them in this lucid, straightforward, and often challenging book. In the process he offers an incisive guide to artistic thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the complexities of contemporary theory. Among the many fields of activity covered by the word art, Bell, himself a painter, focuses on flat things--the paintings that modern theories seek to explain. The questions he addresses include: What is painting? Does anything unite these objects we call paintings? What happened to the idea of representation in modern art? What has caused the vast changes i