These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art? . The artists presented challenged masculine aesthetics. They include Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Sherrie Levine and Claude Cahun.

The 16th revised and updated edition of this introduction to art, from the earliest cave paintings to experimental art. New artists have been incorporated such as Corot, Kollwitz and Nolde, and six fold-outs present large-scale works such as Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece.

Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T.J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat and others as an attempt to give form to France's modernity and seek out its typical representatives, be they barmaids, sightseers or the petits bourgeois.

This work discusses the art of Gustave Courbet in the years directly after the 1848 revolution, showing how complex Courbet's intuition of the social and political issues of the time really was, and how appropriate were the pictures he painted for the Salon of 1851.