Four key historians present a comprehensive history of art from the past century, documenting through 100 essays presented in a year-by- year format key events that contributed to the changing of artistic traditions and the invention of new practices and forms, in a volume complemented by more than 6

The aim of this work is to explore the power of the informe . The authors introduce a new set of concepts into our understanding of avante-garde and modernist art practices. A new map of 20th-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from analyses of the work of relevant artists.

This text studies the crucial role photography played in the Surrealist movement. It shows how photographers enlisted into the service of subjective Surrealism their medium's very claim to objective reality, and presents fantastic and distorted Surrealist photographic creations.

Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.

Taking the form of a protest against the official story of modernism, this text tells the story of the optical unconscious, an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s.

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.