This book is intended as a brief introduction to major works of art since the Renaissance. However, it also provides online links to museums and other websites that offer a larger perspective on the history of art. The book is designed as a traditional textbook, in that each chapter begins with learning objectives and also contains exercises to help students focus on key ideas. It also has a glossary of terms. Each chapter ends with a bibliography for further reading. The book is designed for the general college reader, although it provides a good introduction for students who plan to major in art history.
Susan J. Baker is Professor of Art History at the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) and has over thirty years of teaching experience in art history. Dr. Baker has taught courses in Medieval, Baroque, American, Modern, and Contemporary art as well as Gender and Art. She earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Kansas in 1994 and came to UHD in 1995. An expert in early twentieth-century American painting, Dr. Baker has written on the life and work of artist George Tooker, and was curator of “Human in Form: Later Drawings of Paul Cadmus,” an exhibit of male nude drawings held at the UHD O’Kane Gallery in 2004. In 2008, Dr. Baker contributed her article, "Naked Boys, Desiring Women: Images of Male Beauty in Modern Art and Photography," to Steven Davis and Maglina Lubovich, eds., Hunks, Hotties, and Pretty Boys: 20th Century Representations of Male Beauty, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and in 2009 she published, “A Duel with Fernando de Rojas: Picasso’s Celestina Prints,” in Janus Head. Dr. Baker wrote an article with her sister Dr. Diane Baker, Professor of Management at Millsaps College, which was published in the Academy of Management Learning Journal in December of 2012, entitled, “To “Catch the Sparkling Glow”: A Canvas for Creativity for the Management Classroom.” Dr. Baker's most recent publications are, “Celestina and Other Old Salacious Allusions in George Tooker’s Toilette," Interdisciplinary Humanities, Fall 2014, and “Nothing There: The Mark Rothko Chapel and its Modern Approach to Myth,” in Edmund Cueva, Lessons in World Mythology: A Comparative Approach, Oxford Press: 2016.
Introduction: Why Art History? Chapter 1: God is in the Details: Northern Renaissance Painting in the Fifteenth Century Chapter 2: Art+Math=Perfect: The Early and High Renaissance in Italy, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Chapter 3: Renaissance Reboot: Later Art of the Sixteenth Century Chapter 4: Art as Power and Persuasion: The Southern Baroque Chapter 5: The One Percent and Everyone Else: The Last Spanish and French Courts and the Rise of Democracy in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries Chapter 6: Origins of the Tree Huggers: Romanticism in the Early Eighteenth Century Chapter 7: Naturally Unrel: Towards Abstraction in the Late 19th Century Chapter 8: The Physics of Art: Abstraction, Emotion, and Memory in Early Twentieth-Century Art Chapter 9: Chaos and the Psyche: The Impact of World War and Freud in Mid-Twentieth Century Art Chapter 10: Back to the Figure: Art at the End of the Twentieth Century Chapter 11: What Now? Contemporary Art in the Twenty-First Century