Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016)

Stokstad is a medievalist, and her treatment of that period is the high point of the book. In general, her strength as an author is shining the spotlight on those whose efforts and works might be underrepresented in other texts. This revision shows a marked improvement in fine-tuning the other aspects of the book, including correcting some egregious chronological errors in the previous release. The prose can be a bit dry when taken in large doses.

Basically what you'd expect when you hear the words "art history textbook": dry, boring, too many names and dates and not nearly enough political/social/historical context to explain why the particular works are significant. This really only covers Western art history and skims over the rest of the world with multiple cultures crammed in only a few chapters while the sections on Western movements (comprising 95% of the book) include a lot of unnecessary details (eg. gossip-y minutia about show more the artists' lives). show less

There's only so much love you can show a book on Art History. She managed to keep it from getting completely dry, but by the end I was still struggling.

http://pixxiefishbooks.blogspot.com/2...

This was my textbook for the first-year Art History course that I was taking at the university this year. It's a textbook, so I won't go on and on about it. But as far as textbooks go, it was quite good. Other than being way too heavy to carry anywhere (I never brought it to class), it is fairly comprehensive as far as European art is concerned. There were two tiny chapters on the entirety of Japanese art totalling about twenty pages in all (as I show more discovered when I went to write a paper on Japanese temple architecture). But I guess it's only fair that most art history classes, at least in this part of the world, will focus mostly on the European tradition in art and architecture. There was a decent amount on American art, though again, not much if you are interested in aboriginal art. Ditto for other Asian art, like China and Southeast Asia, plus a small bit of information on Islamic and African arts. Still, this book is widely recognized as being the best textbook there is for a general introduction to art history. If you have an interest in art and art history and don't know where to start reading, this is a good place. I tend to not keep most of my textbooks - they get outdated or are not compelling enough on their own, but I'm keeping this one for sure. show less