Overview

**SELECTED AS A BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE SUNDAY TIMES** 'Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness' LITERARY REVIEW 'A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art' SUNDAY TIMES 'This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... Lucid and thoughtful' COUNTRY LIFE _____________________________________ A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind’s creative impulse. Fifty thousand years ago on an island in Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a pig on a limestone cave wall. Around the same time in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from a fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind. Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around them, and to thrive. Now, art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art – from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist on America's Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting and on to Rachel Whiteread's House. Brilliantly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Stonard's Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind’s creative impulse, and asks how – and why – we create.

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9781408879689

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Reviews

If The Story of Art were written today, it would look very much like Creation ... This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... [Stonard has a] lucid, thoughtful style ... He manages to show both how the great names of Western art and their peers elsewhere in the world were driven by the same forces, but above all that making art is part of what it means to be human -- Michael Prodger * Country Life * Creation has moments of delight and insight * The Critic *

Author Information

John-Paul Stonard trained as a painter before completing a doctorate in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 2005 to 2010, he worked as an editor at the Burlington Magazine, where he remains a member of the Consultative Committee. His writing has regularly appeared in the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Burlington Magazine and Apollo. John-Paul’s publications include Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945-55; Germany Divided: Baselitz and his Generation; Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now; and, as editor and contributor, The Books that Shaped Art History. Over a period of four years he travelled extensively to see the objects described in Creation.

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