"Modern Art narrates, in word and image alike, one of the great stories of our time - how Western vanguard culture created modernist art by heeding the call "to make it new." Uniquely, the artists of our time, beginning with Matisse and Picasso, won the title "modern" by making innovation - a rejection of the past - the paramount value of their whole enterprise.

Such an approach virtually guaranteed that the art it produced would be as experimental as science and a spirited, invigorating challenge for both mind and eye. It is this sense of intellectual and aesthetic ferment that Modern Art captures in its lavish design and abundant color, and also in its close integration of the visual and the verbal. And the book does so right up through the 1990s to the start of the third millennium, ranging across a broad spectrum of visual arts, from painting and sculpture to conceptual forms, installation, video, and architecture.

It is a narrative also enriched by its borrowings from Africa, Asia, and Pre-Columbian America, as well as bound up with comparable breakthroughs in science and technology, politics and economics, philosophy and psychology."--BOOK JACKET.