This book attempts to survey art from 1940 to the present as an accumulation of unique contributions by individual artists, interspersed with a few chapters that concern the broader context of the six decades treated ...-Pref.

This volume presents Cubism, the 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubist visual artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form -- instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints...

The Cherry Orchard (1903) is Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov's final play. It was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, directed by acclaimed actor Konstantin Stanislavski-who also played the role of Leonid Gayev, the bizarre and uninspired brother of Madame Ranevskaya. It has since become one of twentieth century theater's most important-and most frequently staged-dramatic works. After five years of living in...

Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910's, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known to insiders as the "Mucha style" for the legions of imitators who adapted the master's celebrated tableaux. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young...