Who could possibly have forecast on New Year's Eve 1899 that, one hundred years later, painting and sculpture would be only options, not prerequisites? The term "art" has been defined and redefined so many times over the last 100 years that it has gained entirely new social, political, and technological meanings.

Ranging across the full spectrum of disciplines available, including photography and new media, and thematically chaptered to highlight relationships between works and movements, this readable and encyclopaedic masterwork does just what it says on the cover. Whether you want Surrealism or Land Art, Fluxus or Bauhaus, this is your be-all, end-all guide to art of the 20th century.

An undertaking as immensely ambitious as this one deserves to be owned by everyone, which is why we decided to make a special, more compact edition of this two-volume classic in celebration of our 25th anniversary.

1 Prologue to Modernism

The Magic of Light

The Janus Face of Impressionism

The Painting of Pure Reason

Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists

In Search of a Lost Paradise

2 The Work and Legend of Paul Gauguin

Truth beyond Beauty

Van Gogh: Painting as Dramatic Action

World Art from the Provinces

Paul Cezanne: the Primitive of a New Art

The World as Symbol

The Art of the Initiates

Symbolism and its Consequences

A Closed Society

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Worm of Montmartre

Art as a Philosophy

Ferdinand Hodler: Swiss Symbolist

3 The Break with History

Youth Wipes the Slate Clean

The End of the HistoricaI Deflnition of Art Masquerades

The Haunted Realm ofJames Ensor Life unto Death

The Crisis of Modern Consciousness in the Work of Edvard Munch

4 Expression and Form 37

The Fauves and their Classic Representative

Matisse and his Circle

Sensation and Ecstasy

Northern German Expressionism

The Struggle for a New World

The "Briicke" Painters and their Utopia

A Belated Heir of the Baroque

Oskar Kokoschka: Viennese Expressionist

Universal Anxiety and a New Acquiescence

Meidner, Morgner, Schide and Late Expressionism

5 Classicism and Imagination

The Calm after the Storm

Cubism, or Classical Modern Art

Assault on Dadition

The Brief but Violent Earthquake of Futurism

"Paris, You, My Second Vitebsk!"

Marc Chagall and the Jewish Outsiders

Dreams of Compelling Magic

Henri Rousseau, his Contemporaries and Followers

6 The End ofIllusion loI

Painting as an inner Necessity

The Blauer Reite Kandinsky, and the Spiritual in Art

Design of a Possible World

The Exemplary Art and the Exemplary Life of PauI Klee

7 Revolt and Poetry

Scarecrows against Reason

The Dadaist Revolt

Transcending Borderlines: an Interim Report

Marcel Duchamp, Non-Conformist and Prophet

Melancholy and Loneliness

Giorgio De Chirico and Metaphysical Painting

The Omnipotence of Dreams

Surrealism - From Andre Breton to the Present

8 Abstraction and Reality

Russian Revolutionaries and Dutch Iconoclasts

Suprematism, Constructivism, and De Stijl

Art with a Social Mission

The Artists at the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius

Return to the Visible World

The Wave of Realism after WorM War I

9 The Face of the Century

Painting as a Dramatic Act

Pablo Picasso: an Artist and his Legend

10 Between Revolt and Acceptance

The Unknown in Art

The New Realities of Abstract Painting

Farewell to Subject Matter

Abstraet Art in Germany

The Abstract International

Non- Objective Painting around the World

The Gentle Anarchist

Wolfgang Schulze: a German Artist in Paris

Painting as a Voyage of Discovery

Tachism, L'art informel, L'art autre

11 The Paris-NewYork Shift 269

America Overcomes Europe

Mid-Century Painting in the USA

Meditation and Motion

European Reactions to Abstract Expressionism

The Fascination of the Trivial

Pop Art and Nouveau Realisme

The Damaged Life

The Realism of Francis Bacon

Investigation into Reality

Aspects of Neo-Realism

12 PaintingasaMind-Game

Provoking the Eye

Op Art and the Crossing of Borderlines

A Painting is a Painting is a Painting

Minimalist and Conceptual Painting

Purists and Prophets

Painting by Sculptors and Object-Makers

13 Beyond Utopia

Between Vanguard and Reaction

Painting on the Verge of the Millennium

14 At this Writing

Artistic Issues at the Turn of the Millennium

Painting in the Age of Electronie Media