Good book about the history of modern art – How to get a comprehensive idea about it

I’m not even starting about what modern art is. Probably most of you think about crazy stuff that doesn’t resemble the naturalistic depictions of Renaissance. Some say modern art started with Renaissance. Same say it started with impressionists. Some say it is the avant-garde. Some say avant-garde is dada. Some say avant-garde is transgressive art. And then there is a whole other discussion about when did it end…

I personally like to think modern art as a continuous flux of change. But the modern art we have in mind when we say “modern art”, that unconvential crazy stuff like van Gogh, Picasso, Munch, Duchamp and so on, I like to think it all began with Edouard Manet – Luncheon on the Grass – 1863.

This painting is avangardistic and transgressive and the big wave of different artistic currents began to pour after this particular painting.

A lot of “isms” are located at the end of 19th Century. This is half of the “modern art”: less crazy, more experimental.

Then there is the first half of the 20th Century. This is the crazy stuff. The Dada. Hundreads of “isms”, dispersed geographically, ideologically and not necessarlly chronologically. If you’re looking ahead for understanding these particular “isms”, maybe a traditional history book about them is not enough.

First of all you must know that almost every artist from the second half of the modern art period wrote a manifest. This is very important and very specific to this art period.

So I think a good start to understand its history is to study it in correlation with these manifests.

The best book about them, with extras from these manifests, is Les grands manifestes de l’art des XIXe et XXe siècles written by Antje Kramer. Unfortunately, this book is written only in french. I really hope it will get translated into english at least, because it is a very very good introduction into modern art.