Name That Style: All About Isms in Art (Bob Raczka's Art Adventures)

Since majoring in art at the University of Illinois, Bob Raczka has been a writer at various Chicago area advertising agencies. His other books for the series include No One Saw: Ordinary Things Through the Eyes of an Artist; Art Is...; More Than Meets the Eye: Seeing Art with All Five Senses; Unlikely Pairs: Fun with Famous Works of Art; Here's Looking at Me: How Artists See Themselves; 3-D ABC: A Sculptural Alphabet; Artful Reading; and The Vermeer Interviews: Conversations with Seven Works of Art.

Grade 4–7—This book looks at stylistic movements in Western art from the birth of Naturalism during the Renaissance through the 20th century, ending with Op Art and Photorealism. Unfortunately, the conversational narrative and detailed observations that characterized Raczka's Here's Looking at Me (2006) and Where in the World? (2007, both Millbrook) are reduced to a minimum here—to the book's detriment. Instead, each style is profiled using a fixed set of questions, with the answers presented as lists, short paragraphs, and bullet points. The art chosen to illustrate each style is in some cases perfect—van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait illustrates Naturalism; in others, surprising—Courbet's The Stone Breakers is a little-seen painting that is nonetheless a fine choice to illustrate Realism. However, some selections miss the mark. Turner's Snow Storm is used as an example of the Romantic style, but unless viewers are familiar with Turner's other paintings, this one will appear more Impressionistic or even abstract. This title fills a gap, but most libraries would be better served by a more comprehensive art history book for young people, such as Antony Mason's A History of Western Art (Abrams, 2007) or Claudio Merlo's The History of Art (Peter Bedrick, 2000).—Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD
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