Art History: A View of the World Part One

ART HISTORY provides students with the most student-friendly, contextual, and inclusive art history survey text on the market.  These hallmarks make ART HISTORYthe choice for instructors who seek to actively engage their students in the study of art. 

This new edition of ART HISTORY is the result of a happy and productive collaboration between two scholar-teachers (Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren) who share a common vision that survey courses on the history of art should be filled with as much enjoyment as erudition, and that they should foster an enthusiastic, as well as an educated, public for the visual arts. 

Like its predecessors, this new edition seeks to balance formal and iconographic analysis with contextual art history in order to craft interpretations that will engage a diverse student population.  Throughout the text, the visual arts are treated as part of a larger world, in which geography, politics, religion, economics, philosophy, social life, and the other fine arts are related components of a vibrant and cultural landscape.

Art History Portable Edition offers exactly the same content as Art History, Fourth Edition but in smaller individual booklets for maximum student portability.  The combined six segment set consists of four booklets that correspond to major periods in Western art and two that cover global art.  Each book is available individually, making them ideal for courses focused on individual periods.

Marilyn Stokstad, teacher, art historian, and museum curator, has been a leader in her field for decades and has served as president of the College Art Association and the International Center of Medieval Art.  In 2002, she was awarded the lifetime achievement award from the National Women’s Caucus for Art.  In 1997, she was awarded the Governor’s Arts Award as Kansas Art Educator of the Year and an honorary degree of doctor of humane letters by Carleton College.  She is Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas, Lawrence.  She has also served in various leadership capacities at the University’s Spencer Museum of Art and is Consultative Curator of Medieval Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri

Michael W. Cothren is Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College, where he has also served as Art Department Chair, Coordinator of Medieval Studies, and Divisional Chair of the Humanities.  Since arriving at Swarthmore in 1978, he has taught specialized courses on Medieval, Roman, and Islamic art and architecture, as well as seminars on visual narrative and on theory and method, but he particularly enjoys teaching the survey to Swarthmore beginners.  His research and publications focus on French Gothic art and architecture, most recently in a book on the stained glass of Beauvais Cathedral entitled Picturing the Celestial City.  Michael is a consultative curator at the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. He has served on the board of the International Center of Medieval Art and as President both of the American Committee of the International Corpus Vitrearum and of his local school board. When not teaching, writing, or pursuing art historical research, you can finding him hiking in the red rocks around Sedona, Arizona.