Isabel Nogueira - Teorias da Arte: Do Modernismo à Actualidade

A history of art theories from Modernism to the present day. An essential little guide to understanding artistic expressions.

With the advent of Modernism and the modern art movement in general, art underwent a considerably rapid and truly overwhelming transformation, which found its origins in the mid-19th century, with the deep questioning of rationalism and the bourgeois social order, at the crossroads of an impressive set of technological innovations that coincided with the so-called "crisis of representation" – strongly triggered by the development of photography in the 1840s and, from 1895, with the invention of the cinematograph – as well as a profound desire for discovery and experimentation with new visual, aesthetic, and artistic codes. In other words, the object was questioned from within, thus from the conceptual component that underpinned its form. The aim of this book is to offer a proposal for understanding art from Modernism to the present day, through a perspective that bridges history with theory and art criticism, also moving, whenever relevant, through the territories of philosophy and aesthetics.