An up-to-date and comprehensive guide to 150 of the most significant styles and movements that have shaped art history through time. All art is of its time, and this book is the first survey that explicitly embeds styles, schools and movements within the politics and culture in which they arose, by means of timelines, textual references and the unique present-to-past arrangement of the book.

An essential guide to art styles and movements and a history of world art from the present day to Greek antiquity, this book places the reader in the art historian's seat, offering an opportunity to work backwards from our own time and reconnect the dots, or even find new dots to connect. It revives art history, for both the specialist and the general reader coming to the subject with limited knowledge – it shows graphically that art history is a living thing, not dead.