cover image The Art Museum

The Art Museum

Phaidon Editors. Phaidon, $200 (992p) ISBN 978-0-7148-5652-0

Phaidon has outdone itself with The Art Museum, a coffee table art book large enough to function as a small table itself. Likely the most comprehensive of its kind, this remarkable tome presents a survey of world art ranging from 30,000 BCE to the 21st century. Concentrations that would normally comprise specialized volumes are brought together here, organized into "rooms" that mimic the spatial layout of brick-and-mortar museums. Brief but informative introductory essays provide a historical and cultural context of each room, giving readers (or visitors) essential knowledge otherwise found in art history textbooks. For all its accomplishments, the collection is predictably Occident- and Eurocentric, a mirror to the reality of the museum. While allowing for wonderfully detailed representations of the artworks, the book's size makes flipping back to the indices clunky and annoying. Including each work's real-world locations in the accompanying description would be preferable, but for space-saving reasons their method is understandable. Nevertheless, the maps, glossary and museums/gallery index are welcome supplements. This is a compendium worth the investment if you have the money and space. (Oct.)