Gardner's Art through the Ages gives a comprehensive picture of art history. How can a student learn all the material in this book? The student can buy this study guide. It is gives excellent and thought-provoking questions. The parallel textbook doesn't have questions like other books, so this book is absolutely key to learning art history. Whether you are in a high school Advanced Placement art history course or in an introductory college course, buy this book. It asks questions about important points in art history, has "discussion questions" and has a special feature where the student fills out a chart of the important works of a period
Helen Gardner (1878–1946) was an American art historian and educator. Her Art Through the Ages remains a standard text for American art history classes.
Gardner was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and attended school in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. In 1901 she graduated with a degree in classics from the University of Chicago. After an interval as a teacher, she returned to the same university to study art history, and received a master's degree in 1918. In 1920 she began lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she would spend the rest of her career, with the exception of short appointments at UCLA and the University of Chicago.
Her major work, Art Through the Ages, was the first single-volume textbook to cover the entire range of art history from a global perspective. Frequently revised, it remains a standard textbook at American schools and universities. In 1932 she also published Understanding the Arts, an art appreciation text directed toward educators.
This is a really great resource for art and art history. Even though it is a textbook for my AP Art History class I am finding myself reading it for fun, as strange as it seems. Sometimes the language used sounds a bit pretentious, but that is to be expected from a textbook.