20th Century Art

Recent theory has tended to understand the meaning of art primarily as a function of original contexts of production and reception or in its relation to fashionable notions of gender, multiculturalism and "scopic regimes". These approaches, however, fail to negotiate adequately art's tranhistorical and transcultural significance, a shortcoming that is particularly serious in relation to 20th-century works because it confines their significance to contexts that are regulated by the specialist interests of curators, critics and historians.

A basic level survey of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

The works in this set of 16 CDs have been arranged in strict chronological order of composition and the first disc begins with a work from 1901 that has become one of the most popular works in the classical repertoire, mainly through it's use in another great 20th-century art form – the film: Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. Thereafter each disc in the set takes the listener on a fascinating journey through the century, composer by composer and work by work, from Russian Romanticism, French Impressionism, English Pastoralism, Atonalism, Neo Classicism right up to Post Modernism, and from as wide a range of countries and genres as possible.

The 20th century transformed the political, social, and economic structures of the world in ways no one could have imagined as the 1800s came to a close. It was a time of intense and rapid change that stretches the capacity of the imagination: first flight and space flight, the Manhattan Project and the Welfare State, Nietzsche and Freud, the Great Depression and inflation, moving pictures and home computers, the Cold War and terrorism—and war and peace.