Styles, Schools, & Movements

Styles, Schools, & Movements, by Amy Dempsey, is an expanded edition of a work first published almost a decade ago. The original subtitle was An Encyclopaedic Guide To Modern Art, now replaced by the more assertive The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide To Modern Art.

The main entries give a brief history of 100 significant art 'isms', arranged chronologically from Impressionism onwards. Each chapter has a short bibliography, though these contain secondary rather than primary sources. A glossary gives capsule descriptions of a further 200 isms. Stephen Little's book Isms: Understanding Art has a similar concept, though Dempsey's book is more in-depth than Little's.