"What is art? Is that art?" At the end of the twentieth century, these questions continue to provoke and to bedevil discussion. The uncertainty that prompts them can be productive for artists, who may thrive on such a state of tension. Yet uncertainty can also shade into the suspiciousness with which many people approach the work of those artists. Reasonable questions deserve articulate answers, and Julian Bell provides them in this lucid, straightforward, and often challenging book. In the process he offers an incisive guide to artistic thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the complexities of contemporary theory. Among the many fields of activity covered by the word "art, " Bell, himself a painter, focuses on "flat things" -- the paintings that modern theories seek to explain. The questions he addresses include:

-- What is painting? Does anything unite these objects we call paintings?

-- What happened to the idea of representation in "modern art"? What has caused the vast changes in painting over the last two centuries?

-- What does the ancient practice of painting amount to in today's world at the turn of the twenty-first century? Bell writes with a wide-ranging curiosity about what other painters have produced in the last two hundred years, giving fresh accounts of the most influential works and introducing many painters who may lie outside fashionable canons. What Is Painting? is a book for everyone interested in making sense of modern art and of the cultural debates it provokes.

朱利安‧貝爾(Julian Bell)

是位備受推崇的畫家，現居於英國東薩賽克斯郡（East Sussex）路易斯鎮（Lewes）。除了繪畫創作，他也為各類刊物撰寫藝術評論，包括《倫敦書評》（London Review of Books）、《紐約書評》（The New York Review of Books）、《泰唔士報文學副刊》（The Times Literary Supplement）及《衛報》（The Guardian）。曾出版數本書籍，並在其傑出之作《世界之鏡：藝術新史》（Mirror of the World: A New History of Art，Thames& Hudson，2007年）中，揭開圖像創作在技術面及心理層面的深入知識。曾任教於倫敦金匠學院（Goldsmiths）、坎伯韋爾藝術學院（Camberwell College of Arts）、城市協會藝術大學（City& Guilds of London Art School）與皇家繪畫學校（Royal Drawing School）。

■譯者簡介

官妍廷

輔仁大學英語系學士、荷蘭萊登大學藝術史碩士，主修當代藝術。承紐約大學東亞系李渝老師啟蒙，研究興趣為當代藝術中的流亡離散、游牧生產以及文化轉譯。譯有《藝術創作委託指南》、《錢暴後的暗處：操作下的21世紀藝術市場》（典藏藝術家庭）。其他譯作散見近年展覽論述、藝術家自述及評析文章。