Just to thumb through Edward Lucie-Smith's Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists is to be overwhelmed by the vibrancy and range of styles, eras, and personalities that have shaped artistic and cultural perception throughout the last hundred years. Arguing that "twentieth-century artworks cannot be understood fully in total isolation," Lucie-Smith includes in each biography not only some sumptuous reproductions but also photographs of his subjects at work, at play, posing as the Next Big Thing (Salvador Dalí, 1937) or caught off-guard in relaxed mode (Naum Gabo with his wife in the south of France, 1920s). A pictorial biography divided into an impressive array of sections, the book concentrates on every essential movement, from fauvism, which heralded the birth of modernism, through the varied forms of European expressionism and American abstract expressionism, to British pop art. In two of the most effective chapters, the artists of pre - and post-revolutionary Russia are studied in detail, and an unclassifiable but impressive array of artists, such as Yves Klein, Louise Bourgeois, and Jean-Michel Basquiat - who "represent new approaches to the problems of making art" - are explored. This is a fascinating record of some of the most arresting visual images of the last century, and an intimate study of some of art's greatest proponents.

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