the shock of the new

Hughes discusses Cubism, a movement started by Pablo Picasso and developed by Georges Braque, in which multiple viewpoints of a subject were compressed into a single view. Hughes details how African carvings and Spanish culture had a key influence on works such as Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon.

Robert Hughes examines the relationship between art and authority by looking at Dadaism and the art of political movements such as fascism and Soviet communism. Featuring works by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Otto Dix and George Grosz.

Robert Hughes examines art's relationship with the pleasures of nature, its place in them and man's understanding of them. Featuring works by Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin.

This edition deals with the aspirations and reality of the art in which we live, architecture. Utopian visions rarely work in reality and Hughes examines the utopian in the parallel lines of concrete, towering verticals of steel and planes of glass of modernism in the buildings, built and planned, of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Gropius, which he contrasts with the paintings of Mondrian.

Robert Hughes's classic series about art in the twentieth century continues by looking at the avant-garde and modernism in the century of change. Hughes gets innocent and irrational as he examines the surrealists and their attempts to make art without restrictions. Features artists such as Di Chirico, Ernst, Miro and Dali.

Robert Hughes grapples with the artists who made visual art from the crags and vistas of their internal world - the Expressionists, including Van Gogh, De Kooning, Pollock and beyond.

Robert Hughes goes Pop when he examines the art that referred to the man-made world that fed off culture itself via works by Rauchenberg, Warhol and Lichtenstein.

Robert Hughes slips down the decline of modernism while visiting installations and watching art without substance. Once accepted as the dominant culture, the art of modernism found itself without an avant-garde and without the ability to shock or provoke other than as objects that cost absurd amounts of money. Hughes examines how artists have dealt with this commercialisation. Artists include Bridget Reilly, Joseph Beuys and David Hockney.