Books like Creative Impulse: An Introduction to the Arts

Perhaps my expectations were too high for this book but I felt it was quite underwhelmed. Sporre definitely wants to give the reader the historical context in which art developed but he seems to emphasize it to the point where very little continuity from art movement to art movement is explored. The reader ends up feeling that art is merely a reaction to current events. While this is certainly partly true, there is clearly also an influence of one artistic movement on another, reinforcing it or as a backlash against it, and Sporre leaves this almost unexplored. Similarly, as he approaches modern art his book because more and more a list of art movements, I.e., Mechanism, Futurism, Fauvism, etc. with scarcely more than a paragraph and a single painting as a description. I’m sure Sporre intended this book to be an introduction to art history but good introductions should make you want to dig deeper and give you a taste of the relationships to be explored, I felt nothing of the sort after reading this book. The best that I can say is that Sporre made sure the reader is exposed, however briefly, to the main artistic movements throughout the ages.