The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces

＂Brimming with examples from across the artistic spectrum, this is the perfect primer to hook future art enthusiasts.＂ Publishers Weekly

Interested in art but feel under-informed? Curious but afraid you might not ＂get＂ it? Already a fan and wishing to immerse yourself in a fun, engaging, informative and informed read that will refresh and top up your Art History 101 and Introduction to Art courses from college?

The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces avoids the common approach of throwing hundreds of images at a reader and expecting them to learn from and memorize them all.

Instead, the book will guide its readers through a brief series of masterpieces of Western art--from cave paintings to sharks in formaldehyde. This book twelve chapters teach readers about art, the art trade, and art history in a thorough (though concise) fashion.

Each chapter is linked to one notable masterpiece, with references to others, giving readers a fixed, digestible number of objects that they will get to know in depth, and which they can use as a lens to understand the thousands of other, related objects that they might encounter in the future.

Museums can be daunting, and art presents a strange new language, one that certainly intrigues but is often intimidating and foreign. This book, written by one of the world’s best-known art historians uses entertaining stories to break down intimidating barriers and invites readers of all ages for a one-stop immersion into art.

Noah Charney is an internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books and a professor of art history specializing in art crime. His novel, The Art Thief, was a bestseller in five countries and is translated into 17 languages. His The Art of Forgery, Stealing the Mystic Lamb and Slovenology were international bestsellers. His book Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He appears occasionally as a television presenter, with shows for BBC, National Geographic, among many others, and is in demand as a speaker, having been a finalist to be a TED Fellow and with recent talks at the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is currently writing a television series for HBO Europe, and writes regularly for the Guardian, the Washington Post, Salon, the Observer, and many other top magazines and newspapers. Trained in art history at The Courtauld Institute, Cambridge University, and University of Ljubljana, Charney has taught for many years, for Yale and Brown University, and in Cambridge, Florence, Rome, and Ljubljana. Charney is now a professor at University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, where Charney has lived for many years.