This text summarises and contextualises the ideas that formed visual arts practices this century. Art, design and architecture are located in their social and political contexts, and the ideas of modernism are traced from the development of industrialised Europe at the turn of the century to the post-industrial, post-colonial present. The complex relationship between modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts is examined and the book concludes with a review of the global impact of the new technologies on art and design production.

CHRISTOPHER CROUCH co-ordinates Visual Art Theory at Editor Cowan University, Perth, Australia.

Introduction
The Cultural Background to the Machine Age
The Arts and Crafts, Revolution and Rusticity
The Machine Ethic, Functionalism and the Collective
Individualism, the Expressive Voice and the Unconscious
The Modernist Mass Media
Realism and Objectivity
High Modernism? or Modernism in Crisis?
After Modernism? or Developing Modernism?
Coda.