Contemporary Art in the Light of History

Erwin Rosenthal’s Contemporary Art in the Light of History, originally published in 1971, is a small masterpiece of writing on the art of the twentieth century. A scholar of medieval art by training and a prominent antiquarian bookseller, Rosenthal, who died in l981, was equally entranced by modern art, particularly abstraction. His three linked essays in this book—“Contemporary Art in the Light of History,” “Art and Technology,” and “Art Theories and Manifestos, Old and New”—set out a path...