These bright, compact hardcovers introduce young readers and their parents to six visual building blocks--"Lines, Shapes, Colors, People, Places" and "Stories"--via an assortment of the great masterpieces of twentieth century art. Author Philip Yenawine, the longtime Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art, is currently co-director of Visual Understanding in Education, a developmentally based education research organization. He has also been affiliated with education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In "Shapes" Yenawine asks questions like, "Can you find buildings? And roofs?" while looking at a Picasso study. Other "Shapes" artists include Seurat, Gauguin, Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, Klee, Smith and Dali. "Colors" looks at Monet, de Kooning, Kandinsky, Albers, Stella and Johns, among others. "Places" includes 21 artworks by artists such as Hopper, Munch, Klimt, and Bonnard, while "People" highlights works by Balthus, Degas, Freud, Cezanne, Neel and Rivera. "Lines" features 16 works by van Gogh, Matisse, Pollock, Morandi, O'Keeffe and others. And "Stories" includes Chagall, Wyeth, Lichtenstein, Dubuffet, Shahn, Moore and Magritte. Each volume comes with an illustrated summary of artworks.