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, ìCan you find buildings? And roofs?î 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, OíKeeffe and others. And Stories includes Chagall, Wyeth, Lichtenstein, Dubuffet, Shahn, Moore and Magritte. Each volume comes with an illustrated summary of artworks.