Hi Evan,
Art is a broad subject, as it also includes music, writing, sculpture etc. I assume you mean paintings.
I bought a second hand book lately called 20,000 years of art history, but it is in Dutch. This starts with cave-paintings and ends in the 1940's, so does not include pop-art by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
Otherwise you can find separate books on stages in the development of art.
I can think of art deco, art nouveau, roccoco, baroque, art and craft movement, cubism, modernism, impressionism, pre-Raphaelites, pointilism, abstract art.
The visual arts are often associated with architecture and sculpture and other developments in history such as the first and second World War when Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) and Art Deco ended.
It also depends upon whether you intend to concentrate on the history of art specifically how it developed in the US or in Europe or worldwide. The history of Impressionism I find interesting. It started and ended in France and was cut in half by the Franco-German war of 1870. Several artists got killed in that war or gave up painting. Vincent Van Gogh only came into the picture toward the end. Then Monet lasted a long time beyond the end of Impressionism. He did well out of his paintings. My parents visited his house in France - now a museum.
The garden is still as it was when he died with the famous bridge and lilyponds. He had a catact-operation late in life that made him see the colors differently. This showed in his use of odd colors at some stage.
There are also links with paintings and the types of frames that go with them. Picture Framing Magazine offers various books on the history of the pictureframing. The Fine Art Trade Guild has a book for sale entitled The Art of Framing, that deal with various trends in pictureframing over the ages.
Rick
