From a carved mammoth tusk (c. 40,000 bce) to Duchamp's Fountain (1917), and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-10) to Louise Bourgeois's Maman (1999), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto cultural consciousness over the past 40,000 years - a resilient visual vocabulary whose meaning has proved elastic and endlessly renewable from era to era. It is to these works that Kelly Grovier devotes himself in this radical new art history. Stepping away from biography, style, and the chronology of 'isms' that preoccupies most art history to focus on the artworks themselves, Grovier tells a new story in which we learn from the artworks, not just about them.