Dawn's Reading Blog

This book on Goya had an unfortunate layout where the descriptive text for the color plates was all in the back, like end notes. So you have to flip back and forth. The biographical data in the front of the book was reasonably thorough but no real attempt was made to examine Goya’s work.

The painting themselves I only find interesting in his dark and gloomy phases, mostly towards the end of his life. Earlier on he did a lot of pretty generic portraits and pastoral scenes. The book didn’t explain why Goya deviated into such dark works later on in life, but those are the paintings he’s remembered for. One interesting possibility the book raised was that the Colossus in his famous work is a savoir, throwing the French out of Spain, not a monster. I don’t know. He’s a pretty scary looking savoir.

Moorehouse’s Dali was extremely thorough. The book covers more than his biographical data. It really details his philosophies and the incidents behind the recurring images in his paintings. This was a good book. Dali’s kind of a sick dude, though. The more you know about his paintings, the less appealing they are.

Phaidon Colour Library’s Magritte does a good job of discussing the various influences on his style and showing works that illustrate those influences. Magritte seems to have been easily influenced. He frequently used images and ideas from other artists or other media. However, he put his own twisted slant on them, creating unexpected images that can be disturbing. His most original works are also frequently the most disturbing.

The photos are mostly in chronological order but sometimes aren’t, in order to contrast two works against each other. The text doesn’t say much about his personal life but perhaps his personal life wasn’t very interesting.

The Art Book is small, nearly pocket-sized. You don’t get big beautiful reproductions, but you do get a whole heck of a lot of reproductions, five hundred of them to be precise. 500 artists are covered in alphabetical order: one photo per artist, a paragraph about the artist and the work, and the date and place of the artist’s birth and death. In itself, it won’t teach you much, but as a reference it’s invaluable. In seconds you can find the relevent data and one representative piece of art for nearly any artist of significance.

This book was recommended by the Barnes & Noble Intro to Art course I took and I’m glad I picked up a copy. Cheap too.

Van Gogh is one of those coffee table art books you find on the Border’s discount table for five dollars. It’s well worth five dollars, especially if you like Van Gogh’s paintings. The reproductions are large and bright, although nothing can match seeing the real thing. The biographical section is complete but not long. It refers to the color plates, which are chronologically ordered so you can easily see how Van Gogh’s style changed over time or match a segment of his life with the work he produced during that period.

The Illustrated History of Art : From the Renaissance to the Present Day is a nice, brief overview of the different trends and movements in art since the Renaissance. There are plenty of full color pictures to illustrate the text but at only 200 pages it doesn’t cover any era in much depth. The early periods around the Renaissance are covered in more detail with modern art after the Impressionists/Expressionists getting about two pages per “ist.”

I took an Intro to Art class from the Barnes & Noble University and Learning to Look was one of the text books. I didn’t actually buy the book while I was taking the class but I enjoyed the class so much and felt like I got so much out of it that I decided to get the book to delve into the subject more deeply. What a waste. The class (free) was much more useful, interesting, and well presented than the book (not free).

Learning to Look reads like somebody’s bad thesis. It’s rambling and incoherent. The first chapter, in which two different paintings of the same subject were compred and contrasted in detail, was the best. From there, it jumped from topic to topic, lingering where it should skim and skimming where it should explore in depth. Often terms were left unexplained and sometimes non-existent figures were referred to. Also, the photos are mostly black and white. The text will refer to the impact some color selection is supposed to have, only you can’t see it.

I recommend the class without the book.