Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained by Alexander Sturgis (Editor), Hollis Clayton

From the Publisher

How did landscape painting develop from being the backdrop to religious painting to become the exclusive focus of magnificent works by Turner and Monet? How have artists across the centuries approached the issue of catching a likeness in portraiture? Why do certain motifs such as flowers or skulls recur in still life painting?" "Such questions can be hard to answer in a conventional, chronological, treatment of art history. Understanding Paintings takes a new approach, discussing each type, or genre, of painting in turn. In doing so it stresses the enormous breadth of Western art, with chapters on religious painting, myth and allegory, the nude, history painting, portraiture, landscape, genre (or everyday life painting), still life, and abstract painting." "Each chapter begins with an introduction providing an overview of that type of painting. The following pages then explore different subjects or themes that have absorbed artists over the centuries - from self-portraits to the female nude, and from society's vices to spiritual visions. These discussions allow you both to discover the multiple meanings of individual images and to identify the important currents that run through each genre, in order to build up a more complete understanding of the history of painting.

Library Journal

Sturgis (curator, London's National Gallery) and Clayton (art history, Northwestern Univ.) have collaborated on a remarkably trenchant and accessible popular art book that recounts the history of painting on a thematic and topical basis. Rather than focusing on important epochs or "big" names, the authors slice the time line into nine categories: religious painting, mythology, the nude, history painting, portraiture, landscape painting, genre, still life, and abstraction. Within each category, numerous variations of each are summarized in brief essays and illustrated by well-selected high points of the form. For example, the section on religious works (understandably the first and longest chapter) highlights 24 subtopics, including altarpieces, images of Christ, martyrdom, miracles, and the Apocalypse. Portraiture is divided into 13 subdivisions, mythological works into 15. Although it does not offer much in-depth analysis, this refreshing approach makes for insightful and interesting reading throughout. It will prove to be a favorite quick reference for painters and museum goers and a very useful supplement to more conventional undergraduate art history textbooks. An important new title; recommended for all collections. Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Foreword

Like its sister arts of sculpture and dance, painting lives in an intensely physical, eternally present, but silent universe, visually inviting, but slightly alien to self-description. Its own internal language is made of images, and like hieroglyphics, the grammar—the logic that holds images together in the same frame—is highly evolved. Some of the languages, such as the shared classical and mythic allegorical references, are almost dead, recognized by a rarified few. Art comes from earlier art, and Understanding Paintings freely translates the evolution of subject and technique by a clever peg of discussing the works by various genres or subjects. At last, a history of art that is not hidebound by the tradition of chronology or the static grouping of "schools" of painting.

Drawing on the most renown examples of eight hundred years worth of Western art, from medieval altarpieces to abstract expressionism, Sturgis and Clayson, noted specialist art historians affiliated with London's National Gallery and Northwestern University, respectively, offer a clear, concise commentary on the allotted areas: the nude, mythical allegories, historical realism, portraiture, still life, landscape and abstract painting. In much the same way as artists cross centuries with impunity, so the authors have made fresh curatorial groupings. Thus, for example, Velázquez's 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X in a discussion of reading facial expressions as a sitter's character, is linked to Francis Bacon's borrowing for his disturbing, distorted 1951 Pope I. For those who might have reader fatigue for such well-known works, the texts seldom disappoint in inventing ways of re-seeing the images. Leonardo's Mona Lisa maintains that suggestive paradox of near movement in her smile by "losing the corners of her mouth and eyes."

The authors cover a lot of ground, from the sublime sacred space of the Sistine Chapel to Mark Rothko's nondenominational triptychs in a Houston installation, from Bosch's hellish The Garden of Earthly Delights to British Damien Hirst's cow carcass pickled in formaldehyde, but the viewing in this handsome book never seems forced or hurried. Rather, like a good museum guide, they make the works themselves seem immediate, patiently waiting for a new set of eyes to translate their silence into comprehension.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0823055795
  
• ISBN-13: 9780823055791
• Format: Hardcover, 272pp
• Publisher: Watson-Guptill Publications, Incorporated
• Pub. Date: October 2000