Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts (Phoenix Books)

By Joshua C. Taylor

Book Overview

Sometimes seeing is more difficult for the student of art than believing. Taylor, in a book that has sold more than 300,000 copies since its original publication in 1957, has helped two generations of art students "learn to look."

This handy guide to the visual arts is designed to provide a comprehensive view of art, moving from the analytic study of specific works to a consideration of broad principles and technical matters. Forty-four carefully selected illustrations afford an excellent sampling of the wide range of experience awaiting the explorer.

The second edition of Learning to Look includes a new chapter on twentieth-century art. Taylor's thoughtful discussion of pure forms and our responses to them gives the reader a few useful starting points for looking at art that does not reproduce nature and for understanding the distance between contemporary figurative art and reality.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226791548
• ISBN13: 9780226791548
• Release Date: June 1981
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A worthy course.

Interesting, accesible and ultimately enlightening but inclined also to be dry in an "Idiot's guide" kind of way, this renders the topic a little lack lustre which for me detracts from the point of veiwing art and getting any kind of personal, emotional experience from it. Excellent for making art accesible nonetheless and demystifying the nonsense that art glitterarty types surround the topic in so needlessly and prentiontiously...