Learning to Look at Paintings

By Mary Acton

Book Overview

Learning to Look at Paintings is an accessible guide to the study and appraisal of paintings, drawings and prints. Mary Acton shows how you can develop visual, analytical and historical skills in learning to look at and understand an image by analysing how it works, what its pictorial elements are and how they relate to each other.

This fully revised and updated new edition is illustrated with over 100 images by a wide range of Western European and American artists, ranging from Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Botticelli to Picasso, Matisse and Rothko, and now includes modern and contemporary artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Anselm Kiefer, Tacita Dean and Marlene Dumas. In addition, Mary Acton presents new examples highlighting the survival and revival of painting in recent years.

A new introduction situates the book in the wider context of recent changes in the approach to Art History. A glossary of critical and technical terms used in the language of Art History is also included, with an updated but still selective reading list.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415435188
• ISBN13: 9780415435185
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Easy to read

This book is written in a plain, clear style---it is a good reference book to look up anything about art. The chapters are short.

Informative

I enjoyed this book on the principles and elements of design. I think she selected exemplary pictures to illustrate her point. I especially enjoyed the chapter on "subject matter". The only drawback of this book was having to flip back and forth from the reading to the painting. Also, she talked about some of the paintings color combinations that were printed in black and white. In the paperback version some of the details of the paintings were lost because they were reproduced on a small scale. Overall, though I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about design elements.

Fine introduction

Composition, space, form, tone, color, subject-matter, and other pictorial elements of the plastic arts are considered and their interrelationships explained in this handy introduction, with over ninety well-chosen illustrations, some in color. The author, an experienced art teacher, has also included illuminating essays on drawing and its purposes, looking at prints, a handy glossary of art terms, and references for further reading. Highly recommended as eminently suitable for an Introduction to Art course, and for anyone else interested in learning to see more in paintings. (The "score" rating is an unfortunately ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)