10 books like Chardin

This book is simply brilliant. I first read it in the 1980s and return to it often for inspiration and to remind myself of its piercing lucidity. Beautifully written, clear, thoughtful, and direct, it expresses a way of looking at art and visual culture that can be applied to other times and places. Baxandall explores the social relationships and practices out of which works of art emerge, connecting the way paintings look with the society in which they were made. He robustly criticises simplistic approaches to the art of the past and shows how we can think differently and understand more. I have deep admiration for Michael Baxandall, whose writings encourage readers to reflect on their own visual skills and habits, how and where they have acquired them.

A Fortunate Man is deeply moving by virtue of combining words and images to evoke the life of a General Practitioner in rural England, a man prone to depression, who took his own life 15 years later. The black and white photographs of the doctor, his patients, and the landscape in which they lived, perfectly match the poetic prose to capture the day-to-day existence of a man totally committed to his patients and their well-being. It’s an outstanding example of the power of photography when complemented by text to convey the complexities of lives, communities, and healing. The doctor truly dwelt among the people he treated and knew about every aspect of their lives. This book bears eloquent witness to a form of medical practice that has largely disappeared.

Published by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., this beautifully produced and generously illustrated book contains essays on many aspects of portraiture with special emphasis on the USA. Portraits are fascinating; there is just so much to say about the ways in which materials such as paper, stone, metal, and canvas, ink, crayon, and paint can conjure up a human being. Nations, institutions, professions, families, and individuals all make use of portraits to affirm their positions, persuade those who view them of their worth, and shape forms of remembrance. The essays are relatively short, which encourages readers to browse, read a contribution and then come back often to look as well as read more about one of the most extraordinary forms of visual culture that has ever been produced.    

London’s British Museum, with its massive and diverse collections, is world famous and the story of its foundation and early years in the eighteenth century sheds light on the histories of collecting, knowledge, and exploration. More than twenty essays were assembled to celebrate the opening of the Enlightenment Gallery in the King’s Library after years of research and refurbishment. These essays draw readers into the people, the objects, and the ideas that shaped this important and influential institution. The book is lavishly illustrated with gorgeous photographs of paintings and statues, coins, fossils, china, and much more—a wonderful way to grasp the museum’s stupendous holdings and also to understand better the controversies it has engendered.

This book offers the technical breakdown of painting in grisaille. I only know of a few books that cover it and this one was written by an amazing painter! This was the common practice of Bouguereau and Gerome and is thoroughly explained in this particular volume as well and the rendering of planar “facets.” The practice of grisaille is an important phase in painting. The separation of color and form is partly why so many of the “masters” had such control over form and value.

Crary’s work provides a theoretical and empirically informed synthesis of the work of theorists like Berger, Debord, Baudrillard, Barthes, and Sontag. Like these earlier writers, the technological transformations of visual culture are at the heart of the social transformations of the modern world. To understand modernity is thus first to make sense of its visual logics, procedures, and practices. This general argument allowed the author to enter the granular historical details of how seeing and 'observation’ have become essential to the concerns of modern life. What he calls 'techniques of the observer’ are in fact the core sensory apparatus that has helped to shape the institutions and practices of modern life.

What can be visualized is correlated to the technical affordances and historical development of representational practices. This makes technologies of the visual central to social analysis. Some of the most powerful drivers of modern life are thus linked to… show more.

On Photography is Sontag’s attempt to develop the thought of Barthes, Benjamin, and others and apply the resultant perspective to the critical understanding of the fundamental role of photography in modern life. The book is constructed as a series of interconnected essays, each of which explores the moral and dialectical character of photographic interventions. Photography embodies the moral ambiguity of human activity: the camera claims to deliver truth but is essentially selective and partial; photography reveals and conceals the real; the photograph is an artificial mode of representation but claims to provide a `picture’ of life that can only be captured through the camera.

This ambiguous ontology of the image impacts upon both the act of image-making and the interpretive task of reading and understanding the image. With modern photography the viewer is constituted in a dual movement of separation (and alienation) and connectivity (and communality). Photographic engagement constitutes, so… show more.

In one sense Berger’s work is a further exploration of many of Benjamin’s ideas on the social functions of art and visual imagery. Berger is even more emphatic in underlining the changing social (and economic) imperatives that have created particular genres of art. In this book the main emphasis is Eurocentric as Berger weaves his story of the social logics of images into an account of the class and gendered character of the art world and, more particularly, of the world of paintings.

As a Marxist reading of the tradition Ways of Seeing emphasizes social class and dominant class relations as a formative way in which the visual world has been constructed. But he is `culturalist’ enough to stress the relative autonomy of the visual and cultural formations and how the conventions governing artworks and aesthetic interpretation have changed historically. Unusual in the theory of visual culture during the 1960s… show more.

In this 376-page drawing “bible”, all aspects of drawing are covered in great detail, from portraits and figure studies to still life and landscapes. After the first chapter on materials and equipment, Giovanni illustrates the bone structure, musculature, and features of the head, hands, and feet using pencil, ink, and charcoal. It’s the most comprehensive approach I’ve seen in any portrait book.

Further chapters on shadows, shading, composition, sketching, perspective, and aerial perspective are also extremely helpful. This book is a mine of information, and one I turn to when in need of technical know-how for portraiture.

This is probably the book, in the entire history of publishing, in which the author repeatedly apologizes for having it published. Of course, this is entirely false modesty. Ware is one of the more acclaimed and creative graphic tellers of our time. This is a facsimile of his sketchbooks from 1986 to 1995. A second one would follow but this is the first and, consequently, closer to the source of his creative origins. But my main reason for suggesting this book in this context is the way he draws by observing what is around him as a sort of breathing exercise that keeps him alive and going.