Most artists can cite books that have held great meaning for them over the years. Not only have these books imparted wisdom and generated ideas, they have been companions in the long—and sometimes solitary—profession of being an artist. We carry on conversations with great books over the years, and as we change, the works change with us. Different aspects of these works—which we may have missed earlier on—reveal themselves to us on subsequent readings. There are many works that have been crucial to me over the years, but here are ten that I could not imagine being without. I certainly could not have developed my ideas on art without these works. They include artist’s letters, treatises, and landmark works in art history, theory, and criticism.
1. Of the ten books on my “artist’s bookshelf,” I would put Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet first.
These letters are addressed to all young people, but especially to artists. they whisper in the ear of anyone with a soul that yearns to fulfill itself. they are also an invocation, a call to the gods and to the mystery, which works like a prayer for all our artistic endeavors. Rilke speaks to the demands, pleasures, and pains of the artist’s life like no other. she challenges the reader to see life as a mission; understand that the life most people live is only the surface of life, and that it is only the artist who penetrates to the depths of real experience. she continually raises one of the most important, but difficult, features of the artist’s life, which is loneliness. Rilke believes that without the ability to experience and utilize deep solitude, a truly creative life is impossible.
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2. letters to theo by vincent van gogh is the second.
Never has a creative intelligence been exposed like Vincent does in these letters. we see him dealing with all the essential problems; his work, his family, his love objects, and historical and contemporary art and literature. we see it from the inside out, day by day, week by week, forging the vocabulary of modernism, painting, “not how I see things, but how I feel them”. van gogh appeals to us because he is the perennial lost soul, a young person trying to find his way in the world, trying to discover the meaning of his existence and how he can be useful to the world. vincent is like st. agustin, but the other way around: he starts out trying to be a saint, but when traditional religion fails him, he makes a religion out of painting. Perhaps most moving of all is the discovery of just how close the two brothers were. theo went insane after vincent’s death and survived less than a year before he himself died, leaving his wife johanna to care for his young son vincent and with the legacy of his brother-in-law of him.
3. Third is Heinrich Wölfflin’s The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art.
wölfflin, along with bernard berenson and erwin panofsky, is one of the founding fathers of art history. as herbert read de wölfflin said: “he found the history of art as a subjective chaos, but left it as a science”. Anyone who has studied art history is used to seeing two slides on the screen at the same time. This was just one of the innovations introduced by Wölfflin, who believed that all aesthetic judgments were relative rather than absolute, so that something could only be said to be “pictorial”, for example, compared to something else. In Early Art History, Wölfflin examines one of the most crucial paradigm shifts in art history, the shift from the Renaissance to the Baroque. he outlines five pairs of opposing qualities that define the main characteristics of each period. he then trains the viewer to recognize each of those oppositions, so that he can identify any newly found work as Renaissance or Baroque. the pairs are: “linear” and “pictorial”; “airplane and recession”; “multiplicity” and “unity”; “clear” and “unclear” forms; and “tectonic” and “a-tectonic” construction. wölfflin believes that the passage from the renaissance to the baroque was the greatest paradigm shift in the history of art. he believed that most subsequent stylistic changes followed the same general patterns, so that if you could understand this particular evolution, you could understand the whole of art history. Although Wölfflin is an art historian, he sees as an artist. he is sensitive to the slightest changes in temperament, as revealed by lines, tones, shapes, and construction. no one has ever written about stylistic distinctions with such passion and insight.
4. The Principles of Art History is well complemented by Bernard Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance.
painters is an “education of the look” taking the Italian Renaissance as a model. Berenson’s work as a connoisseur had much to do with how he developed his feeling for art history. he spent his days separating the work of artists of different styles and qualities, and this made him acutely aware of personal difference. Because he was examining the work of individual artists, he came to see art history as largely biographical; as part of the “great man” theory of history. he believed that events gave rise to great thinkers, military leaders, and artists, who rose to positions of power based on their unique abilities and thereby changed the world by their presence. this is the complete opposite of wölfflin, who, being a hegelian, thought that history was made up of great unseen and unstoppable forces, and that if a great man arose, it was only because the consciousness of the entire world had been prepared for him in the future . of time. Furthermore, Berenson based his approach on the work of the ancient historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch, whose histories were often largely a series of biographies. Berenson was not only interested in biographies, however, but also in genealogies; who studied with whom, who was able to make an informed innovation, etc. he understood that artists are often quite concerned about their lineage. studying the work of closely related artists made him intimately aware of the difference between the greatest masters and those who were not as talented. in his art history, therefore, he deviates into two fields that are not strictly historical; the thorny question of quality, and the psychology of aesthetic appreciation, or the psychology of enjoyment in art. he was as interested in the viewer as he was in the artist, and he sought to understand why certain artists moved us so much and the mechanisms by which this was achieved. Berenson’s tremendous analytical powers, his training at Harvard, his friendship with William James, his role as a connoisseur, and his career as a picture dealer and authenticator, gave him interests and credentials that most art historians do not have.
5. the nude: a study in ideal form by kenneth clark is the first, and still the most serious, study of one of the crowning achievements of western art , the nude.
Beginning by examining the difference between naked and nude, Clark explores in great detail our propensity to idealize the human body and how this affects every decision we make about ourselves. Clark understands that without this process of idealization, the concept of the nude would be impossible. he concludes that the nude is not a subject of art, but an art form, just as ballet is a form of dance and opera is a form of music. Clark sees the nude as capable of embodying the full range of human emotion, from pathos to ecstasy, from sensuality to asceticism. he also studies the concept of dipendenza, or the relationship between the nude and architecture. he emphasizes how both forms require beauty to be married to certain strict functional needs. Despite his pessimism about whether the nude is still a viable concept for us, this is an incredibly inspiring book on a subject so close to many of us in the art student league.
6. The nude’s relationship to architecture brings up my next book, Body, Memory, and Architecture.
written by kent bloomer and charles moore as an introduction to the study of architecture for their freshmen at yale, body, memory, and architecture is a remarkable introduction to the subject, because the authors discuss architecture from the point of view of how the inhabitants experience the buildings, rather than how they are built. bloomer and moore believe that truly memorable places, places that move us, that we remember and to which we want to return, are based on the human body. Modernism opposed the body to the Cartesian grid, thus giving us the soulless boxes and glass and steel cannons that oppress us daily. in the process, architects, along with their arcane concerns (beauty), were replaced by engineers, with their modern and quantifiable concerns (efficiency). As in so many other fields, specialization took over broader-based humanistic concerns, leaving us with efficient, quantifiable environments that sound good on paper but leave our eyes starved and our souls hungry.
7. leonardo da vinci’s treatise on painting is perhaps the best book on art that was never finished (like so many other leonardo projects).
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but what we have is the literary equivalent of a sketchbook; ideas, notes, speeches, rants, observations, etc. on any topic of use to the painter. What is important to note is that, unlike nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, there is no mention of the artist’s feelings or emotions at all here. For Leonardo, as for all his Quattrocento colleagues, the foundation of art was rational and scientific, based on an understanding of phenomena that were observable, predictable, and repeatable. As Leonardo wrote, “those who fall in love with the practice of art, without having previously applied to the diligent study of the scientific part of it, can be compared to sailors, who go to sea in a ship without a rudder or compass, and therefore you cannot be sure of reaching the desired port.” For Leonardo, perspective is the sine qua non condition of all the visual arts, without which nothing can be done well: “The young student must, first of all, acquire a knowledge of perspective, which allows him to give each object its proper dimensions…perspective is to painting what a bridle is to a horse and a rudder to a ship.” Nowadays, we take for granted that artists should always carry a sketchbook with them, but this was actually one of Leonardo’s greatest innovations. At a time when most artists turned to their study pattern books to see how to draw any object, Leonardo insisted that they turn to nature as a source, and take their sketchbooks out on the street and observe the nature of first hand: “be quick to draw them with light strokes in your pocket book, which should always be about you. when it is full, take another one, these are not things to be erased but to be kept with the greatest care; because the forms and movements of bodies are so infinitely varied that memory cannot retain them; therefore, keep these sketches as your assistants and teachers.”
8. if wölfflin’s principles of art history help to analyze the stylistic differences between periods and styles, then the painting and experience in 15th century Italy > by michael baxandall examines the social forces and cultural norms that make a particular period, 15th century italian renaissance art, look the way it does.
The book begins with the question: why do Renaissance paintings look the way they do and how do we read (interpret) them? in other words, when we look at a Florentine altarpiece, we know that there is a lot going on that we can only half understand, like watching a movie with the mute button on. How did a fifteenth-century person see, and what did he or she know that enabled him or her to understand painting much more fully? Baxandall concludes that every culture has “visual habits” and that these visual habits allow, or require, that we perceive visual information in certain ways. therefore, the style of the images is closely related to social history. One of the most important social factors Baxandall examines is money. To Baxandall’s way of thinking, “who paid for the painting” is just as important as “who painted it.” because patrons often exerted a strong influence on artists, both positive and negative, the paintings become “fossils of economic life” and “repositories of social relations”. he does this by examining the contracts between artists and their patrons, trying to pay close attention to the role of the client in the appearance of the paintings. In Baxandall’s mind, the client and the artists made the image together. this type of thinking can be applied to almost any period of art history, although modes of patronage have changed dramatically.
9. One of the most inspiring books on the list is the art spirit by robert henri.
not sure if i love it just for its own sake or because it reminds me so much of art student league (where henri taught for many years). henri believes that creating art is everyone’s business, not just professionally trained artists. as he writes, “every human being is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has the same possibilities as anyone else to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don’t think any real artist cares if what he does is ‘art’ or not”. and although henri creates a special place for people who dedicate their lives to making art, he feels that all people can live creatively and freely, and possess the spirit of art. in henri’s mind, the “spirit of art” is
simply as a result of expression during the correct feeling. it is the result of a control over the foundations of nature, the spirit of life, a real understanding of the relative importance of things. any material will do. anyway, the goal is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state that makes art inevitable. I am not interested in art as a means of making a living, but I am interested in art as a means of living a life. the object of painting a picture is not to make a picture, however unreasonable it may seem. the object, which is behind every true work of art, is the achievement of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. at such moments activity is unavoidable, and whether this activity be with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the trace of the state. these results, however crude, become dear to the artist who made them because they are records of states of being that he has enjoyed and that he will recapture. they are equally interesting to others because to some extent they are readable and reveal the possibilities of a greater existence.
10. Finally, I would end with Susan Sontag’s collection of essays, on photography.
We are so saturated with photographic images, and images have infiltrated so much into all aspects of our lives, that today no one can imagine the world before photography. and although we are all well aware of the pleasures and benefits that photography has conferred on us, we are less aware of its darker and more insidious side. It is this unsettling aspect of photography that Sontag examines in his landmark essay, “Into Plato’s Cave.” sontag presents photography as a highly problematic activity. These problems are of a moral/ethical, aesthetic and philosophical nature. some of the problems that sontag outlines, for example, are:
• that photographs can only tell how something looks at a given moment, while the truth about anything is revealed by looking at how something works over time;
• that photographs are confused with reality, they give us the false idea that we can have the world in our hands as an anthology of images;
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• that by endowing this already overcrowded world with duplicate images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available to us than it really is;
• that people always “look” different when they know they are being photographed. what does this say about truth and appearance?
• that photographing is appropriating what is photographed. it puts one into a certain relation to the world that feels like power and knowledge, but isn’t;
• that photographing people is violating them, seeing them in a way they never see themselves: it turns people into objects that can be possessed;
• that there is an implicit aggression in each use of the camera: we “load”, “point”, “point” and “shoot” the camera;
• that the camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral limits and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility towards the people photographed (witness the number of people who took pictures of the subway passenger who was pushed into the tracks, and later killed, instead of helping him up).
These are just a few of the many objections sontag raises about this seemingly innocent and now ubiquitous activity. And Sontag was writing before digital photography and cell phone cameras made photography even more ubiquitous than when she was writing. All of these books raise questions of fundamental importance to artists. with these texts in her place as building blocks, any subsequent work she may read can fit into her place to form a larger framework for her thinking about the visual arts. Since she taught many of these books in the art literature seminar, I know well the value of rereading important books. I have read some of these works a dozen times! And the best books will keep revealing more and more, no matter how many times you read them.
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