Far From Brooklyn

Somehow I got through four years of liberal education without taking a survey-style course of art history.

I was in the airport, with a couple crummy mysteries (see previous entries!) and saw the old Art 101 standby on a shelf, a cunningly packaged volume from Phaidon about the size of a Robert Ludlum thriller. The first half of the book, say 500 pages, is text, and the second half is plates.  It would be more satisfying, I’m sure, to read a larger, floppier paperback version, or better yet a big fat hardcover of course, but for $20 this pocket edition was handy for a flight to Toronto – it could slip into the outer flap of my computer bag – and a bargain to boot.

I wouldn’t call reading this book a transcendent experience but it was pretty close to the equivalent of taking that Art 101 course I never got around to back in college.

I was surprised by the artists he lingered over – Rubens, for example – and those he gave relatively little attention – Picasso comes to mind.  But he’s a generous viewer and a good companion throughout the centuries.

A surprising amount of attention was paid to architecture, which seemed odd, considering how many other art forms were given no attention whatsoever – perhaps this is just the canonic way undergraduates were expected to be introduced to art in the 20th Century.

I’d like to read more Gombrich – The Preference for the Primitive, for instance.

The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich