A picture, says David Hockney, is the only way that we can communicate what we see. Here, in a collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford, he explores the many ways that artists have pictured the world, sharing sparkling insights and ideas that will delight every art lover and art maker. Readers who thrilled to Hockney’s Secret Knowledge know that he has an uncanny ability to get into the minds of artists. In A History of Pictures he covers far more ground, getting at the roots of visual expression and technique through hundreds of images—from cave paintings to frames from movies—that are reproduced. It’s a joyful celebration of one of humanity’s oldest impulses. A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen
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Loved this book!! A lot of things in it were new and I really enjoyed the way every comment is supported by the art. There was a big section reiterating his findings on “the secret knowledge” about camera obscura. I had read a lot about it already, but enjoyed the pictures backing his theory. Love Hockney ❤️ 360 I’m always looking for interesting books about art. I found this one onboard a Viking cruise. (No, I didn’t steal it…though I was tempted to.) It’s a beautiful, full color book, one that is written more conversationally than most art books and which has loads of pictures so the reader always knows what the writer is referring to. Its take on pictures is unique, as far as I know. It’s not just a history of art…it’s a history of “pictures”, including paintings, photographs and films. Photography and paintings have more in common than I thought…cameras of a sort were used by artists as early as the early 19th century to project images onto canvas, which were then traced and painted as photorealistic images. It’s this type of info that caught my interest and make this a book I can highly recommend if art (or pictures) float your boat. 360 An idiosyncratic look at art history, in the form of a conversation between a painter (Hockney) and an art critic (Martin Gayford). The book is illustrated by a young woman (Rose Blake) whose parents are Hockney's friends; she draws Hockney and Gayford as adults and herself as a much smaller child (at the time of the book's publication she was 29 or 30). Mmph. There are lots of Hockney's works depicted, way more than any other artist's; it's un peu celebratory of Hockney's genius. Like, de trop. That said, I do love the flow of the book -- it's never boring (that's a huge feat!), and organizing it around aspects of seeing (light, perspective, reflections, etc.) is really smart. I like the inclusion of photography and motion pictures, even though the treatment of them feels super-cursory. Which, OK, I get it, it's a survey book. BUT as you might expect from a book by two old white guys, the artists mentioned are overwhelmingly white and male. There are references to Asian art, but the artists are mostly unnamed, and Asian art is only discussed insofar as it influenced Western artists. There's a mini-handful of women, like mini-M&Ms. I don't think there are any African artists in here at all. 360 While this was interesting and informative, it was exhausting to turn page after page and see the glaring omission of art made by women and non-white men. That the authors didn't acknowledge this made it all the more cringe-worthy.
And, while Hockney is progressive insofar as he doesn't miss an opportunity to mention that he sometimes draws on an iPad, he is quick to dismiss the legitimacy and power of photography and film. 360 The authors have spun magic in the span of sixteen chapters.
Well, not everyday of the week do you get to read an Art History book meant specifically for children.
A must read for every child. Open their minds to questions such as Why is the Mona Lisa beautiful and why are shadows so rarely found in Chinese, Japanese and Persian painting? How have the makers of images depicted movement? What makes marks on a flat surface interesting? -- and so on.
Cheers. 360
I have always appreciated David Hockney, but would never put him on my all time favorite artists list. This book of conversations between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford in which they informally discuss aspects of art and photography is, however, just pure joy. The conversations seem so relaxed. They take an aspect of art, like ‘shadow’ or ‘photograph versus painting’ , and what follows is a gentle discussion with a few relevant art plates. Chapters are short and that makes them perfect for one chapter each night before sleeping. Loved it. Another to read over and over again. 360 Interesantísimo libro, construido en diálogo entre los dos autores. Una revisión apasionante de la historia de las imágenes, de su impacto en nuestra vida social. Me gusta cómo las reproducciones visuales acompañan el texto, que no sigue un orden cronológico, sino temático, al ritmo de la conversación. 360 Hockney and Spectator art critic Martin Gayford pretend to sit down and have a long conversation about the visual arts. The book is actually a very deliberately organized argument for the primacy of the human eye and memory in the creation of art, something that has gotten lost in the couple hundred years since photography seemed to achieve what things look like. The camera is indeed hard to shake off, but Hockney and Gayford are pointed on its limits, mostly in the way it sees quite unlike the human eye. They're not scolds, though—check Hockney's own extensive photographic work—and they don't seek to dismiss photography, or even that old shortcut the camera obscura, which they make clear required its own kind of skill (or in the case of Vermeer, genius). They simply want to escape the tyranny of photography, its domineering—and limiting—status. In their defense of eye and mind, they even question the advances of perspective, which also claimed to correct the picture. The book offers several examples of Byzantine and especially Chinese art, which often evoked experience more viscerally than later, perspective-enslaved works. (A secondary motive behind the book seems to be cultivating Hockney's own rep. He's identified as perhaps the most critically acclaimed and universally popular artist of our age on the jacket flap, and if you have a problem with his placing reproductions of his works beside those of Rublev or Dufy or Hopper, literally beside them, you probably better take a pass on this thing. It wasn’t a problem for me.)
Hockney and Gayford have their favorites (who doesn’t?)—van Eyck comes off better here than Caravaggio, Ingres better than Gérôme, and, addressing Nude Descending a Staircase, Hockney offers this concise little distinction in favor of Pablo: Duchamp's picture is about the movement of the nude. Picasso's Cubism is more profound. He was concerned with the movement of the spectator—but the book is extremely diverse, and generous, in its examples. There's even some good news: just as representational art eventually overcame what looked not so long ago like a sure triumph of abstraction, the coauthors predict a big comeback for painting in general, the domination of photography suddenly vulnerable in a digital era where the pliability of images is obvious to anyone. 360 Such a delightful wonderful book on history of pictures. A beautifully written in a simple dialogue an artist and an art historian, this book is easy to read for anyone without any prior knowledge on art or its history. A great side effect of reading this book is extreme desire to see all these painting mentioned, even if you saw them before, again and again! I'm too busy at work to allow a short trip to St Petersburg's Hermitage , so a short dash to local Moscow museum will suffice for now . I was also lucky to view an exhibit on Talbot early photography and to see for myself how these pictures look ( very very small ). Exciting and very approachable study on such a complex subject, a true gem of a book! Read this book and go see pictures in a very different light! 360 I really enjoyed the first 200 pages of this. Like really like them. And then I realised that the lack of diversity was not going to be addressed or overcome. Ancient and early modern art exists within a bubble or perpetuated bias. I understand. And a book that only talks about a handful of artists will only talk about those 'big players', I understand. But other than Chinese paintings and their use of lines, the vast majority of this book only talks about European men. EVEN when we then move to the use of photography and video they're still only writing about the same people who've had the stage for centuries. Not to mention, a book intended to explain the movement of pictures through time read like a 'painting is art, photography is not' towards the end. Even though they wrote that was not their intention; the constant message was otherwise.
Overall, I loved the first chapters of this book so much, and then found it a struggle to read the last half so much. I get that Hockney is an artist, but not every aspect of art history needs an example of how he is the best at it. Just let things he good, appreciate them. You don't have to prove you can do it too, I didn't buy the book for that. 360
