100 Books Like The Science of Art

Maurice Pirenne was a physiologist who studied vision and was fascinated by the problems of how we see and interpret paintings and photographs. In this book he explains how vision works and uses his own elegant experiments to demystify perspective and visual illusion. What I especially like about this book, is that Pirenne is not content just to explain the theoretical issues, but uses his own skills in photography to explore the issues and provide vivid demonstrations. This is one of the best and clearest books, to my mind, on these tricky questions. 

Robin Evans was a versatile architectural historian and theorist who died too young. This highly original and unusual book, published after his death, is about the relationship of geometry to architecture, and how methods of drawing, including perspective and orthographic projection, can influence what is conceived and built. I admire the way in which Evans, unlike many architectural historians, is able to combine deep scholarship with a working practical understanding of how buildings are made, and how they are used in practice. There has been no other recent writer on architecture with so subtle a mind.

David Hockney believes, rightly in my opinion, that European artists since the Renaissance have used optical aids - mirrors of different types, the camera obscura, the camera lucida - much more often than conventional art history has allowed. I like and admire this book for the wonderful choice of illustrations, and the deep knowledge and understanding of painting methods that Hockney betrays, with wit and elegance, in the text. His arguments are highly subversive and involve a complete re-thinking of the role of optics in Western art, before photography. I don't go along with all of Hockney's theories. But he has overturned the subject, and has got art historians thinking again.

In the late 1990s, when I was writing a short history of the Phaidon Press–a pioneer imprint of art books both affordable and beautiful—I used to visit Gombrich at his home in north London. His own career as art historian was entwined with Phaidon’s fortunes. I asked him if it were true that he used to get an adolescent to read his texts to check for clarity of expression.

The legend was exaggerated, of course. But Gombrich’s prose still strikes me as admirably free of academic obfuscation, and this book is filled with lucid discussion of what is happening, perceptually and psychologically, when artists invite viewers into their ‘worlds’.

This book's investment in objects of art and the everyday deepened my relationship with the most mundane aspects of my daily life. I began to see the world around me as a lens for self-knowledge.

The book's intimate reflections ignited in me a day-to-day creativity that has transformed the would-be-ordinary into the beautiful. Here the material world is a gateway to our humanity. I read this book for the first time over twenty years ago and it has stayed present and relevant for me ever since.

I really enjoyed this story even though it isn’t exactly the kind of mystery I normally choose. At the center is a rather eerie vein of darkness, but the beautiful winter scenes of Minnesota, neighbors who care about one another, and a budding romance, tend to lessen the impact. It’s rather a heartwarming story with a ghoulish murder mystery attached.

A woman returns to her hometown to open a bed-and-breakfast in the old mansion that has been in her family for generations. One wing of the house is blocked off and she wants to open it up for her personal living quarters. Cue scary noises and sudden chilly drafts.

This story is also set by Lake Superior in winter, and you get an authentic taste of Northern Minnesota Nice, but inside, the house has a sinister presence that needs Tess to know what happened fifty years ago.

After the literature of Paris, the painting of Paris. T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life studies the ways in which the artists he calls “painters of modern life” created canvases that attempted to focus attention on a subsequent transformation of Paris, in the nineteenth century. Clark considers the depictions by painters such as Manet, Degas, and Seurat of Paris as it evolved and of Parisians interacting with their changing city. The depictions of Parisians experiencing the boulevards, cafés, and parks of Paris that Clark analyzes are perhaps the greatest tradition ever of city painting. No one has ever attempted such a study of the many paintings of Paris as it was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When they do so, Clark’s book can provide a model.

This is a truly remarkable work. I was expecting a straightforward book of art but discovered a wonderful portrait of Syria in the 20th century. It is an original, creative, and deeply contextualized lens into the modern political history of Greater Syria. It successfully brings natural Syria, Bilad al Sham, into our frame of reference through the work of three main artists: Khalil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al Moudarres. In its early chapters, it skillfully describes and analyses Syria’s interface with the late Ottoman period. The Interwar Mandate period is particularly well researched and articulated in drawing Syrian plastic arts into view, as France and other European diplomats, philosophers, and anthropologists’ influenced individual Syrian poets, and philosophers either during their sojourns in Europe or at home in Syria. Beautiful Agitation is an enchanting read, scholarly and lively, making sense for the first time of important Syrian artists’… show more.

Color is visual and this book shows you through images how colors interact with each other and what constitutes good color combinations.

She sets the foundation for rules and color strategies, but she moves on to incorporate various color wheels and finished paintings using those selected colors. I love how she categorizes various color wheels from traditional to bold, opaque earth, old masters, and modern palettes.

She also shows paintings using various color combinations from triads to analogous color combinations and all the other possible combos.

I love this book because it is educational and visually beautiful.

Jean’s book has a novel format for teaching that I love.

She does begin with an introduction to acrylics but then she breaks down various components with examples and then a featured artist to explore that technique. She shows how collage, texture, drawing, and different styles can turn out so different using the same materials.

Jean is a brilliant figurative mixed media artist and she abstracts the figure in a way that invites even nonobjective painters to want to try a new subject manner. She has some fun composition ideas and even a roadmap of when to add other materials.

A visually beautiful book that will inspire your work no matter what your genre.