Learning to Look

A Handbook for the Visual Arts

Taylor Joshua C.

Sometimes seeing is more difficult for the student of art than believing. Taylor, in a book that has sold more than 300,000 copies since its original publication in 1957, has helped two generations of art students "learn to look".

This handy guide to the visual arts is designed to provide a comprehensive view of art, moving from the analytic study of specific works to a consideration of broad principles and technical matters. Forty-four carefully selected illustrations afford an excellent sampling of the wide range of experience awaiting the explorer.

The second edition of "Learning to Look" includes a new chapter on twentieth-century art. Taylor's thoughtful discussion of pure forms and our responses to them gives the reader a few useful starting points for looking at art that does not reproduce nature and for understanding the distance between contemporary figurative art and reality.

Contents:

Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Illustrations
List of Illustrations
Illustrations
An Approach to the Visual Arts
1. An Analysis of the Work of Art
2. Color and Perspective
Color Terminology
Perspective and the Experience of Depth in Painting
3. Some Distinctive Characteristics within the Visual Arts
Drawing and Painting
Graphic Arts
Sculpture
Architecture
4. Some Materials and Techniques of the Artist
Drawing
Painting
Graphic Arts
Sculpture
Architecture
5. The Artist and the Work of Art
6. The Eye and the Mind
Chronological Table
A. Chronological Table Pertaining to the Visual Arts, Literature, and Music
Index

About the Author

Joshua C. Taylor (1917-1981) was a professor of art history at the University of Chicago from 1960 to 1974 and was named the William Rainey Harper chair of art history in 1963. He was director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution from 1970 to 1981. He received a Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1956 with a dissertation on the 19th-century American artist William Page. His best known book is "Learning to Look: a Handbook for the Visual Arts", which has become a standard text for art history, humanities, and museum courses. Among other books, he was also the author of "The Fine Arts in America", the editor of "Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art" and a co-editor of "Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics".

Back to the list of books