Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others

by Lincoln Perry

Overview

“Beguiling and informative”—Wall Street Journal

Learn to see art as an artist does. Discover how a painting’s composition or a sculpture’s spatial structure influence the experience of what you’re seeing. With an artist as your guide, viewing art becomes a powerfully enriching experience that will stay in your mind long after you’ve left a museum.

A visit to view art can be overwhelming, exhausting, and unrewarding. Lincoln Perry wants to change that. In fifteen essays—each framed around a specific theme—he provides new ways of seeing and appreciating art.

Drawing heavily on examples from the European traditions of art, Perry aims to overturn assumptions and asks readers to re-think artistic prejudices while rebuilding new preferences. Included are essays on how artists “read” paintings, how scale and format influence viewers, how to engage with sculptures and murals, as well as guides to some of the great museums and churches of Europe.

Seeing Like an Artist is for any artist, art-lover, or museumgoer who wants to grow their appreciation for the art of others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567926996
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	668,080
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Lincoln Perry’s distinctive landscapes, figurative paintings, and sculptures have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions across the country. His large-scale murals can be found in landmark buildings such as the Met Life building in St. Louis and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The Universityof Virginia Press published the monograph, Lincoln Perry's Charlottesville, which included an essay and interview by his wife, Ann Beattie. A frequent contributor to American Scholar, Mr. Perry divides his time between Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

Table of Contents

An Artist Goes into a Museum

An Introduction 3

Summoning Francis

A Memoir of Sorts About Being Inspired 12

A Grand Tour

How a Trip to Europe Can Change Everything 26

An Epiphany in Munich

Rethinking Old Assumptions 40

Gleaning the Patrimony

A Side Trip to an Alternate Tradition 50

Past as Present

Art, as Fresh as the Day It Was Done 58

Big Tom and Little Tom

Masaccio and Masolino, Realism and Fantasy 72

Reading Paintings

Clarifying Pictorial Space 84

Format and Fate

How You Frame the Issue 102

Human Scale

Big Fish in a Little Pond, and Vice Versa 115

Busted, or Very Like a Whale

The Poetics of Damage 125

Only Connect

On Seeing Sculpture and the Urge to Touch It 138

Making as Metaphor

The Sculpture of Hildebrand and Rodin, Charkow, and Neri 152

Sex and Subtext

I Hate to Say What It Looks Like, But… 168

Multiplicity

Can One Image Always Tell the Whole Story? 181

You Had to Be There

The Necessity (and Joy) of Travel 194

Illustrations 213

Acknowledgements 219

Editorial Reviews

07/11/2022

Sculptor Perry covers “how certain paintings and sculpture were made” in his conversational debut, a convincing “plea to look closely.” Across 16 essays, Perry combines memoir and art criticism, recalling in “A Grand Tour” a 1979 trip to the Louvre and seeing work by Camille Corot (who “make you proud to be a human after all”) and Paolo Veronese (who painted “Shakespearean” characters). “Summoning Francis” covers the early inspiration he found in Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, while “Reading Paintings” is a masterclass in technical components including color, shape, and what Perry calls velocity, or the speed with which the viewer is “asked to read through the fictional space of the picture,” in works such as Picasso’s Man with a Guitar. The book includes very few reproductions of the artworks discussed, relying instead on Perry’s own sketches, which don’t all scratch the itch. Still, Perry has an expansive knowledge of European artists, comparing well-known ones with more obscure figures, and his guidance is well delivered: “I’ll try to evoke what I’ve come to love not because I believe it’s what you should love, but, rather, because I hope my enthusiasm might inspire you to find what you love.” Budding art aficionados, take note. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Seeing Like an Artist

“Go, look, love! A painter’s memoir of traveling to see great paintings with his own eyes becomes a passionate argument for the value of personal encounters with art....Beguiling and informative...Mr. Perry advises each of his readers to ‘create your own Grand Tour’ of the kingdom of art....this guidebook is obligatory.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Perry covers ‘how certain paintings and sculpture were made’ in his conversational debut, a convincing ‘plea to look closely.’ Across 16 essays, Perry combines memoir and art criticism...‘Reading Paintings’ is a masterclass in technical components including color, shape, and what Perry calls velocity, or the speed with which the viewer is ‘asked to read through the fictional space of the picture’....His guidance is well delivered: ‘I’ll try to evoke what I’ve come to love not because I believe it’s what you should love, but, rather, because I hope my enthusiasm might inspire you to find what you love.’ Budding art aficionados, take note.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Meticulously reveals the interplay of light, color, and spatial planes hidden beneath a wealth of important paintings. Perry’s lessons are revelatory.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A dazzling tour . . . In easy-going language, Perry discusses just about every consideration that goes into completing a work of art . . . Read it before your next visit to a museum.”
—Maine Sunday Telegram

“Lincoln Perry has written an irresistibly readable, companionable, and quotable artist’s memoir in this Grand Tour of commentary on museums (primarily European) and artists as varied as Rodin, Picasso, Corot, Bruegal, Veronese (the ‘group figure narrative’), Bernini, Courbet, R.B. Kitaj, Masaccio and Masolino, Rubens, Pollock, and Rothko. There is no substitute for seeing art ‘in situ,’ as Perry tells us, but accompanying this ideal observer, a practicing artist with the sharp, sympathetic eye of a fellow craftsman, is an exhilarating experience.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Babysitter

“So much writing about art seems like useless noise—abstract, pretentious, gassy. This is not that. Lincoln Perry takes us on a journey, showing us what he sees and how he sees, and it’s wonderful. There is revelation on every page.”
—James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History

“Lincoln Perry writes so clearly and sees everything in a state of wonder. His visual experience embraces ancient Greece, the Renaissance, African and Asian art, Modernism. He finds the abstractionist in Michelangelo and the storyteller in Picasso. No one knows how to cite quotations better than he. He has looked into museums all over the world and literally lived in a camper next to the Louvre. He is a wonderful companion on the page and an unintimidating expert: this book will open your eyes.”
—Edmund White, author of A Previous Life

From the Publisher

2022-07-13
A push for casual museumgoers to explore a deeper engagement with the art they experience.

With an unabashed focus on the Renaissance, Perry’s collection of short essays encourages readers to look beyond a painting’s depiction for what makes a masterpiece. He meticulously reveals the interplay of light, color, and spatial planes hidden beneath a wealth of important paintings, and he steers viewers toward contemplating “how an artist thought as he painted.” Exemplifying the importance of seeing and interpretation, Perry, himself an accomplished artist, illustrates the book with his own sketches in lieu of traditional reproductions. “That’s what a good painting enables us to do,” he writes. “We can become not passive recipients, but instead participants.” The author is best when he lectures like a professor, effortlessly floating between scholarly citations and visual references. The more personal moments are less interesting. Perry relentlessly touts the importance of seeing art in situ and frequently recounts his extensive travels throughout Europe. Now in his 70s, he occasionally shows his weariness with the younger generation. In one essay, he recalls a “very sour student” who pointed out that a “Grand Tour” of Europe is cost-prohibitive for most people today. “It was never a matter of money,” he later insists, believing that “a bit of [Gustave] Courbet’s passion for life” was all a true art lover (like him) needed to get out there. Later, an aside about “the way kids devour the latest movie in the Marvel multiverse” feels unnecessary. Ultimately, Perry’s lessons are revelatory, but his insistence that viewers “use [their] eyes first” is too dismissive, particularly to those who might find enrichment in a book like this one. When we read how, in order to truly understand frescoes “one really has to be there to have a non-verbal and purely spatial experience,” it’s a perplexing sentiment to process, particularly in a book that’s so passionately verbose and full of such well-researched, meandering tangents.

Thoughtful investigations in art history for an unintentionally narrow audience.

Kirkus Reviews

Lincoln Perry writes so clearly and sees everything in a state of wonder. He is a wonderful companion on the page and an unintimidating expert: this book will open your eyes.”

author of A Previous Life Edmund White

Irresistibly readable, companionable, and quotable.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates

So much writing about art seems like useless noise—abstract, pretentious, gassy. This is not that. There is revelation on every page.”

Pulitzer Prize finalist James Gleick