Learning to See: Art History

Berger takes apart oil painting, advertising and the female nude in a hundred and sixty pages. The book that most often changes how people look at pictures.

The most-read art history book ever written, and the spine of this pathway. Gombrich's line is that there is no such thing as Art, only artists. Read it once, then use it as a reference.

The 1971 essay that refused the question as posed and asked instead what institutions produce greatness. Read it third, so it lands on the canon you have just been handed.

Robins explains why Egyptian figures are drawn the way they are: not a failure of perspective but a system for showing what is permanently true about a body rather than what an eye happens to see.

Beard on the building, the sculptures, the arguments about where they belong and what the temple actually meant to the people who paid for it. Short and pointed.

The director of the British Museum tells world history through a hundred things, which is the best available demonstration that objects carry arguments.

Mitter covers five thousand years, from the Indus seals through Buddhist and Hindu sculpture to the Mughal court and the twentieth century, in one volume of the Oxford History of Art.

The standard single-volume survey, strongest on painting and on why calligraphy sits at the top of the Chinese hierarchy of the arts rather than the bottom.

The British Museum volume on the work Hokusai made after seventy, when he thought he was only beginning. Corrects the impression that he painted one wave.

The accessible one-volume survey, covering ceramics, textiles, metalwork, calligraphy and architecture across a thousand years and three continents.

Irwin on one building: how it was made, how it was used, and how much of what visitors admire is nineteenth-century romantic invention.

The arts of the book: miniatures, manuscripts, and a tradition of figurative painting that flourished for centuries inside a culture usually described as forbidding images.

Baxandall's period eye: fifteenth-century viewers read paintings using skills from gauging barrels, dancing and preaching. The most useful book in this pathway for learning to see historically.

The book that invented art history and the idea of the artist as genius, written by someone who knew several of his subjects. Unreliable, essential, and very good company.

Garrard reads Artemisia as an artist with a position rather than as a biography with paintings attached, which is the harder and better argument.

The life, the street fights, the killing, and the paintings that put ordinary bodies into sacred scenes and lit them like a crime.

Brook uses seven Vermeer paintings as doorways into the seventeenth-century world system: the beaver hat leads to Canada, the porcelain to China, the silver to Peru.

The Salon, the rejections, Meissonier at the top and Manet at the bottom, and how the ranking reversed itself within a generation.

Hughes on modern art from the Eiffel Tower onward, written with more force and less reverence than anyone else has managed. Opinionated and worth arguing with.

A painter explaining, in 1911, why he was about to stop painting things. Read it as evidence rather than as theory: this is what it felt like from inside.

The biography that brought Kahlo back into view. Herrera is good on the paintings as well as the life, which is rarer than it should be.

The standard history: the technology, the people, and the arguments about whether the thing was art, told across nearly two centuries.

Sontag on what taking a picture of something does to your relation to it. Combative, quotable, and still the essay collection people argue with.

Written after his mother died and organised around a photograph of her he will not show you. The studium and the punctum: what a picture means, and what pierces you in it.

Hessel rewrites Gombrich's survey with the women in it, from Renaissance nuns to the present. Read it against The Story of Art rather than instead of it.

A sociologist embeds in an auction, a crit, a fair, a prize and a magazine. The best account of how contemporary value is actually manufactured.

Stallabrass on why contemporary art looks the way it does, and on the relationship between the work, the market and the state that produced it.