Book review: "What Are You Looking At? The Surprising, Shocking and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art" by Will Gompertz

I don't know how I got SO lucky that I read two books that almost back to back that I really really enjoyed. I'd give it an incredibly enthusiastic 4.5 stars. 

So the author of this book was the curator of the Tate in London, if there is someone who can try to make sense of modern art it's him. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting, with it's seemingly random drips and swirls and think "This is so dumb, my 5 year old could do this". (First of all, it's not dumb, second of all no they couldn't and no they haven't so stop saying things like that) Then this might be the book for you. One of the most amazing things about this book is that the inside of the covers contains a map, and it looks like a London Tube map but instead of finding Piccadilly Circus and Islington, you find Pollack and Monet and Damien Hirst and how they all fit together and who leads to who. I love it. I want it blown up and on my wall.

There's so much information in this book that I don't even know how I'm going to condense it, but whatever that's the job so here's my effort :)

• Many impressionists, specifically Manet and Monet, were influenced by Japanese wood block prints. Japan was just coming out of it's self isolation and this was some of the first art anyone in the world people saw coming out of Japan. You miiiiiiight know this one. Mostly the influence was in perspective.

• I really thought the couple of pages on Degas were super interesting. He was the most non-Impressionist Impressionist of the bunch. He didn't like painting en plein air, he was meticulous about his prep work and sketching, he cared more about his subject's movements then the lighting. You may know Degas from things like ...
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• Seurat was El Capitan of color theory and pointillism. Though Da Vinci did it first because #GOAT.  Pointilisim means that you use dots not strokes and the dots don't touch. You may know Seurat from such things like...

Here's a quote that I liked: "The truth is that abstract art is a bit of a mystery; one that plays havoc with out rational brains if we believe paintings and sculptures need to tell a story. It is a complex idea that is typically expressed in a simple way....subsequent generations of artists eliminated yet more visual information in an attempt to capture atmospheric light (Impressionism), accentuate the emotive qualities of color (Fauvism), or look at a subject from multiple viewpoints (Cubism). "

Here's another quote I like, it's in reference to museum curators describing art in a kinda pompous and incomprehensible way sometime because  they are trying to cater to a broad constituency. "It's a fact of life: rock stars trash hotels, sportsmen and women get injured, art folks talk bollocks". 

Rene Margritte is one of my favorite painters, and when I explain him to people I'm like "I like his stuff because if you glance at it everything looks fine but then you look closer and things are not fine". The author says "(he) inhabits a world of the everyday and the mundane where the ordinary is extraordinary-in a very bad way... he was the prince of paranoia, the doyen of dread". There are so many great examples of this, but this is the picture that they highlight in the book. Take a long, long look at it the worse it gets.

 

There's a discussion of a painting by an artist I'd never heard of before. The artist's name is Marcus Harvey and the painting is called Myra. It's a portrait of a British woman who killed some children and instead of brushstrokes the painting is made of palm prints....of children. The actual face I made when I read that. 🤯

Anyway, I loved this book, I was massively entertained, I learned so much.