How to Read a Modern Painting: Lessons from the Modern Masters

by Jon Thompson

Modern art, filled with complex themes and subtle characteristics, is a wonder to view, but can be intimidating for the casual observer to comprehend. In this accessible, practical guide, author and instructor Jon Thompson explores more than 200 works, helping readers to unlock each painting’s meaning.

Beginning with the Barbizon school and the Realist movement of the mid-19th century and continuing through the 1980s avant-garde, artists including Bonnard, Basquiat, Van Gogh, Picasso, Degas, Warhol, and Whistler are featured. Thompson describes each artist’s use of media and symbolism and provides insightful biographical information. A natural companion to Abrams’ How to Read a Painting , this book is a vibrant, informative trip through one of art history’s most compelling periods.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History

416 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

Reviews

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 3 out of 5]

 
Two Books on Modern Art

"How to Read a Modern Painting." Is it fair to blame a book for not living up to its title? Probably not. But it was the title that got me to take it down from my shelves, where it had been languishing for a decade. And it was the title that has set me off on a little quest to find books that really do what this one implies—provide a set of principles that can be applied, selectively of course, to any painting of the past century and a half. A tough order, sure, but the title twinkling from behind the sofa proved too much of a teaser to resist.



The snapshot above will give an indication of what the book does, and does well. It features 178 paintings, from Courbet to Warhol, mostly with a double-page spread each. We get the artist, title, date, and basic information about the picture [1]. We get a full-width reproduction of the picture itself [2]. If the artist has not been featured before (though Picasso has), we would get a one-paragraph bio [3]. There is always a substantial paragraph describing the picture [4]; I will quote from this one later. There are often several thumbnails showing related works [5], details [6], or source materials [7]. And there is usually a separate paragraph placing the work in wider context [8]. All in all, a very comprehensive presentation, raising the total of reproductions in the book (both large and thumbnails) to over five hundred.

It is to the contextual paragraphs [8] that I would look to fulfill the implications of the title, to move beyond commentary on individual paintings, however wise, to link a series of works together in terms of a common way of seeing. Perhaps this one is a bad example, for the author makes the point that this picture, Les demoiselles d'Avignon, is a new beginning that "seems even to have taken Picasso by surprise." And, "Just as it has no real historical precedent, it is not an obvious precursor of Cubism either. In many respects, it stands quite alone." Fair enough. But few of the other commentaries create horizontal linkages either. The first clearly Cubist example discussed, Picasso's Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, has only a footnote on "divisionism," a term relating to the brushwork that is rendered virtually useless by having different meanings when applied to Pointillists, Symbolists, Orphists, and Fauves—a blizzard of cross-references that can only confuse, rather than elucidate.



Every now and then, however, those little thumbnails do make some surprise connections. As here, between Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy (1897) and Juan Gris' Guitar and Fruit Dish (1921). Read the text, though, and you will see that while Thompson points out something striking about the so-called "naive" painter, his comparison to Synthetic Cubism (a term he has not yet introduced) goes in entirely the wrong direction. There is no such thing as a "reminiscence" looking forward, no direct link, no causality; it is merely an amusing visual rhyme.

But the really surprising thing about the painting is the way in which the figure of the gypsy is tilted forwards as though seen from above, in shallow relief. This device connects her pictorially with the 'flattened' vase and mandolin. There is something highly reminiscent of a Synthetic Cubist still life about this spatial invention, over twenty years before Juan Gris painted his Guitar and Fruit Dish (1921).

Well, if the notes on individual pictures are not going to connect them up, you can at least group them in a meaningful order, like the thematic arrangement of individual rooms in a large gallery. But no. The pictures included in this book are in strict chronological order. So between the two Picassos, we get Winslow Homer, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and Henri Matisse—seven painters in all, showing almost as many different styles (there is some similarity between Kirchner and Marc). The tyranny of the calendar! It tells you nothing about "how to read a painting," though it may open your eyes to these particular ones. And whether it does depends upon the quality of the reproductions, which are mostly good, together with the relevance of the individual commentaries and the logic of the selection. Let's look at these:

The image is simple. Five naked women disport themselves in various poses with a bowl of fruit in the foreground. The manner of realization is far from simple and is surprising, even today. Staccato, zigzag and arching lines make for a wild rhythm that takes over the whole picture surface. All traces of perspective have been eradicated. Flaring white brushstrokes shatter the tonal coherence of the painting. The art-historical discussion of sources and influences has been largely short-circuited by the idea of an unholy marriage between Cézanne and African art, even though the most cursory glance reveals nothing of Cézanne and only the occasional detail that might be said to be African in feel. The truth is—and it is evident throughout the painting—that there are many conflicting points of reference for the painting. Picasso was trying to recover the primordial life force through painting, and he looked to many so-called 'primitive' sources for his inspiration: Assyrian stone reliefs; funerary carvings from the early Athenian period; Boeotian bronzes and Cycladic figurines as well as African tribal sculpture, masks, and fetish figures.

Thompson's style ranges from the verve of "Staccato, zigzag and arching lines make for a wild rhythm that takes over the whole picture surface" to the gauche repetitions of the word "painting." But his information is potentially valuable; it would be more so if he backed up his dismissal of Cézanne by reference to some other page in his book, or if most of his readers had any idea of the "primitive sources" he lists at the end. He would be good at sparking discussion with graduate students, but as an introductory exposure to the basics promised in the title, his notes miss the mark.

Looking through the volume again, I remember now why I bought it: because it has a large number of examples by modernist artists beyond the artistic axis along which the history of modern art is normally traced: from France and the Mediterranean countries, briefly through Britain, and on to a full flowering in postwar America. We have already noted Thompson's interest in German artists, and to be fair, most of the major figures in 20th-century European art are featured somewhere, no matter where they come from. But the book also contains examples by such artists as: Auerbach, Baselitz, Basquiat, Broodthaers, Casorati, Caulfield, Clemente, Daniëls, Fabro, Goiden, Kiefer, Kippenberger, Kirkeby, and Kossoff—and that's only the first half of the alphabet. Fine; I learned something from seeing their works. But as for building a sense of large currents of ideas, this coverage only broke the tides into meaningless little eddies.

======

There are, of course, many books dealing with 20th-century art. An older one, but still stimulating, is The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1991), an expansion of his BBC-tv series of the same name. Out of curiosity, I looked up the passage, near the end of his first chapter, where he discusses the Picasso Demoiselles. He would agree with Thompson that it is a new beginning, but he places it firmly in a long tradition (and yes, he includes Cézanne):

With its hacked countours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing paining after three quarters of a century, a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. None signalled a faster change in the history of art. Yet it was anchored in tradition, and its attack on the eye would never have been so startling if its format had not been that of the classical nude; the three figures at the left are a distant but unmistakable echo of the favourite image of the late Renaissance, the Three Graces. Picasso began it in the year Cézanne died, 1906, and its nearest ancestor seems to have been Cézanne's monumental composition of bathers displaying their blockish, angular bodies beneath arching trees. [See detail below]

Hughes goes on to discuss the color and the paint handling, and moves on to the subject itself: "They were, as every art student know, whores. Picasso did not name the painting himself, and he never liked its final title. He wanted to call it The Avignon Brothel, after a whorehouse on the Carrer d'Avinyo in Barcelona he had visited in his student days." Hughes identifies the subject as the moment when the prostitutes display themselves for the client to choose. But he continues with an extraordinary passage that Jon Thompson would never even attempt:

By leaving out the client, Picasso turns viewer into voyeur; the stares of the five girls are concentrated on whoever is looking at the painting. And by putting the viewer in the client’s sofa, Picasso transmits, with overwhelming force, the sexual anxiety which is the real subject of Les Demoiselles. The gaze of the women is interrogatory, or indifferent, or as remote as stone (the three faces on the left were, in fact, derived from archaic Iberian stone heads that Picasso had seen in the Louvre). Nothing about their expressions could be construed as welcoming, let alone coquettish. They are more like judges than houris. And so Les Demoiselles announces one of the recurrent subthemes of Picasso’s art: a fear, amounting to holy terror, of women. This fear was the psychic reality behind the image of Picasso the walking scrotum, the inexhaustible old stud of the Côte d’Azur, that was so devoutly cultivated by the press and his court from 1945 on. No painter ever put his anxiety about impotence and castration more plainly than Picasso did in Les Demoiselles, or projected it through a more violent dislocation of form. Even the melon, that sweet and pulpy fruit, looks like a weapon.

With writing like this, who would not start to read pictures differently? Hughes realized that "a generalized and speckly tour d'horizon" was useless for television, and instead opted for eight essays, each taking a specific theme and pursuing it across a wide historical front. A few years earlier, the BBC made a series called Connections, in which historian James Burke tied scientific discoveries together in extraordinary ways, often spanning centuries. Though more narrowly focused, Hughes makes similar connections, not only between artworks, but between art and the history and culture within which we ourselves, our parents, and perhaps our grandparents have lived. And he did it on a popular level, without ever talking down.

======

A book that would really fit the title "How to Read a Painting" would do more than merely comment on a bunch of artworks; that is like translating a number of passages in a foreign language, but not providing a grammar. But such a grammar for modern art would be hard, I'll admit. It would say something about subject, loss of subject, return of subject, subject as idea rather than representation. It would address the dialectic between paint per se and what that paint represents. It would look at the expansion of media beyond the canvas. It would address matters of purpose, the role of the artist, and the relationship of art to the everyday world. So far, I have not found a book that does this for the modern period. But I have found an intriguing newly-reissued handbook that does it for earlier art, Looking at Pictures by Susan Woodford. And, quite new, a gorgeous volume called Modern Art in Detail by Susie Hodges, that I thought might be more satisfactory, but I was disappointed. Click the titles for my reviews.

[Simon Yoong · Rating 4 out of 5]

good book but it just. goes. right. into. it.

some introduction would have been great.

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some years ago I read Patrick De Rynck's _How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters_. I found the volume informative on the techniques, symbols, tropes, genres, and so on used by artists over the centuries. It has a format of two-page spreads, each dominated by a largish reproduction of a single painting and text about the painting and the artist, generally with one or two smaller reproductions of other paintings somehow related to the main painting, or, occasionally, details of the main painting. I came away from it feeling that I was more able to enjoy the old masters' paintings generally.

This volume, subtitled "Lessons from the Modern Masters," unsurprisingly follows the same format. Alas, I did not find it as fascinating.

Part of it is the inchoate nature of modern painting. There are, I think, more movements in a given decade than there were in a century of the Renaissance and prior, each with its manifesto rejecting much of what has gone before and its radical new techniques. Some of these movements I rather like. (Mainly Impressionism and Surrealism, with a fond spot for Dada and Pop art.) Most I don't, even after reading Thompson's volume.

But the burgeoning of movements and techniques makes it hard to tell a coherent story about modern painting, especially when you are limited to a format of two-page spreads (admittedly broken twice in this volume to go into more detail about something particularly important and special in the author's eye).

Thompson often manages to make me more sympathetic to what an artist/movement is trying to accomplish, and some of it is accomplished with consummate skill and, well, artistry.

But some of them give "My three-year-old could draw that" a bad name.

I mean: I can see covering a canvas evenly with black paint to make a point. But having done it once, doing a whole series of them, identical except perhaps for the size, is just gilding a turd. Likewise, whole series of paintings each containing one stripe, against a contrasting or complementary background, down the length or height of the canvas - oh, what design; what artistry; what BS!

Then there is (not named as such in this book but plenty of examples) primitivism, in which millenia of developed technique in figurative drawing are deliberately thrown away in favor of, well, something a three year old or other person uneducated in painting might do. I won't say "could do," as these paintings are clearly designed rather than rapidly thrown together, some of them with great skill and care. But to see someone who is clearly capable of more, doing something less, makes me crazy.

I donno; perhaps that's the reaction they want.

More complex are the works of people like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. They get accused of being frauds, but they aren't; they are pursuing their own muses. I happen to believe that their muses have been taking bad drugs.

But most of the works included I respect without liking. Picasso heads the list; he clearly knows exactly what he's doing and why, and he does it damn well, but it is, to me, cold and affectless (with the odd exception, notably "Guernica"). Then there are the opticalists like Frank Stella, Bridget Riley,and so on: work I even like, but wouldn't want to look at more than twice.

In the end, I'm glad I read this, and will keep it for occasional reference, but I still prefer figuration (not "realism") to abstraction. (Similarly in sculpture; love Rodin, hate things made of girders welded together in some strange Lovecraftian geometry.)

[Harmonyofbooks]

Sanat tarihine bir süredir ilgili bir okur olarak okumayı incelemeyi en çok sevdiğim eserler izlenimcilik akımına kadar sürüyordu. Sonrasında modern sanata geçişle birlikte açıkçası ilgimi biraz kaybetmeye başlıyordum. Son zamanlarda okuduğum İşte Dali ve Manzaralar kitabı sayesinde modern sanata dair ilgim artmaya başlarken bunu daha detaylı bir kitapla taçlandırmak istedim. Yayınevinin sanat alanında çıkardığı kitapları uzun zamandır takip ediyordum ve ilk olarak bu kitabı okuma fırsatı bulabildim. Modern Resim Nasıl Okunur kitabı 1800’lerin ortalarından 1900’lerin sonuna kadar öne çıkan ressamların hayatlarına kısa bir anlatımla değinirken, bu ressamların hem en popüler hem de yine çok beğenilen birkaç eseri üzerinden detaylarını bize ulaştırıyor. Özellikle çok sevdiğim birkaç sanatçıya sadece tek bir kere değil de birçok kez aralarda karşıma çıkıcak şekilde değinilmesini çok beğendim. Kitabın anlatım dili çok basit sayılmazdı. Daha büyük keyif alarak okumak için aralıklarla okumayı tercih ettim. Özellikle soyut eserler üzerinden daha farklı bir bakış açısı edinmemi sağladı. Birçok yeni eserle ve sanatçıyla tanışmama ışık tuttu. Çok beğenerek okudum, kesinlikle harika bir bilgi kaynağıydı. Şu ana kadar okuduğum sanat kitapları arasında en sansürsüz içeriğe sahip kitaptı. Merak edenlere keyifli okumalar dilerim..

[Daniel Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thing about library books is that you have only for a limited amount of time, and having to read something that has no story within that time can become a bit of a chore. I think this books would be better off being a coffee table book or a bedtime book, or some book that you can pick up from time to time and have a light read about one or two (or three) artist without having to worry about remembering the previous ones. But other than that, 'How to Read a Modern Painting' was helpful in enlightening me about various artists over various eras. I wouldn't want to buy a brand new one, but if there was one available in a used bookstore, I think I'd buy it. It's been a longgg time since I've last been in one anyway :P. I'd really like to go there again.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great book for us philistines trying to get a glimpse of maestros and their IT paintings. the book dedicates a short and sweet 2 pages for each painting with a short biography. I still fail to understand Mondrian's plasticism and Duchamp puzzles me a lot but oh the joy of finding hopper and degas (again)!

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the coverage but actually it doesn't tell you much about how to read a modern painting. It shows you some interesting paintings, tells you too much about artists' lives and very little about the paintings really. Disappointing except for the subject.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fabulous review of modern and contemporary art. What it does not do, however, is help instruct the reader how to read a modern painting. I was hoping to receive the magic decoder ring.

Alas.

[ur mom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd personally recommend this book more as a reference when looking at specific artists/art, having read it back to back and finding that it wasn't able to grab my attention for long periods (probably my fault for reading it that way).

Each double page briefly detailed a different modern artist's life, provided a fairly in-depth analysis of one of their paintings, then occasionally explored themes related to the artist. Very rarely, it would have extra pages detailing extra information on an artist or the overall artistic theme (e.g., 'The Translation of Tone into Colour: Pointillism Explained' on page 52), which I really loved and it's a shame there wasn't more of that in the book. So felt like everything else was cut too short to make me interested.

As the book forces itself into chronological order according to the main painting discussed on the double page, artists sometimes appeared more than once, which is nice since it provides depth. However, I feel like it may have worked better for the pages on the same artist to appear consecutively, rather than being spaced apart because, when trying to read back to compare their current art with their art before, it became a little inconvenient and I didn't think it was worth it for the sake of maintaining a chronological structure.

Another problem I had with the format was that it often brought up paintings in writing but did not show pictures of them, which became really tedious and distracting when having to look up each one (eventually, I did give up).

Overall, I think this needed quite a bit more editing and consideration for the readers before being published, but it was still fairly interesting nonetheless, and perhaps if you were to pair it with another book as I did (Isms by Stephen Little), you'll be able to appreciate it a little more.

[Tanya]

There is no reason why a book on "modern masters" should feature almost no artists of color or women. The analysis itself is frequently uninsightful and myopic -- e.g., the white woman pictured in Manet's Olympia is described as "the model," although there are two central figures in the painting (the "black serving-woman" is given half a line of mention). Much of the text focuses on artists' biographies rather than themes or techniques. Layout is unappealing. Meh.

[Debra Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book; I learned so much from reading it and the analyses are a good introduction to seeing the telling details in various paintings.

[KiRsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Nederlandse editie heet: De kunst van het kijken. Het verhaal van de moderne schilderkunst. Mooi boek.

[Görkem Arslan · Rating 3 out of 5]

eser cesidi bol, incelemelerin icerigi cok zayif maalesef.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an invaluable resource for practicing to enter the Museum of Bad Art's guest interpretator challenge ( See http://museumofbadart.org/interpretat... for example. ) or for visiting Columbia's premier bad art venue, Sparky's Ice Cream.

The art selection was good, the interpretations interesting and insightful, but they make me crack up sometimes.

[scherzo♫ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Commentary: jargony bs
Title: misleading
Art: 90% European, rest USA (couple Canadian born who moved to USA)

Exasperating insistence that the critical definitions of artistic labels should somehow control art and artists.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and very well designed

[Joyce]

Particularly strong on 20th century Italian painters.