16 reference books that shaped art history.. and shaped my career

Svetlana Alpers

Art of Describing, 1984

In this account of the history of art as it was written in the C20th, 16 essays were written by leading art critics and curators, looking at the impact of each pivotal art book. Each essay in The Books that Shaped Art History by editors Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (2013) mapped the intellectual development of its author, set­ting out the premise of the work and placing it within the broader disciplinary field. Each chapter analysed a single major book, setting out its prem­ises, discussing its position within the field of art history, and looking at its significance in the context both of its original reception and its legacy.

This book provides a great roadmap of the field by reading art history and reassessing the impact of some of the most important works of art history. An excel­lent introduction by the co-editors specifically explored how art history was shaped by the outstanding contribut­ions, as well as by the dialogues and ruptures between them. 

Kenneth Clark

The Nude, 1976

The contributors to this book had a brief to tell of the personalities and stories that lay behind the special texts of modern art history. Such an approach of course ran contrary to the current of much academic art writing in the C20th, which regarded personalities and stories as the province of chatty amat­eurs. As a result these biographically informed essays achieved insights that would be lost if these great books were read as if they were self-contained artworks.

If I had selected the seminal art books myself, I would certainly have chosen Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement; Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion; Cl­em­ent Greenberg's Art and Culture; Erwin Panofsky’s Early Neth­erl­and­ish Painting; and TJ Clark's Image of the People: Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. And Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the C17th.

But I must admit to never reading the essays on art genres that I did not like or didn’t know about. Rosalind Krauss’ The Origin­al­ity of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, for example, brought struct­ur­alist and post-structuralist thinking into art history.

Irwin Panofsky,

Early Netherlandish Painting, 1971

Many of these art historians turned out to be popular with scholars and lecturers for decades, which meant that they had ample opportunity to update their texts to suit the changing times. In the first edition of Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), he couldn’t wait to welcome the new cold age of steel and glass, which he hoped would do away with the warm muddle of individual creativity. What he wanted was an impersonal architecture serving the greater social and political good.  Lately arrived from the chaotic Weimar Repub­lic, Pevsner's longing for the blank slate of perfect order made psychological sense back then. But, as the 1930s reached their ter­r­ible end, his certainty about absolutism started to fade. By the time Pioneers of the Modern Movement was re­published in 1949, he had toned down his architectural views, becoming one of the C20th's most honoured of English art historians.

Roger Fry's Cézanne was first published in 1926 in a French magaz­ine with virtually no illustrations, and all Fry received in return were some free copies. Even when his friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf came to the rescue a year later and did an English version for their Hogarth Press, Cézanne: A Study of His Development, it still left a lot to be desired. Fry did not locate Cézanne historically on the change from the naturalistic C19th to the conceptual C20th. What really made Fry's heart pound were the geometric shapes making up Cézanne's serene, stable art. By carefully scrutinising the interrelations of form and colour, Fry set down the principles of a proto‑formalism that would become the dominant way of writing art criticism for decades.

Regarding Kenneth Clark, we know that he wrote the first draft of The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956) when he was chairing the Independent Television Authority, the body charged with ushering in commercial television. Clark was already embarked on his journey from public servant to public intellectual, from the relative anon­ym­ity of the National Gallery to the global exposure of his tv series Civilisat­ion. While there was no doubting the fine scholarship underpin­ning The Nude, this was a book seeking a mass audience.

Katherine Hughes noticed the connections that bound the writ­ers of this core library together. Pevsner studied under Hein­rich Wölfflin, whose  Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art is included here. Clark was a friend of Fry, and wrote early drafts of The Nude at Bernard Berenson's idyllic Florentine Villa I Tatti (Harvard Centre for Italian Renais­s­ance Studies). Krauss started off as a follower of Greenberg.

Sometimes the essayists agreed, sometimes they argued and often they simply ignored one another. As a result, the overlaps between these 16 foundational texts were often messy and contested. So even though The Books that Shaped Art History questioned the very status of art history itself, any contested quality in the essays I missed would have gone straight over my head.

Heinrich Wölfflin

Principles of Art History, 1929

How appropriate that this book was initiated by Burlington Magazine, one of my two favourite art journals. A monthly publication that has covered the fine and decorative arts since 1903, this journal was the work of art historians and connoisseurs that included Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson.