Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts

Joshua C. Taylor

Jun 1981 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

Sometimes seeing is more difficult for the student of art than believing. Taylor, in a book that has sold more than 300,000 copies since its original publication in 1957, has helped two generations of art students "learn to look."

This handy guide to the visual arts is designed to provide a comprehensive view of art, moving from the analytic study of specific works to a consideration of broad principles and technical matters. Forty-four carefully selected illustrations afford an excellent sampling of the wide range of experience awaiting the explorer.

The second edition of Learning to Look includes a new chapter on twentieth-century art. Taylor's thoughtful discussion of pure forms and our responses to them gives the reader a few useful starting points for looking at art that does not reproduce nature and for understanding the distance between contemporary figurative art and reality.

About the author

Joshua C. Taylor (1917-1981) was a professor of art history at the University of Chicago from 1960 to 1974 and was named the William Rainey Harper chair of art history in 1963. He was director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution from 1970 to 1981. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1956 with a dissertation on the 19th-century American artist William Page. His best known book is Learning to Look: a Handbook for the Visual Arts, which has become a standard text for art history, humanities, and museum courses. Among other books, he was also the author of The Fine Arts in America, the editor of Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art and a co-editor of Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics.