Seeing Like an Artist

July 11, 2022
Sculptor Perry covers “how certain paintings and sculpture were made” in his conversational debut, a convincing “plea to look closely.” Across 16 essays, Perry combines memoir and art criticism, recalling in “A Grand Tour” a 1979 trip to the Louvre and seeing work by Camille Corot (who “make you proud to be a human after all”) and Paolo Veronese (who painted “Shakespearean” characters). “Summoning Francis” covers the early inspiration he found in Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, while “Reading Paintings” is a masterclass in technical components including color, shape, and what Perry calls velocity, or the speed with which the viewer is “asked to read through the fictional space of the picture,” in works such as Picasso’s Man with a Guitar. The book includes very few reproductions of the artworks discussed, relying instead on Perry’s own sketches, which don’t all scratch the itch. Still, Perry has an expansive knowledge of European artists, comparing well-known ones with more obscure figures, and his guidance is well delivered: “I’ll try to evoke what I’ve come to love not because I believe it’s what you should love, but, rather, because I hope my enthusiasm might inspire you to find what you love.” Budding art aficionados, take note.

August 1, 2022
A push for casual museumgoers to explore a deeper engagement with the art they experience. With an unabashed focus on the Renaissance, Perry's collection of short essays encourages readers to look beyond a painting's depiction for what makes a masterpiece. He meticulously reveals the interplay of light, color, and spatial planes hidden beneath a wealth of important paintings, and he steers viewers toward contemplating "how an artist thought as he painted." Exemplifying the importance of seeing and interpretation, Perry, himself an accomplished artist, illustrates the book with his own sketches in lieu of traditional reproductions. "That's what a good painting enables us to do," he writes. "We can become not passive recipients, but instead participants." The author is best when he lectures like a professor, effortlessly floating between scholarly citations and visual references. The more personal moments are less interesting. Perry relentlessly touts the importance of seeing art in situ and frequently recounts his extensive travels throughout Europe. Now in his 70s, he occasionally shows his weariness with the younger generation. In one essay, he recalls a "very sour student" who pointed out that a "Grand Tour" of Europe is cost-prohibitive for most people today. "It was never a matter of money," he later insists, believing that "a bit of [Gustave] Courbet's passion for life" was all a true art lover (like him) needed to get out there. Later, an aside about "the way kids devour the latest movie in the Marvel multiverse" feels unnecessary. Ultimately, Perry's lessons are revelatory, but his insistence that viewers "use [their] eyes first" is too dismissive, particularly to those who might find enrichment in a book like this one. When we read how, in order to truly understand frescoes "one really has to be there to have a non-verbal and purely spatial experience," it's a perplexing sentiment to process, particularly in a book that's so passionately verbose and full of such well-researched, meandering tangents. Thoughtful investigations in art history for an unintentionally narrow audience.

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