The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard – review

There is a feeling about this publication of the biter bit, or rather, the observer observed. It consists of 16 essays by leading art historians about the most significant books about art published in the 20th century. The illustrations at the start of each section, rather than being of paintings and sculpture, are of scholars — as one might expect, a diffident-looking, bespectacled crew who look as if they spent more time in the archives than the gym.

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject is likely to have at least a few of the books discussed here: E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960) for example, or Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). These are works that have affected the way we look at art for generations (and have been liberally quoted in uncountable quantities of student essays). But the point of this exercise is not to look at art, but at the different ways in which it has been studied and discussed.

If that sounds a bit technical, well it sometimes is. One or two contributions are distinctly chewy, from the prose point of view, and the same could be said about the books they are discussing. But other contributions are urbanely approachable. John-Paul Stonard, one of the editors, writes one of the latter group. He has a little entertaining fun with Kenneth Clark’s more fulsome passages:

He suggests that we bring to mind ‘the golden hair and swelling bosoms of his [Rubens’s] graces, as we sing harvest songs on a bright Sunday in September’.