A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works - Hardcover

'Finally, a book that asks, with a restless and sensitive eye, what it is that makes masterpieces sing across the centuries. A highly enjoyable history of art that is also a fascinating meditation on excellence' - Jonathan Jones, art critic

What makes great art great? Why do some works pulse in the imagination generation after generation, century after century? From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Picasso’s Guernica, some paintings and sculptures have become so famous, so much a part of who we are, we no longer really look at them. We take their greatness for granted; our eyes have become near-obsolete. We need a new way of seeing.

Unsatisfied with traditional, hand-me-down interpretations of these masterpieces interested only in learning about art, and not from it, Kelly Grovier combed the surface of revered works from the Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor to Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. What did he find? The key to their enduring power to move and delight us. He discovered that every truly great work is hardwired with an underappreciated detail, a flourish of strangeness, that ignites it from deep inside.

From a carved mammoth tusk (c. 40,000 bce) to Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1505–10) to Louise Bourgeois’s Maman (1999), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto cultural consciousness over the past 40,000 years – a resilient visual vocabulary whose meaning has proved elastic and endlessly renewable from era to era.

It is to these works that Kelly Grovier devotes himself in this radical new art history. Stepping away from biography, style and the chronology of ‘isms’ that preoccupies most art history to focus on the artworks themselves, Grovier tells a new story in which we learn from the artworks, not just about them. Looking closely at each work, he identifies an ‘eye-hook’ – the part of the artwork that ‘bridges the divide between art and life, giving it palpable purpose and elevating its value beyond the visual to the vital’ – and encourages us to squint through this narrow aperture to perceive the work’s truest meanings. This book is unique in emphasizing the durability of what is made over the ephemerality of its making and serves as a rejoinder to a growing sensibility that conceives of artists as brands and the works they create as nothing more than material commodities to hoard, hide, and flip for profit.

Lavishly illustrated with many of the most breathtaking and enduring artworks ever created, as well as many that inspired or took inspiration from them, this refreshing book will spark a debate about how it is that artworks articulate who we are and what it means to be alive in the world.

Table of Contents

Ashurbanipal Hunting Lions (c. 645-635 bce)

Ishtar Gate (c. 575 bc)

Parthenon Sculptures (c. 444 bc)

Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor (c. 210 bc)

Murals, Villa of the Mysteries (c60-50 bc)

Laocoön and His Sons (c.27 bc and 68 ad)

Apollodorus of Damascus (?): Trajan’s Column (113 ce)

The Book of Kells (c. ad 800)

Travellers among Mountains and Streams (c1000), Fan Kuan

Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1077 or after), likely the work of women embroiderers

Universal Man (1165), Hildegard of Bingen

The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (c. 1427), Masaccio

Ghent Altarpiece (1430-32), Jan van Eyck

The Descent from the Cross (1436), Rogier Van der Weyden

The Annunciation (c. 1438-47), Fra Angelico

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480), Andrea Mantegna

The Birth of Venus (c.1480s), Sandro Botticelli

The Mona Lisa (c.1503-6), Leonardo da Vinci

The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-1510), Hieronymous Bosch

Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes (1508-1512), Michelangelo

The School of Athens (1510-1511), Raphael

The Isenheim Altarpiece (1509-1515), Matthias Grünewald

Bacchus and Ariadne (c.1525), Titian

Self-portrait (1548), Catharina van Hemessen

Crucifixion (1565-87), Tintoretto

The Supper at Emmaus (1601), Caravaggio

The Ecstasy of St Teresa, Cornaro Chapel (1647-52), Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Las Meninas (1656), Diego Velázquez

Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), Johannes Vermeer

Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c 1665-9), Rembrandt Van Rijn

Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768), Joseph Wright of Derby

The Nightmare (1781), Henry Fuseli

The Third of May 1808 (1814), Francisco Goya

The Hay Wain (1821), John Constable

Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (exhibited 1844), JMW Turner

Whistler’s Mother (1871), James Abbott McNeill Whistler

The Thinker (1880-1904), Auguste Rodin

A Bar at The Folies-Bergère (1882), Edouard Manet

Bathers at Asnieres (1884), Georges Seurat

The Scream (1893), Edvard Munch

Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (1904-1906), Paul Cézanne

Primordial Chaos (1906), Hilma af Klint

The Kiss (1907), Gustav Klimt

The Dance (1909), Henri Matisse

Nymphéas (1914-1926), Claude Monet

Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp

American Gothic (1930), Grant Wood

The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dalí

Guernica (1937), Pablo Picasso

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Humming-bird (1940), Frida Khalo

One: Number 31 (1950), Jackson Pollock

Study after Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), Francis Bacon

Brillo Boxes (1964), Andy Warhol

The Rothko Chapel (paintings 1965-66; chapel opened 1971), Mark Rothko

Betty (1977), Gerhard Richter

Backs and Fronts (1981), Sean Scully

Maman (1999), Louise Bourgeois