Seeing Like an Artist

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What to expect

Learn to see art as an artist does. As the mysteries of techniques and styles are revealed, viewing paintings and sculptures becomes a more powerfully enriching experience that will stay in your mind long after you’ve left a museum.

A visit to a museum can be overwhelming, exhausting, and unrewarding. Lincoln Perry wants to change that. In eleven essays—each framed around a specific theme—he provides new ways of seeing and appreciating art.

Perry is a disarmingly charming tour guide to museums large or small. He makes even all art approachable and accessible. Along the way, he weaves in personal stories, from his own artistic journey as a painter to the days when he could sleep in his beaten-up VW Bus in the Louvre’s parking lot.

Drawing heavily on examples from the European tradition of art, the author aims to overturn your assumptions and cause you to re-think artistic prejudices while rebuilding new preferences.

Included are essays on how artists “read” paintings and guides to the great museums and churches of Europe. This is for any art-lover and museum-goer who wants to gain a deeper experience as a viewer of art.

Critics Review

  • “Irresistibly readable, companionable, and quotable.”

    Joyce Carol Oates, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  • “So much writing about art seems like useless noise—abstract, pretentious, gassy. This is not that. There is revelation on every page.”

    James Gleick, Pulitzer Prize finalist

  • “Lincoln Perry writes so clearly and sees everything in a state of wonder. He is a wonderful companion on the page and an unintimidating expert: this book will open your eyes.”

    Edmund White, author of A Previous Life

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