The Art of Reading Art

Product detailed description

How to read paintings and understand what they say. Every large museum hangs works hailed as genius. Why exactly these ones is explained less often. The Art of Reading Art: Understanding What Makes Great Art Great answers that question. It was written by Matthew Olivier and builds on his exceptionally popular online series @matthewolivierx.

Olivier has chosen more than a hundred works across eras and styles, from Bosch's The Conjurer and Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. He does not write an academic catalogue or trace the movements period by period. He talks about paintings as if he were telling you about them on a walk through a gallery: what we see on the canvas, how it was painted and what follows from that.

He is interested in history and technique, but above all in details: what a gesture of the hand, a colour or an unassuming object in the corner of the canvas reveals about the painting and its maker. Painters have always drawn on the past and on their own time, and the result is work we still admire hundreds of years later. Olivier explains how to recognise those layers in it.

The book is written for anyone who enjoys looking at art but is not sure what to look for. No prior education is needed. It works well as preparation for a gallery visit, and equally as a gift for someone who would like to understand art better.

Matthew Olivier is a visual artist, author and storyteller from Toronto, Canada. His work brings classical technique into dialogue with present-day culture. He is known for paintings full of subtle emotion and a quiet attention to the human experience. Since launching his professional career in 2020, he has become one of the most widely recognised and talked-about voices in visual art today. His influence continues to grow in contemporary painting and on social media, where his videos on art history receive millions of views.