Learning to Look at Modern Art Paperback – Illustrated, 27 May 2004

A great introduction for students

Bought this book for an online course. Good packaging, quick delivery and the book is in very good condition 👍🏻

Clear, informed, information.

This book is raising more questions than answers. Her introduction mentions that she encourages the spectator to see for themselves, to keep an open mind... yet she tells us how a viewer should feel. I've underlined several passages where she states things like: "this forces the viewer to reflect on..." "you feel as though..." and more than often, this is very different to my experience of the piece.This book is not objective at all, and she refers us to her other book well over 20 times. Makes me question her motivations.

Well structured and interesting.

Very helpful and have bought it for friends who love it too.

V good

I bought Mary Acton's "Learning to Look at Modern Art" because it was required reading for a course I was taking. But you don't need an excuse for buying and reading this book because it's well written, well illustrated, easy to read and fascinating for anyone with a burgeoning interest in modern art that wants to know how to look at modern art.There will of course be debates about when did modern art begin [and end?] but Acton takes Picasso's early cubist painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" from 1907 as her starting point and concludes by looking at the convergence of art forms in film, fine-art, photography and advertising. Along the way, inter alia, Acton takes in the shock of cubism, the extremes of surrealism, the symbolism of conceptual art, the cultural references of pop art and explores the YBAs questioning of what is art, by looking not just at fine art, collages, and sculpture but also film, photography and art's influence on modern and post-modern architecture.Highly recommended, but if you're thinking of buying this book you need to be aware that it's not a chronological history of modern art; it is as the title says a guide book to looking at [and interpreting if not understanding] modern art; so don't expect chapters that deal with the 1900's, inter-war years, post-war years, the 60's etc; or chapters devoted to the principal schools art of the period: cubism, dadaism, surrealism, abstract-expressionism, pop art, etc. Instead, as Acton explains in the introduction to the book it "tries to make sense of modern art through explanation, analysis and insight" and that's why after introducing the idea of modern art and its drivers in the first two chapters the later chapters are more thematically based looking at conceptualism, expressionism, composition, space and form, light and colour and the depiction of traditional subjects in modern art across the book's timespan.