Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others

By Lincoln Perry

“Beguiling and informative”—Wall Street Journal

Learn to see art as an artist does. Discover how a painting’s composition or a sculpture’s spatial structure influence the experience of what you’re seeing. With an artist as your guide, viewing art becomes a powerfully enriching experience that will stay in your mind long after you’ve left a museum.

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

Drawing heavily on examples from the European traditions of art, Perry aims to overturn assumptions and asks readers to re-think artistic prejudices while rebuilding new preferences. Included are essays on how artists “read” paintings, how scale and format influence viewers, how to engage with sculptures and murals, as well as guides to some of the great museums and churches of Europe.

Seeing Like an Artist is for any artist, art-lover, or museumgoer who wants to grow their appreciation for the art of others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781567927009

Lincoln Perry

Lincoln Perry’s distinctive landscapes, figurative paintings, and sculptures have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions across the country. His large-scale murals can be found in landmark buildings such as the Met Life building in St. Louis and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The University of Virginia Press published the monograph, Lincoln Perry's Charlottesville, which included an essay and interview by his wife, Ann Beattie. A frequent contributor to American Scholar, Mr. Perry divides his time between Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

Book preview

An Artist Goes into a Museum

An Introduction

Artists visit museums the way bears visit beehives⁠—it’s less a genteel process than a needy, hungry grabbing at the sweetness within. We circle the hive, casing the joint, sniffing, stealing what calls to us; then, our appetites temporarily sated, we return to our studio and get back to work.

Or perhaps we’re the bees, flying around, gathering the nectar we find in nature and returning to a communal project, a big, endless beehive of fellow artists, living and dead. After all, I’ve seen countless artists buzzing around gallery and museum exhibitions day after day, and never ran into so many old painting friends as I did at the Bonnard and Balthus shows in New York City some years back. Who goes to poetry readings? A safe bet that you’ll see swarms of poets. Concerts? Musicians. That doesn’t mean art, poetry, and music lovers need an artistic license to frequent these nutritious hives, but one might ask what these practitioners are hoping to find at the banquet. What are artists looking for, and how might we go about getting the extra-sweet stuff they’re addicted to?

Perhaps I need a different analogy.

Over lunch at a Key West noodle restaurant, a friend told me about a red silk vest his mother had made for his father in Hong Kong around 1950, when the family was posted in Japan. The vest needed a bit of work by the time Michael inherited it, and though he didn’t care much for it, he and his wife, Helen, took it to nearby Stock Island, where two Korean women were reputed to be good at such repairs. Spreading the vest on their worktable, the seamstresses started speaking quietly and rapidly to each other, pointing and gesticulating. What is it? Michael asked, leaning in for a closer look at the garment. The women folded back the vest, pointed out elaborate seams and stitching, and explained that it was a beautifully made piece of art. He’d never noticed one way or the other, but as they pointed out the vest’s qualities, he could immediately see what they meant.

Michael told me this story because we’d been discussing my wife’s reading at a bookstore the night before and how in answering attendees’ questions she spoke about the craft of writing, how stories are made, rather than about their content. As an architect, Michael felt most people didn’t care about the subtleties of his craft, and as a painter and sculptor, I agreed that this was true in my field as well. So the Korean women’s reaction to his vest was a sort of parable: in order to apprehend, let alone appreciate, what goes into making something that could be called art, one needs a bit of instruction.

John Hollander, a poet friend, used to point out that with the birth of the middle class, it was assumed that like-minded men and women would aspire to participate in culture, to play a bit of piano, paint some watercolors, and on occasion write their friends letters in verse. This would pass the time enjoyably with no real pressure to excel, but also meant that when one came in contact with a virtuoso pianist, watercolorist, or poet, one could appreciate the accomplishment of a master in the form. Back then, a newspaper might even report the weather as a rhyming ditty, whereas today, John noted, if most of us come across something resembling a poem, we pull back as if we’ve seen a snake writhing on the page.

Just as the Korean seamstresses pointed out to Michael how the seams and stitching worked inside his red vest, I’ve set out to discuss how certain paintings and sculpture were made. Not how paint is mixed, or bronze poured, but to speculate on how artists chose the structural underpinning of their work, and what this means to us, the viewers, whether bears or bees. My approach is not that of a sociologist, not even an art historian⁠—and there are very few dates mentioned here⁠—but simply to refer to and describe, and occasionally reproduce, the art discussed. You might also find images on the web, along with more information about the art and artists involved.

Writing about art this way has long drawn criticism: Matisse claimed, Artists should have their tongues cut out. Flaubert wrote, Explaining one artistic form by another is a monstrosity. You won’t find a single good painting in all the museums of the world that needs a commentary. The more text there is in the gallery guide, the worse the picture. Lucian Freud said, Any words that might come out of [an artist’s] mouth concerning his art would be as relevant to that art as the noise a tennis player makes when playing a shot.

As smart and funny as all of these quips are, I can’t help but disagree. If I overestimate people’s desire to be shown the subtleties of fabric, stitching, and the beauty of buttonholes, I apologize. But art is a visual meditation on life, available to all, so it seems a waste to just put that red vest on a high, dark shelf, unworn and undisplayed.

I’ve spent a significant portion of my life searching out the sweet spots in museums, and over the decades I’ve arrived at certain patterns I find very helpful for navigating them. To begin with, I tend to go relatively quickly through an entire museum or exhibition in order to gauge where I’ll want to spend the majority of my time. In a small collection, this doesn’t take long, whereas I think it took me twenty-six hours to thoroughly explore the expanded Louvre. Understandably, many casual museumgoers won’t want to dedicate such a chunk of time, so it may help to have some advice beforehand from a trusted source about what to concentrate on.

Even a museum junkie has to admit that there’s some pretty lousy stuff out there, the twigs and seeds of art. The disappointments can be as frequent as the delightful surprises. I’ve eagerly anticipated exhibitions, such as the National Gallery in Washington’s retrospective on the work of Vuillard, a favorite painter, only to be infuriated by the curator’s decisions. In other venues you can’t go wrong, such as in London’s National Gallery, Delft’s Mauritshuis, and New York’s Frick, which are compact and jammed with masterpieces. Most everything in these venues is magical; other collections could benefit from some editing.

I’ve found Madrid’s Prado to contain entire rooms of the kind of painting that might convince a newcomer that this old art isn’t simply not for them as far as taste is concerned, but is instead, in a word, terrible. An accidental ramble through those rooms might deprive the visitor of true joy and send him out onto the streets of Madrid unaware of the treasures he had missed just around the corner from the disastrous room. Some artists, such as Peter Paul Rubens, although well represented in the Prado, prove a hard sell to friends, who dismiss his work as mere rhetoric or even corny, so I suggest they get to Munich to see him at his best.

I want people to fall in love with this art, not to give up, frustrated by all those stodgy portraits of Hapsburgs with their underbites, or beaten down by the huge nineteenth-century machines. Usually based on dramatic, tragic deaths, these phenomenally capable extravaganzas were the special-effects movies of their day: staged and manipulative, but enjoyable. An antidote can be found in the Prado’s last room, with Francisco Goya’s Pinturas Negras’s brooding meditations on man’s inhumanity to man. On leaving the Prado, you may feel energized by the optimistic Rubens or have had your worst fears confirmed by Goya. Later that evening, the people sitting at the table next to you at your ten o’clock dinner may appear more effervescent or more haunted as a result of letting the art sink in; a woman’s dark profile might stand out against a bright ochre wall, or a bright keyhole of light appear beneath a neighboring table. That’s what art is designed to do: change you.

Something similar could be said about the Louvre, high on everyone’s list but often forbiddingly daunting. It’s huge, yes, but I suggest concentrating on just a few rooms, and if they excite more exploration, wonderful; if not, you’ll have seen unforgettable masterpieces. When you decide you’ve had enough, find one of the many cafés tucked here and there in the museum, and rest⁠—there are rooms of greatness you haven’t seen, but if your appetite has been whetted, keep going or come back . . . remember, this is all about pleasure, not sore feet.

Ideally, of course, one could enjoy a leisurely stroll in a fine museum, lingering in the very best rooms and focusing on, say, ten things in the collection. When I lived in New York, I would sometimes go to the Met just to see one object, maybe two⁠—but that luxury is rare.

Museums have recently been criticized as static tombs of culture, monolithic mausoleums used by the powers that be to indoctrinate, intimidate, and subjugate: beware the zombielike, dead white European artists coming to eat your brains. I’m all for expanding our conception of what constitutes art, though I also hope to continue to have access to the art I love and treasure.

Consider a trip I took to the Mystic Seaport Museum, in Connecticut, where our family spent time when I was a boy. Picture a ten-year-old kid studying the museum’s hundreds of astoundingly intricate and beautiful models of square-rigged ships for hours⁠—days⁠—on end. One in particular was unforgettable: an exact replica of the ship a British sailor served on before being taken prisoner and spending fourteen years in a French dungeon. The sailor used scraps of bone and human hair, a perfect memory, and a need to keep sane to carefully plank and rig his foot-long frigate. When my brother and I returned as adults, the ship was no longer exhibited, but was instead stored along with every other ship model in a warehouse nearby. They’d all been replaced. In one room, a rope hung from the ceiling. Can you tie a knot? a sign condescendingly asked.

I was told someone had decided to make the Seaport more relevant and more kid-friendly. But what does that even mean? Why would a museum replace artistry and craftsmanship with banal interactive activities that lack the power to spark the imagination? I had, after all, been a ten-year-old kid whose passion for ship models, square-riggers, and going to sea had been not only buoyed but also been made vivid by the Mystic Seaport’s old exhibitions. I seriously doubt a room with a rope in it would have had the same impact. And, yes, I could already tie a knot.

But small regional museums aren’t the only ones susceptible to such redefining. On a recent trip to Rome, I walked through the Borghese Gardens to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. I had very fond memories of La Galleria Nazionale, having visited often decades before to see walls chockablock with otherwise very difficult to find treasures by twentieth-century painters and sculptors⁠—Carlo Carrà, Mario Sironi, Felice Casorati, Renato Guttuso⁠—from a particularly fecund period in Italian art. But when I returned, I thought I’d walked into the wrong museum. Yes, it was still a huge, handsome Neoclassical edifice with lots of stairs, but there was almost nothing there. Renovation in progress? No, it had already been renovated.

In each enormous room a painting or two was hung on a blindingly white wall, with some sort of contemporary installation in the middle of the space⁠— some rocks, say. Like those keen on making things more relevant at the Mystic Seaport Museum, here in Rome someone had decided what we needed to see. Presumably all those breathtaking paintings are in a warehouse somewhere. Italian Futurists once advocated burning down museums; now, if artworks offend or are deemed out of fashion, it’s fortunate that we tend simply to hide them away in storage.

In many ways, I’m still that ten-year-old boy, six decades on, as passionate about the art I’ve seen on my trips to Europe as I was about Mystic Seaport’s evocation of the sea. The spiderweb of functional rigging on my model of the Cutty Sark, each little thread with a working purpose, kept me occupied, riveted, in our basement for countless hours. Now those hours are spent drawing, painting, and sculpting. The more time I spend, the higher the bar rises, and the more I feel the need to study the art most relevant to my own projects, the work of kindred spirits.

This business of going from museum to museum can be heartbreaking. Yet many of us will cross oceans to see a Raphael or a Rembrandt in person. And some of us would fly almost anywhere to see a Bernardo Cavallino or a Fausto Pirandello exhibition. But I have no intention of telling readers what is good or bad art, relevant or irrelevant to their lives, worth loving or worthy of disdain. For art really can be a species of love, and although I’m aware that I’m naturally circumscribed in various ways to loving a particular kind of art because of who I am, I’ll try to evoke what I’ve come to love not because I believe it’s what you should love, but, rather, because I hope my enthusiasm might inspire you to find what you love. My advice is, given the chance, to make an effort to see what calls to you and gradually you’ll weave an understanding of how the tapestry is made. Use your eyes first⁠—trust them and know that art needn’t be an illustration of some sociological or political argument: it can be self-sufficient, like listening to music. Optionally, read the label.

I’m troubled that we can lose the ability to look carefully, with enjoyment, often never having been encouraged to spend time engaged with what’s in front of us. This collection of essays sets out to offer a corrective of sorts to this malady⁠—a plea to look closely.

Perhaps you’ve noticed someone in a museum standing stock-still before a painting, maybe hand on chin, entranced, or even guiding a pencil on a sketch pad. The person looks, from all estimations, like an artist. If you were less shy or less polite, what might you ask about what she sees in the painting before her that you don’t? That’s what these essays attempt to address, in a somewhat loose and cumulative way.

The first essay follows a young person’s encounter with one powerful painting in an almost perfect museum. The next one updates the Grand Tour of Continental museums and churches that most well-to-do eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englishmen were expected to take as part of their education. The third essay describes what happens when our assumptions going into a museum are overturned, and how even a seasoned painter might rethink his prejudices.

A mad dash in northern Italy to see a neglected art tradition⁠—far uphill from any museum⁠—is the subject of the fourth essay. That even the oldest art we go to see is neither dead nor outdated occupies the next one, followed by an essay on a pair of coworkers whose quite different approaches to mural painting may inspire you to reflect on your own preferences. The seventh essay discusses how artists read paintings, or work to guide the viewer’s eye through pictorial space, and the eighth extends the topic by exploring how they decide to frame or format their image. The ninth investigates how scale works to place us in these formats, involving or implicating us. The tenth suggests that the damage suffered by art can make us rethink what we’re looking at, be they objects or the things we see after we leave the museum. The eleventh, first of two essays on sculpture, recalls the power I felt as a child on encountering a magnificent bust in the Museum of Natural History; the twelfth finds polarities in how sculpture is conceived of and made. A look into how various images have sneakily implied sexual subtexts occupies the thirteenth essay. The fourteenth endorses the ability of multiple images to reinforce subtly multivalent meanings, and the last essay encourages you to get to Europe to experience its art in situ.

Because I begin this introduction by suggesting that museums resemble beehives, I should clarify one point: they’re filled not with stinging insects but instead with sweet experiences. My cousin in Canada is a beekeeper and he once showed me how to carefully steal the honey from the hive.

The working title of this book was Stealing from Museums because as with beehives, with museums we all need a few pointers to avoid being stung.

So if I may be your bee or beekeeper, let’s lift the lids and see what’s in these marvelous hives.

Summoning Francis

A Memoir of Sorts About Being Inspired

Aman stands in the light. Arms open to its rays, he is entirely passive, receptive, deeply appreciative; he could be worshipping the sun. His broad, cloaked chest catches the light like a solar collector, as planar as the writing desk he echoes or as the pale silver rock face behind him, all bathed in the ecstatic glow. In fact, the entire landscape, from closest pebble to unreachable mountain peak, is blessed by the sun, bathed in a predominant warm glow. What better image of heaven on earth, or the Kingdom of God, even for a non-Christian?

Yes, he wears monk’s clothes, and if we read the