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Amazon.co.uk Review
The belief that every picture tells a story is taken to new heights in Alberto Manguel's fascinating study Reading Pictures. The follow-up to his enormously successful A History of Reading, Reading Pictures is a richly personal account of the significance of pictures, and the stories that we attach to them. For Manguel, the vocabulary we bring to our reading of pictures is deeply personal, "determined not only by the world's iconography but also by a vast range of circumstances, private and social, casual and obligatory". The result is that the interpretation of paintings, and the stories that accompany them, are endless. This could lead to interpretative anarchy, but Manguel is far too clever for that. The book pursues a deeply idiosyncratic journey through a range of painters, photographers and architects, connected purely on the basis of Manguel's curiosity to understand the stories that lie behind their work. The themes that run throughout each chapter are the image as story, absence, riddle, witness, understanding, nightmare, reflection, violence, subversion, philosophy, memory and theatre. The range of Manguel's learning is astonishing, from Robert Campin and Caravaggio to Picasso, Joan Mitchell and Peter Eisenman's memorial to the Holocaust. Such eclecticism may frustrate purists, and some chapters are much better than others, but there are wonderful readings of Picasso's Guernica, seen as paradoxically borne out of the psychological violence the painter inflicted on his lover, and a moving account of absence and silence in the paintings of Joan Mitchell. What drives Manguel's book is a profound belief that today, "the reading of older and wiser images escapes us. We lack a common language that is both profound and meaningfully rich." Reading Pictures is a wonderful response to this sad situation. --Jerry Brotton
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The language in which we speak about art has become steadily more abstruse, though for thousands of years this was not the case, Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images. Is there a vocabulary we can learn in order to read these images? Is there something we can do so as not to remain passive when we flip through an illustrated book or wander through a gallery, or are there ways in which we can 'read' the stories within paintings, monuments, buildings and sculptures? We say 'every picture tells a story', but does it? Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photographed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores, with delight and erudition, how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent. Whether delving into the love of life in the twentieth-century world of Joan Mitchell, or the brutal complexities of Picasso's treatment of his mistress; revisiting the riddles of the past in the fifteenth-century painting of Robert Campin, or exploring the heartrending life of 'the hairy girl' whose matted fur so astonished sixteenth-century Italy, he helps us to enjoy and explore the visual landscape we live in.
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