The best art history books for beginners, and which to read first
Four art history books for beginners, from Gombrich's The Story of Art to Berger's Ways of Seeing: what each one is for, and which to read first.
If you buy only one, make it E. H. Gombrich's The Story of Art. It first appeared in 1950, it is still in print, and it does the thing a beginner needs most: it tells the history of art as one continuous story, in plain sentences, with every work it discusses printed on the page. The other three books here are better at particular jobs (looking things up, making sense of modern art, asking how we look in the first place), and each of them works best once Gombrich's long view is in your head.
I live in Athens, where art history is hard to avoid: finds from the metro excavations sit in glass cases at Syntagma station. Most people I walk with know a few names and dates and feel they are missing the thread that joins them. A book can give you that thread, if it is the right kind of book for the gap you have.
Story, reference, modern art or a way of looking
Art books for beginners come in roughly four kinds, and the four below are one of each. A story is a narrative you read from the beginning, each chapter leaning on the one before. A reference is something you dip into, made for checking a name after a gallery. A guide to modern art covers only the last century and a half, the part that leaves most newcomers feeling shut out. A book about looking is not a history at all, but an argument about what images do and who they are made for.
A quick way to pick:
- You have never read any art history and want the whole sweep: The Story of Art.
- You learn through pictures and want to look things up after a museum: Art: The Definitive Visual Guide.
- Old masters make sense to you, but a urinal in a gallery makes you cross: What Are You Looking At?
- You want to argue about images, including the ones on billboards and phones: Ways of Seeing.
The Story of Art: the long view in one volume
Ernst Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909 and moved to London in 1936 to work at the Warburg Institute, which he later directed from 1959 to 1976. Phaidon published The Story of Art in 1950, and it has been revised through sixteen editions and translated into more than thirty languages. He had younger readers in mind when he wrote it, and that is its strength: the writing is plain and clear, with almost no jargon.
It opens with a line many readers remember: "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists." The book keeps faith with that. It is about particular people solving particular problems: what a painter in fifteenth-century Florence was trying to do, and what the next generation did with the answer.
Gombrich also set himself a rule that matters more than it sounds. He would not discuss a work he could not show, so you never read about something you cannot see. The chapters run in order from prehistoric painting through Egypt, two chapters on Greece, Rome and Byzantium, one that turns east to Islam and China, and on through Europe into the twentieth century.
Its limits are well known. It is a story told from Europe, and the first edition included no women artists at all and the sixteenth includes only one, which critics still raise. Even so, no other single volume gives a newcomer such a clear sense of what came before what. It suits patient readers who like to start at the start, at a chapter an evening.
Art: The Definitive Visual Guide: the book to look things up in
Some people do not want a story. They want to stand in front of a painting, wonder who made it and what came just before, and find out in two minutes. DK's Art: The Definitive Visual Guide is built for them. It carries the name of Andrew Graham-Dixon, the British art historian who presented BBC series such as A History of British Art and Art of Spain, and, like most DK references, it lets the pictures do most of the work.
The publisher counts more than 2,500 paintings and sculptures by more than 700 artists, from cave painting to contemporary work, in six chronological chapters. Each movement gets a short account of its origins, subjects and techniques, with visual timelines and close-ups that show how to read a composition.
It is a big hardback that belongs on a shelf at home, not in a day bag, and it is not made to be read from cover to cover. Use it the evening after a museum to put names and dates against what you saw, or keep it near a teenager doing homework. Paired with Gombrich, it gives you the story and the index.
What Are You Looking At?: modern art without the embarrassment
Many beginners are comfortable until about 1860. Renaissance altarpieces make a kind of sense; then come splashes, squares and objects from the hardware shop, and people start to feel the joke is on them. Will Gompertz wrote What Are You Looking At? for that reader.
Gompertz was the BBC's arts editor from 2009 to 2021, and before that spent seven years as director of Tate Media. The book came out in 2012. It begins, as many accounts of modern art do, with Marcel Duchamp's Fountain of 1917, a factory-made urinal entered as a work of art, and then tells the story movement by movement, a chapter for each, from Manet and Courbet to artists such as Banksy and Ai Weiwei.
The tone is the point: chatty, funny and full of anecdote. Publishers Weekly found it entertaining and clarifying, while a critic in the Literary Review thought there was little new in the story it told. Both can be true, and a beginner does not need a new story, just a familiar one told well.
It suits people who get more from radio than from textbooks, and anyone heading to a modern art museum who wants a few stories to hand. It will be no help in front of a Byzantine icon.
Ways of Seeing: a short book that argues back
Ways of Seeing is the odd one out, and the shortest. In January 1972 BBC Two broadcast four half-hour films by the critic and novelist John Berger, produced by Mike Dibb, and the book of Ways of Seeing followed the same year from Penguin and the BBC. It has seven essays, and three of them contain no words at all, only sequences of images you are left to read for yourself.
The first film opens with Berger cutting the head of Venus out of a reproduction of Botticelli's Venus and Mars, a painting in the National Gallery in London. It is vandalism against a copy, and it makes his first argument at once: a painting that can be reproduced can be cropped, moved and made to mean something else. The idea draws on Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Other essays look at the female nude, at oil paint as a display of what wealthy owners possessed, and at advertising as the heir to those paintings.
The series was partly a reply to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, the grand BBC survey of Western art, and the book keeps that spirit of argument. Some of it has dated. That is a reason to read it after a history like Gombrich's, when you have something for it to argue with, and it is short enough for an afternoon.
Reading them alongside museums and streets
Art books are easy to read in the wrong way: all at once, at a desk, far from anything they describe. They work better in short doses tied to a place. A plan that fits a single museum visit:
- Before you go, read the chapter of Gombrich that covers the main collection. For the National Archaeological Museum in Athens that means his two chapters on Greece; for a collection of modern art, two or three chapters of Gompertz.
- In the museum, choose three works and give each ten minutes. Look before you read the label.
- That evening, find the artists or the period in the DK guide and see what was being made elsewhere in the same decades.
- A week later, read one essay of Ways of Seeing and go back to one of your three works. Ask who it was made for and who it was meant to impress.
- Keep a note of what you saw and in which room. After a year, that list will tell you more about your own taste than any of the four books.
Not all of this needs a ticket. Gombrich's chapters on Greece make most sense on the paths below the Acropolis, and Berger's essay on advertising is best tested at a bus shelter. If contemporary art is where you want to end up, a biennial is a natural next step after Gompertz; there is a guide to visiting art biennials in Southeast Europe. Berger's question about who an image is for applies just as well to installations in a city square, the subject of a piece on how to judge temporary art in public squares.
Art history does not stop at the museum door. Rafael Schacter's The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti is a good bridge from these four books to the walls outside, and it is one of the titles in our guide to books on street art and graffiti. In Athens you can cross that bridge on foot: the Athens street art map runs from Exarchia to Metaxourgeio, and the National Archaeological Museum sits at the Exarchia end, so you can see Greek bronzes in the morning and painted walls after lunch.
An order that works
Read Gombrich first, slowly. Move to Gompertz when you want more on the past 150 years, then Berger, as a corrective to both, with the DK guide beside all three for looking things up. If you already know the old masters, start with Gompertz; if you are buying for a teenager who prefers pictures to paragraphs, the DK guide is the friendlier first door.
These four picks come from publisher details and published reviews rather than any testing of our own. More on museums, theatre and the wider arts is in the culture strand. Whichever book you open first, take one chapter to a single room in a museum, and stay there longer than feels normal.
