Customer Reviews

Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures

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Through three well-chosen case studies, Baxandall examines the question of artistic intention: how the constraints of the culture, the artistic medium, and the intended use of a work of art shape the process of its creation. Particularly penetrating is his "excursus on influence", in which he argues that participants in an artistic tradition shape and change how their predecessors are understood. This is an ingenious and satisfying book: I read it twice for two different college classes, and expect to read it again and continue to profit from it.

This book is so conspicuosly intelligent, and its exercises in criticism so involving, that it is a great pleasure to read. Baxandall begins by developing a scheme for the explanation of concrete historical objects in general.

He takes the Forth bridge in Scotland. Baxandall, more than it makes it beautiful, he shows you that it really is beautiful. But wait, there's more. He takes Picasso's Kahweiler and shows it to you as beautiful, and damn well you believe it.

Baxandall shows us how to interpret art.

But he claims modesty: he is a historian, he says, and is only offering one method of many to think about pictures. I think this is the only place where he has gone wrong. After going through his method of understanding art, you will know there are no others. All the other ones are wrong. Baxandall is right.

If you want to be someone who talks about art intelligently, buy this book and you will be able to talk of art in the only way you should

This book is a genuinely informative and at times engrossing view into the making and understanding of pictures. However, it reads (not surprisingly) like a textbook; it is brilliant and thought-provoking in some parts but dryly monotonous in others. (The bridge-building bit stands out as particularly tedious.) The points Baxandall makes via this tediousness are no less brilliant, but their lustre is lost beneath layers of dull, yawn-worthy prose. Baxandall's stylistic shortcomings should not scare away anyone with a passionate interest in the study of Art and its interpretation. But for the layman in search of a clear and down-to-earth discussion of how to look at pictures, this is probably a book to avoid.