See What You’re Missing: New Ways of Looking at the World Through Art

In this stimulating entry, Gompertz (What Are You Looking At?), the artistic director of London’s Barbican Centre, examines the ways artists use their powers of perception to “see the world afresh” and help others do the same. Nineteenth-century English landscape painter John Constable used an “empirical” attention to nature to paint meticulously detailed, six-foot-tall cloudscapes that let viewers “see what was in plain sight but routinely overlooked.” And after Frida Kahlo was injured in a streetcar accident at 18 that left her with lifelong health problems, she harnessed her pain in dramatic self portraits that “bar[ed] her soul with brushstrokes rather than a pen.” Meanwhile, after contemporary painter Jennifer Packer observed the conspicuous absence of Black people in paintings in contemporary museums, she took it as an “intellectual provocation” to weave a recurring theme of partial disappearance into her own work (she depicts figures that “fade in and out of view like a small boat on a high sea”). Gompertz combines accessible discussions of artistic technique with an appealing enthusiasm, rendering entries vivid and thought-provoking. Artists and art lovers alike will be delighted. (Apr.)