Best Books on Art History and the Western Tradition

Art history books divide into two types: the surveys that try to cover everything from Lascaux to Warhol in 900 pages, and the specialist studies that take one period, movement, or artist and go deep. Both are useful and neither replaces the other. The surveys give you the chronological spine and the comparative vocabulary. The specialist studies give you the texture that the surveys cannot afford to include. This list gives you both, starting with the texts most likely to survive a lifetime of returning to. ## Start Here: The Great Survey Texts ### The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich This is the most widely read art history book ever published, and it earned that position. Gombrich wrote it in 1950 for general readers and revised it repeatedly until his death in 2001. The Pocket Edition is a complete text. The 16th edition is the standard. What makes it work is that Gombrich never talks about Art as an abstract category. He talks about artists solving problems. Every chapter explains what problem a particular artist or period was trying to solve and how the solution changed what came after. That framing keeps the book coherent across 40,000 years. [Check price on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0714832472?tag=31813-20) ### Art Through the Ages by Helen Gardner Gardner's survey is the standard American university textbook. It is larger and more encyclopedic than Gombrich, covering non-Western traditions more thoroughly and including more detailed analysis of individual works. The trade-off is that it reads more like a reference text than a narrative. Use it alongside Gombrich rather than instead of it. [Check price on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1337630101?tag=31813-20) ## Going Deeper: The Renaissance and Its Aftermath ### Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari Vasari published this in 1550 and revised it in 1568. It is the foundational text of western art history, an account of Italian Renaissance painters, sculptors, and architects from Cimabue to Titian, written by a working artist who knew many of his subjects or their immediate pupils. It is also unreliable in the details, biased toward Florence, and written as much to argue for certain hierarchies as to record facts. Read it knowing those limitations and it remains the most vivid document we have of how Renaissance artists saw themselves. [Check price on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140445455?tag=31813-20) ## The Twentieth Century The western tradition's twentieth century is where art history becomes most contested. The standard narrative, from Impressionism through Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, has been challenged from multiple directions: by feminist art historians who pointed out which artists were systematically excluded, by non-western scholars who questioned what "western tradition" excludes, and by critics who argued that the New York art world of the 1950s and 1960s distorted how we read the entire preceding century. ### The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes Hughes wrote this in 1980 to accompany a BBC television series and it remains the most readable single-volume account of modernism from the Eiffel Tower to the collapse of the utopian projects of the early twentieth century. Hughes is opinionated, literary, and willing to argue that some modernist movements failed. The book is better on painting and sculpture than on architecture and photography, but the best chapters, on the Futurists, the Russian Constructivists, and the New York School, are as good as anything written on those subjects since. ## The Western Canon Debate From the 1980s onward, art history departments debated the idea of a "western tradition" in art as both a pedagogical category and an ideological one. The debate was productive. It resulted in more rigorous attention to how canonical status gets assigned, better recovery of artists who had been excluded, and more careful attention to the relationship between European art and the traditions it borrowed from and displaced. The survey texts have changed significantly as a result. Gardner's current edition covers African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian art in ways earlier editions did not. But the western tradition itself, the sequence from classical Greece through Rome, the Byzantine inheritance, the Italian Renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age, and the modernist movements, remains the organizing spine of most art history curricula for defensible reasons. The books on this list give you that spine without pretending it is the only story. ## Further Reading For more books on cultural history, art, and the ideas that shaped western civilization, browse the [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.