100 Great Artists

by Charlotte Gerlings

General readers, art students and practitioners alike will pick up this book again and again, to check facts, browse among the pictures, and explore how great artists like Breughel, Goya, Constable and Picasso first captured our admiration and why they remain influential to this day.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, History, Art History, Reference

208 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2005

Reviews

[John Burns · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was pretty rubbish. Just a basic reference book that I found in the library. I think there's something to be said for this kind of superficial overview of many artists, as opposed to say dedicating 50 pages to just one artist, but I felt like this was a bit too much of a basic overview. You get 1 or 2 medium sized paintings per artist plus 2 or 3 paragraphs of biographical information. I feel like this isn't enough to really get the most basic sense of an artist. When you have basically one painting and it's maybe just a detail, then you have a very limited notion of that artist's ouevre. The way art works is you need to observe several similar paintings by the same artist before you really get the feel for the artist and get to the point where you could recognise one of their works even if you haven't seen it before, just by the style. I suppose this is the goal of any art reference book, or should be the minimum goal. Can the reader come away from the book with the ability to identify other works by the same artist. If not then I would argue that the book hasn't done its job.

It's just a basic reference book. It's meant for picking up and flicking through. It's not very useful for actually learning about art.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

A just okay book, works mostly as a quick reference guide that belongs on a coffee table somewhere. Lacked any real detail but had at least somewhat decent organization. Oftentimes made a few generalizations that could be debated, also didn't like how each artist only got two pictures but for some artists, they only got one, and instead included a different artist that somehow related to the one being discussed. Definitely feels written by a quick Wikipedia search, nevertheless offered a decent surface-level review of some notable painters from history and drew a few connections I hadn't thought of prior.

[Marielle Mullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

makes me feel very cultured

[T R Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel that coffee table book does a reasonably good job of giving basic information about all the artists it covers, in limited space, and includes some interesting information about a number of artists that I knew little about. The short timeline given for each artist is also quite good, even if some are a bit spartan. On the other hand, some of the entries do go off on tangents about connected artists rather than concentrating on the artist themselves.

The artwork in the book is all very good with a nice variety of styles and introduced me to some very nice pieces that I hadn’t seen before. The introduction to the book does say that some pictures were unavailable, which is probably why some obvious pictures are missing.

[Jorge Serra · Rating 4 out of 5]

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