13 Best Books About Art for People Who Feel Stupid in Galleries

Berger made a BBC series in 1972 and turned it into this small book, and it still does more per page than anything else on the subject. Four of the essays are written and three are only pictures. He argues that photography broke the old meaning of paintings by letting them travel, that the European nude was built for a male owner standing outside the frame, and that oil painting and advertising are closer relatives than either would like. You can finish it between lunch and evening chai.

Gompertz ran the BBC arts desk and worked at Tate before that, and he writes like a man who has watched thousands of people stand in front of a Duchamp and feel personally cheated. The book runs from the Impressionists to now, one movement at a time, always answering the question you are too embarrassed to ask out loud, which is why this is in a museum at all. He is funny without being smug, and he never asks you to admire something simply because an institution bought it.

Most Indian readers can name three European painters and not one Pahari master, and that is not their fault. Goswamy takes about a hundred paintings from the eleventh century onward and gives each a few pages: what is happening, where your eye is meant to travel, what the border and the colour and the small gesture in the corner are doing. The long opening essay on how these works were made, and for whom, is the part I keep going back to. It is the book that made me stop walking past miniatures.

Hessel started an account about women artists after an art fair where she noticed she had not seen a single work by a woman, and this book is the long version of that project. It runs in order from the Renaissance to now, hundreds of artists, most of whom you will not have heard of, which is precisely the point. It is quick to read, opinionated in a good way, and it travels well outside Europe and America, which single volume surveys still mostly do not. The reproductions are the reason to own it on paper.

Gombrich wrote this for teenagers and accidentally wrote the book everyone else has had to argue with since. It moves from cave painting to the twentieth century in one clear line, and its trick is that he never lectures. He opens by saying there is no such thing as Art, only artists, which is the least frightening sentence in the whole subject. Each chapter shows you a few works properly instead of flashing fifty at you. It is long, it is Western, and it is where most people's real education starts.

Mitter is a historian and this belongs to the Oxford History of Art series, so it is a proper academic survey rather than a picture book. He runs from the Indus valley through Buddhist and Hindu temple sculpture, the Mughal and Rajput schools, the colonial encounter and the Bengal school, and into modern Indian art. What I value most is that he treats European reactions to Indian art as a subject worth studying rather than as background noise. It is dense, it is short, and it does not flatter you once.

Vasari was a working painter and architect in Florence who decided to write down the lives of the artists around him and before him, and in doing so invented the entire genre. He covers Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, whom he all but worshipped. The Oxford selection keeps the good ones and drops the roll call of minor Tuscans. It is opinionated, unreliable in places, and full of workshop detail about grinding pigment, chasing patrons and hating rivals, which is what makes the Renaissance stop being a slide show.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met in New York in 1967 with no money and an unshakeable belief that they were artists before either had made anything worth the name. The book follows them through terrible rooms, the Chelsea Hotel, stolen sandwiches and the slow discovery of what each of them was for, she in words and music, he in photography. It is a love story between two people who could not stay a couple and never stopped being each other's first reader. The last chapters are hard going.

Isaacson builds the book out of Leonardo's notebooks, which is the right call, because the notebooks are where you meet him: shopping lists beside anatomical drawings, a reminder to find out why the sky is blue, plans for machines nobody could build for four centuries. The painting chapters are the best part, especially the long section on how the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa were actually constructed. He also refuses to hide the failures, the abandoned commissions and the long years of very little.

Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Hungarian mother and a Sikh father, trained in Paris, and then did the thing nobody around her expected. She came back to India and turned her eye on ordinary people in small towns and villages, painting them without pity and without exotic decoration. She died in Lahore in 1941, aged twenty eight. Dalmia is an art historian and works from letters and family papers, so you get the arguments, the affairs and the restlessness alongside the paintings, and she never turns her subject into a saint.

Thornton trained as a sociologist and treats the art world as a set of tribes worth studying properly. Each chapter is one day: an evening sale at Christie's, a studio visit, the crit room at an art school, Art Basel, the Turner Prize, a magazine office, the Venice Biennale. Nobody is mocked and nobody is spared either. You come out knowing how a price is actually made, how a reputation is built before the money arrives, and why the same fifty people keep turning up in the room.

Wolfe's claim is simple and rude. By the middle of the twentieth century, he says, you could not see a painting without first reading the critic who told you what it meant, so the writing became the art and the canvas turned into a footnote. He names names, mostly American critics, and he is enjoying himself far too much throughout. It is short, it is unfair in places, and it says out loud the thing that half the people in any modern art room are silently thinking.

Chevalier invents a life for the girl in Vermeer's painting. Griet is sixteen, sent to work as a maid in a Delft household where the master paints slowly and sells rarely, and the book is really about looking. She learns to grind pigment, to notice that the corner of a room holds five colours rather than one, to see what her employer sees. There is a plot involving a jealous wife and a menacing patron, and it is fine, but the studio is the reason to read it.