Will Gompertz (What Are You Looking At?), former director of the Tate Galleries and BBC arts editor, shares his expertise in art and arts criticism in bite-size but insightful pieces in See What You're Missing: New Ways of Looking at the World Through Art, which presents a diverse sample of the world's major masters and explores their unique ways of seeing. This book, which acknowledges such influences as John Berger's Ways of Seeing, combines two types of instruction: how to look at a piece of art, and how to apply the artist's way of looking to one's everyday life. See What You're Missing features 31 artists, including Peter Paul Rubens and Kara Walker, and each entry explores new ways of seeing.
Gompertz highlights, for example, Jennifer Packer, a contemporary artist exploring Black representation in portraiture whose work is often tied to societal or cultural issues. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) was created in response to the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020. Gompertz identifies Packer's way of seeing as "Seeing What's Not There," noting that she is primarily concerned with absence. He explains: "Packer argues that context and detail are always missing, that an image can never be comprehensive. There is always something absent." In so doing, he helps readers see her work with more nuance, and the ways in which she encourages people to examine social issues with an eye toward what is omitted. Whether looking at Cy Twombly or Frida Kahlo, Gompertz invites readers to see like the artist and then to apply that way of looking to the world. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian