Best Art History books/articles

[Imenol]

Hey! I thought I would start a thread to share books and articles that people have found influential in their own thinking. The point is not to make a list of great books, but rather to get a better sense of which books have resonated with people on a particular way, perhaps shaping our choices of subfield or our decision to pursue art history. From the top of my head, I can think of Kubler's The Shape of Time, Koerner's Bosch and Bruegel, Nagel and Wood's Anachronic Renaissance, Alper's The Art of Describing, Bahrani's The Graven Image, and Michael Baxandall's The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. What about you? Which books have influenced you and why? 

[Pius Aeneas]

Probably the most influential for me are Baxandall and Panofsky. Obviously Baxandall is quite an important figure in the field in general, but in particular I've been influenced by Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy as well his article "Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle." For Panofsky it's Meaning in the Visual Arts, but I imagine I'll end up reading a lot more of his work because iconography is an important aspect of my own research. Baxandall's work helped me better understand the whole social history of art approach. Merleau-Ponty's essay "Eye and Mind" was also extremely useful in making me think about things from a different perspective. Honestly, most of the scholars I read for my theory and method course in the first year of my PhD deepened my understanding of the myriad ways of looking at and understanding art. 

[mrssalad]

Mieke Bal changed my life!

[Imenol]

Panofsky is great of course, and I find Baxandall endlessly fascinating, although I would have picked The Limewood Sculptures over Painting and Experience. What about Georges Kubler? Is there any better initial sentence than "Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world." 

[mrssalad]

Oh shit. I forgot my actual favorite book: Deleuze on Francis Bacon. 

[maxhgns]

In addition to Baxandall's Painting and Experience and Patterns of Intention: Linda Nochlin's Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, for obvious reasons. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir's African Art and Authenticity: A Text With a Shadow for pretty similar reasons (it's pointing out similar problems with the authenticity and cultural purity narratives as Nochlin is with the canon and the genius narrative). Also Bill Holm's Northwest Coast Indian Art, An Analysis of Form, because despite its flaws it's still a really good treatment of First Nations art, and there's really not very much of that out there.

(If you'll forgive the intrusion of a philosopher rather than a fellow art historian!)