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• Available in print & ebook, from Amazon, and from other stores via Ingram (9781088217214 print, 9781088217290 ebook)
• 6×9″; 189 pp.; 203 color illustrations.

In Manhattan’s Union Square, a 164-year-old equestrian sculpture of George Washington presides over throngs of students, commuters, shoppers, and protesters. Few glance at it, much less scrutinize it. Yet although I’ve passed through Union Square thousands of times, I always pause to view it and it always makes me smile.

Why? Because Washington reminds me of ideas and values that are critical to the way I choose to live my life. Time after time, the sight of this sculpture provides me with emotional fuel and great pleasure.

Why learn to look closely at art you love?

Favorite artworks play a very special role in our lives. They provide us with enjoyment and inspiration. They help us recall important events of the past and project a course of action in the future. They help us relax when the time is right and exert ourselves when appropriate. Art, in short, helps us to live and makes life more enjoyable. That’s why we value favorite works so highly.

Given the vital role these works play in our lives, it’s worth asking: Are we extracting all the pleasure we can from them? Or are we missing something – perhaps something crucial – that would make them even more meaningful, more powerful, more life-serving?

My method of looking at art

The summer after I graduated from high school, I discovered that art wasn’t merely a way to fill a blank wall. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” said my high-school art teacher, Mrs. Hartman, as she handed me what looked like the largest, thickest book in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. To eyes accustomed to garden gnomes and rock-star posters, the illustrations in H.W. Janson’s History of Art shone outrageously, extrava­gantly beautiful.

And there was more than beauty. When studying the art of the Renaissance, for instance, I realized I could see what people of that place and time considered important. I began to think not just about colors and shapes, but about the ideas each artist was expressing. I began to look, too, for connections of those ideas with the fundamental ideas of history, science, technology, politics, and philosophy.

Some years later, I heard Mary Ann Sures give a brilliant talk about the ideas and meaning of several paintings and sculptures. I left the talk eager to go out and analyze art as she did. But I quickly realized that I had no reliable way to get from the visual to verbal – from looking at a work to thinking and talking about it. So in the 1990s, I set out to develop a systematic method for doing that. Among the elements that helped it evolve were a college course on explication de texte and Leonard Peikoff’s course “Eight Great Plays As Literature and As Philosophy.”

By 2000 or so, I had finally developed a method that gave me great pleasure to use, whether I was thinking about art on my own or discussing it with others. It involves looking closely at both subject and style in order to understand a work’s underlying meaning, or theme. The method is easy to grasp and to remember: its steps are set out on pages 10-12 of the book.

Why this book?

Over the past twenty years, I’ve applied my method in several hundred essays on sculpture. In 2003 I self-published nineteen of them as Forgotten Delights: The Producers. That book includes chapters on outdoor sculptures in Manhattan representing explorers, inventors, engineers, businessmen, and workers whose thoughts and efforts reshaped New York, the United States, and the world. In 2006, The Objective Standard published “Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love,” which included lengthy analyses of two sculptures. In 2007, New York University Press published Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide. It was designed as a guidebook, with fifty-four essays arranged geographically. Sam Roberts in The New York Times praised it as “a perfect walking-tour accompaniment to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better appreciate statues famous and obscure.”

The sixteen essays in Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love have all appeared either in the works mentioned above or on my website, DianneDuranteWriter.com. I happen to agree with Horace Greeley, who asserted that “To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate – nothing to say that has not been better said already – that is to inflict a real injury on mankind.” So you might well ask: why am I publishing these essays in book form?

Answer: In this book, the essays have a different goal. I’m showing you my method for looking at sculptures so that you can learn to apply it to your own favorite works, in detail, in depth, and on your own. Except for Chapters 2 and 3, which include some preliminary material, the essays progress from simple to more complex. They range from the lone figure of Nathan Hale to the allegorical group Continents. Three of the essays (Chapters 2, 3, and 5) look at particular sculptures in great detail. But you need not spend that much time on all sculptures. I’ve also included essays that look at particular aspects of a sculpture’s subject and style more briefly. Abundant color illustrations are included because if you can’t see a sculpture in person, the next best option is to see photos of it from multiple angles.

But why would you take the time to do an analysis of the sort I demonstrate? I can suggest two positive reasons and one negative one.

The negative reason is to be able to defend your favorites. Studying art involves comparison, contrast, and context-setting. For that, the broad knowledge of art historians and critics can be very valuable. Since the late nineteenth century, however, art historians and critics have arrogated to themselves the role of judging whether a piece is art, and whether it’s good or bad art. (For more on why and how that happened, see my Seismic Shifts in Subject and Style, available on Amazon.) But art historians and critics inevitably judge artworks by their own values, which are not always – not even often! – going to be in accord with yours. They may condemn a work you love. They may insist that bizarre objects such as an unmade bed or a cow preserved in formaldehyde are worthy of your attention and admiration. (Not made-up examples!) If you can observe a favorite artwork closely and discuss it objectively, you’ll be better able to defend your own reaction to and interpretation of it.

On the positive side: usually there’s much more to a work of art than we can glean in a passive viewing. To enjoy it to the fullest, we need to approach it with an active mind. That might mean diving into the details of the sculpture. It might mean working to understand the sculpture’s theme. It might mean evaluating the sculpture in philosophical, emotional, esthetic, or art-historical terms.

Also on the positive side: using my method will help you find more art that you love. Why? Because if you realize that you love a particular work for its subject, an aspect of its style, or its theme, you can more easily seek out similar works.

I hope this book gives you hours of enjoyment as you read it … and decades of enjoyment as you look with new eyes at your current and future favorite works of art.

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• AVAILABLE NOW at $6 for the Kindle version and $30 for the print version. Format of the paperback: 6×9″; 189 pp.; 203 color illustrations.
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