See What You're Missing

By Will Gompertz

Artists are expert lookers: they have learned to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvelous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

In his inimitable engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists—from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world—to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

In See What You’re Missing we learn, for example, how Guo Xi can help us to see beauty, how David Hockney helps us to see colour, and how Frida Kahlo can help us see pain. In doing so we come to know the exhilarating feeling of being truly alive. See What You’re Missing is at once entertaining and enlightening art history while delivering empowering new insights to its reader.

Hardcover, 368 pages, 2023.
36 color illustrations.

9 x 6 in.