A History of Pictures

You can find all kinds of beautifully printed surveys of art history for your library, but why not choose as your guide the charming, deeply knowledgable, and idiosyncratically opinionated David Hockney (whose own paintings are a necessity in any such survey), in conversation with the critic Martin Gayford? They leap from subject to subject, from the Mona Lisa to Marlene Dietrich, with a puckish curiosity, always with the thought in mind that, as Hockney says, "Any picture is an account of looking at something," and always with a refreshing and irreverent understanding of how pictures are actually made.