I think the best way to know an artist is by experiencing their work. By that measure, this book is delicious. 

And then there's the blurbs...

I can do without the hemming and hawwing of art historians, though some of the excerpts in here were useful as they provided context and technical detail. All the symbolic musings were near-useless on the face of it. Worse yet, they were written in clunky, monstrous sentences I don't care to remember.