FYI: The Rijksmuseum in Netherlands has their entire collection digitised and available. It was mentioned here a while back.

Totally agree - the essays/papers/artist ephemera in most of these books are impossible to find and rarely reprinted. I've always found it strange that looking at art is pretty common but reading/talking about art in a critical way is seen as too academic/inaccessible for most people. I hope that by putting this stuff into the public domain more people get excited about Art History - it's a super interesting field that has a lot to offer and learning how to do visual analysis is pretty useful in a ton of different fields.

For me, when I walk through an art museum, my favorite "description" tags are one that are objective - "here's what this art is depicting (if it's not clear), here's some neat historical context, maybe here's a little bit of what the artist said about the work or how it was received."

But then there's tags (at least in MFAH) that were obviously written by someone else and are completely subjective. My favorite one to lambast is just a painting of a black square on a white background, and the description is a 400 word essay about how the work "challenges the boundaries of man" and other phrases that to me are nonsense.

I get that it's easy to pick on Modern Art but I feel sticking to the objective is still possible in that field.

The Bulletins are nice. I particularly enjoy the "recent acquisitions" Bulletins they put out to showcase the highlights of what they've added in the last couple years. Those cover objects from broad swaths of history, from antiquity right up to near-present day.

They say a bit about each object and usually include something about why it was an important item to add to their collection. Some nice perspectives in there.

If his civilisation television series is anything to go by, probably not the best person to read as far as learning about history goes.