Christmas art books
David Ekserdjian
The seemingly unstoppable rise of the exhibition catalogue happily does not mean that nothing else gets published, and my selection of glossy delights to drive away the Boxing Day blues has more than its fair share of goodies that were not born in museums. The Royal Tombs of Egypt by Zahi Hawass (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) is a spectacular case in point, which not only contains numerous gorgeous photographs of the paintings and carvings within them, but also some remarkable six-page fold-outs. Hawass is above all concerned with the subject-matter and meaning of these decorations, which were based upon such texts as the Book of the Dead, and proves to be an exemplary guide to their intricate iconography.
Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting by David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Yale, £40) is a Washington/Vienna coproduction, but it does also serve as a lasting memorial to one of the great turning-points in the history of Western painting. Better yet, it balances its consideration of the giants of its title by paying appropriate attention to such fascinating lesser figures as Giovanni Agostino da Lodi and Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo at their very best.
Still in the Serenissima, Palladio’s Venice by Tracy E. Cooper (Yale, £45) examines the relationship between the most influential of all architects and the most beautiful of cities in a highly novel way. While doing justice to the familiar landmarks — principally San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore — the author also engages in authoritative and absorbing burrowing into the near-misses and might-have-beens. It is a spooky thought that Palladio wanted to replace the Doge’s Palace with a new design in the wake of a disastrous fire in 1577, but in most instances the dead ends are a source of regret, not relief.
Rembrandt is one of the only old masters who seemingly cannot be studied to death, and not just because of the endless wrangling about the dividing-line between his oeuvre and the productions of his pupils. Two monographs — Rembrandt’s Universe by Gary Schwartz (Thames & Hudson, £40) and Rembrandt: Images and Metaphors by Christian and Astrid Tümpel (Haus Books, £30 ) — offer very different approaches to the fourth centenary of his birth. In essence, the academic Tümpels treat Rembrandt’s career chronologically, but also include chapters which function as asides on particular topics, whereas the more arresting but far from unscholarly Schwartz’s chapter titles (‘Earning and Spending’, ‘Patrons’, ‘Landscape’, and so on) reveal his thematic structure. Both are well worth reading, but only Schwartz has written a new book. The Tümpels’ is an update of a work first published in 1986, and just occasionally it shows: the magnificent ‘Rape of Europa’ of 1632 acquired by the Getty in 1995 is still captioned as on loan to the Metropolitan Museum from a private collection.
Even the treasures of the Getty cannot quite compare with the uncanny distinction of the collection at the nearby Norton Simon. Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, Volume I by Richard R. Brettell and Stephen F. Eisenman (Yale, £60) is an exceptionally luxurious catalogue of just a part of its holdings, and to turn its pages is to benefit from a masterclass in what an eye for quality such as Mr Simon’s can — or at least could — achieve. The commentary is equally distinguished, often using the individual entries for wide-ranging disquisitions on the relations between, say, a Manet still life and its antecedents in 17th-century Holland and 18th-century France.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings by Wendy Baron (Yale, £55) does not include the thriller-writer Patricia Cornwell (who thinks her hero was Jack the Ripper) in its bibliography. Instead, this massive catalogue raisonné represents the culmination of nearly half a century of engagement with its subject, and will probably never be surpassed. For some of us, Sickert is not the most lovable of painters, but he is utterly compelling, not least for his extraordinary variety. The Camden Town nudes may indeed be his finest hour, but there is so much else.
Sickert (1860-1942) spent almost precisely one half of his life in the 19th century and the other in the 20th, but he was never drawn to the distortions and abstractions of the avantgarde. An utterly distinctive aspect of that brave new world is fascinatingly brought to life in Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí by William H. Robinson and Jordi Falgàs (Yale, £40). This is the catalogue of a show which is currently at the Cleveland Museum of Art and will move to the Metropolitan next year, but at over 500 pages it certainly qualifies as a major study of its chosen theme. Self-evidently, the big names are flagged up in the title to pull in the punters, but the approach is resolutely non-monographic, and there is also an admirable refusal to let painting rule the roost unchallenged. The result will prove to be a visual education for all but the most specialised specialists.
The back cover of Visiting Picasso by Elizabeth Cowling (Thames & Hudson, £25) describes Roland Penrose as ‘a Samuel Pepys at the court of King Pablo’, although Boswell seems the more natural precedent. Be that as it may, this is a wonderfully deft handling of a body of archival material whose gripping content nevertheless absolutely requires Cowling’s commentary. The photographs, many of them by Lee Miller, Penrose’s wife, include such surreal offerings as Penrose in drag and Picasso with Gary — as opposed to Douglas — Cooper.
Lee Miller was a very good photographer, but Cartier-Bresson was a great one. Now Scrap Book by Henri Cartier-Bresson, supplemented by Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography by Pierre Assouline (both Thames & Hudson, £45 and £20), combine to serve as a fitting memorial to the artist and the man. The scrap book was assembled in connection with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, and contains many of HCB’s most unforgettable images alongside others which were new to me. It even includes one of the two photographs he ever cropped — a miraculous snap of a man jumping across a puddle, which is seen in both forms. The most obvious emendation is the removal of a blurry fence at the left margin, but HCB also closed in on his subject to forge an incomparably tauter and stronger composition.
The name of Maya Lin is much less well known on this side of the Atlantic than in her native America, but even here her most celebrated creation — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC — is justly revered. Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes by Richard Andrews and John Beardsley (Yale, £25) is the catalogue of an exhibition in Seattle which assembles a number of remarkable interactions with the natural world. Some are in the form of sculptures made of plywood, pins or wires, while others involve art in the landscape.
The physical properties of wood are the key to the book I have carefully saved till last, because it is the one I know I will turn to more than any of the others. This is Carved Altarpieces: Masterpieces of the Late Gothic by Rainer Kahsnitz and Achim Bunz (Thames & Hudson, £85), an irresistible celebration of an art form the best examples of which have remained in situ. I have seen Veit Stoss’s incomparable altarpiece in Cracow, but Michael Pacher at Sankt Wolfgang and Tilman Riemenschneider at Rothenburg ob der Tauber and many, many more are treats in store. No reproduction can ever hope to compare with an actual work of art, but in the meantime this vast tome and its luscious details are undoubtedly the next best thing.
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