ART
The King’s Painter
The Life and Times of
Hans Holbein
by Franny Moyle
Apollo £35
The Tudor court seems so
vivid to us in large part thanks
to Hans Holbein’s matchless
portraits; yet, ironically, little
is known about the painter
himself. In her generously
illustrated study, Franny Moyle
nevertheless manages to
construct a compelling image
of a multifarious artist — he
also painted Catholic
altarpieces and frontispieces
for Protestant tracts — who
became the artist-witness to
the religious and dynastic
upheavals of the age.
Francis Bacon
Revelations
by Mark Stevens and
Annalyn Swan
Wm Collins £30
“You always have to go too far
to get anywhere at all, in art or
life,” Francis Bacon said, and
Francis Bacon: Revelations
shows how true he was to his
aphorism. Stevens and Swan
chronicle, in minute detail,
the rough-trade men, the
sadomasochism and the Soho
carousing, but also how the
self-taught painter created
works of nihilistic despair that
captured the dark spirit of the
20th century.
Napoleon’s Plunder
And the Theft of Veronese’s
Feast
by Cynthia Saltzman
Thames & Hudson £25
When, as a young general on
the up, Napoleon conquered
Italy, he stripped it of the
cream of its artworks and
sent them back to France to
buff his own burgeoning
glory. The largest purloined
treasure was Veronese’s huge
The Wedding Feast at Cana
and it forms the central strand
of Cynthia Saltzman’s
absorbing and chilling
narrative of this collision of
soft and hard power.Albert & the Whale
by Philip Hoare
4th Estate £16.99Albrecht Dürer was
omnivorous in his interests.
Philip Hoare’s elegant and
vivid examination of the artist
is similarly wide-ranging and
personal. For Hoare, Thomas
Mann and the Manhattan
Project become part of his
story, alongside innumerable
telling details about Dürer
himself, especially the whale
beached on the Zeeland coast
he was so desperate to see.Magritte
A Life
by Alex Danchev
Profile £30René Magritte’s bowler-hatted
men, floating apples et al
have become universal
images for an out-of-kilter
world. In Magritte: A Life, the
first significant biography of
the artist, Alex Danchev —
who died shortly before
finishing the book — presents
the most subtly subversive
surrealist. While he lived a
quietly bourgeois life in a
Brussels suburb (he even
painted in a suit and tie),
Magritte said he was “always
on the lookout for what has
never been seen”.Creation
Art Since the Beginning
by John-Paul Stonard
Bloomsbury £30With Creation, John-Paul
Stonard has written a worthy
and richly illustrated
successor to Ernst Gombrich’s
fabled The Story of Art. WhereGombrich’s story was western
and predominantly male,
Stonard’s is one of
connections that starts with
Indonesian cave paintings
50,000 years ago and
effortlessly takes in
everyone from the sculptors
of the Great Sphinx of Giza
to the heirs of Picasso.Art of the Extreme:
1905-1914
by Philip Hook
Profile £30The decade 1905-14 was the
age of the “isms” — of
movements such as fauvism,
cubism, futurism and
expressionism. In Art of the
Extreme Philip Hook takes a
fresh and often wry look at
this efflorescence. As he deftly
shows, not everything in the
art world was as feverish as in
the avant-garde quartiers of
Paris and the new artists had
to fight for a place in an
ecosystem that was content
without them.The Italian Renaissance
Altarpiece
by David Ekserdjian
Yale UP £60Painting altarpieces was the
aim of almost every Italian
artist of note from the 14th to
the 16th centuries, but their
combination of colour,
invention, richness,
architecture, scale and the
numinous does not always
sit comfortably with the
modern eye. David
Ekserdjian’s book is a
sumptuous and scholarly
study of a form he sifts into
categories — icons, narratives
and mysteries — to reveal its
development and subtleties.Hokusai
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
by Andreas Marks
Taschen £125Andreas Marks’s book is a
visually stunning reproduction
of the great Japanese
printmaker’s most famous
series. The book justifies its
hefty price tag by its sheer
luxury — large format, silk
bound, slip-cased and with
Japanese open binding. The
fame of The Great Wave has
tended to drown out
Hokusai’s other pictures, but
here, printed full size, they
can be appreciated for their
compositional brilliance and
revealing detail. cInside the
minds of
the masters
Portrait of a lady Jane
Seymour by Hans HolbeinHolbein, Hokusai, Bacon and Dürer
all star in Michael Prodger’s choice of
the year’s most dazzling books
Hogarth
Life in Progress
by Jacqueline
Riding
Profile
£30William Hogarth is too easily
seen as the John Bull of
painters, a bluff xenophobe
who showed British life in all
its earthiness and humour.Jacqueline Riding, however,
reveals a far more nuanced
and interesting man.
Alongside his role as national
satirist, he was an art
theorist, an innovator and a
painter who fought hard to
raise the standing of British
art. He emerges here as a
one-man awkward squad
who, in his own telling, knew
“I was never right until I had
been wrong”.OUR BOOK OF THE YEAR
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