A confession: I like art books. If I really enjoy an exhibition, I’ll buy the accompanying book or catalogue. And it doesn’t even have to be an exhibition; if a book captures my eye or imagination, the store or gift shop just made a sale. This fixation (my wife calls it an obsession) started about 10 years ago. I can’t say anything really triggered it.
What these books allow me to do is relive the exhibition. I can look at the exhibition catalogs for Ai Weiwei or Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and I am right there in the exhibition rooms, responding to each work almost the same as I did when I was there in person. The catalogs also, if they’re well done (and they usually are), include commentary by the museum’s experts or other scholars about the artist and the works.
I think there’s something else at work, a well-known phenomenon. As you age, creative activities like art, symphony music, dance, and theater become more important. Or perhaps you simply have more time.
These are some recent exhibition catalogs and art books that I recommend as worthwhile.
Frans Hals is the catalog for the exhibition (still going on right now) at the National Gallery in London. We had the opportunity to see it while on vacation, and it was excellent. The only Hals work I was really familiar with was “The Laughing Cavalier,” part of the Wallace Collection (also in London). But the paintings, and to see so many of them, were a wonder. The man could paint facial expressions.The Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum by Ian Jenkins was first published in 2007. When I first saw the marbles, back in 1983, they were called the Elgin Marbles. Greece wants them repatriated, the British Museum seems amenable to a “long-term loan,” but the British government so far has said no. I’d hoped to see them again, but the room was “closed for cleaning.” Missing them, possibly forever, prompted me to buy the book in the museum’s book shop. A dinner was held about three weeks later in the room, with the chairman of the museum indicating some support for the idea of sending them back.
Turner on Tour by Christine Riding (and others) concerns two paintings that J.M.W. Turner finished in 1826, one of the harbor of Dieppe and the other the river port of Cologne. They represent “Turner as traveler,” and they were significantly different from his previous work. You can look at both and think, “Yep, without a doubt, they’re Turners,” but the text explains how they’re different and how they represent a major breakthrough for the artist.
I bought Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien less because of the artworks depicted and more because I’m a Ringhead. Selected and including the text by Christopher Tolkien, his father’s literary executor, the book shows scenes drawn by the artist to illustrate many of his owns works. So if you want to see Bilbo Baggins’ home at Bag End, or the trolls, or how Tolkien thought of Lothlorien, this is the book. It was first published in 1992 and remains one of the bestselling books about Tolkien’s works.
In 2019, the Courtauld Collection, a small but high quality art museum in Somerset House in London, loaned a good many of its artworks to the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The result was the exhibition entitled The Courtauld Collection: A Vision for Impressionism. The exhibition catalog is about the closest book you’ll find to be the “museum’s catalog,” and it’s stunning to see all of what’s included. We visited the museum in September (it had recently reopened after a major renovation). The book is a hefty hardback, but it was on sale, so I calculated the weight and figured I could bring it home in checked luggage.
In 2017 and 2018, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., hosted Paul Cezanne: Painting People. The exhibition catalog is relatively small, but it’s filled with the portraits painted by the artist over his entire career. It has an introductory essay by art historian Mary Tompkins Lewis and succinct and informative summaries about each of the works. I might have bought this one out of a sense of nostalgia; the first art exhibition we attended as a young married couple was one of Cezanne at the Houston Art Museum back in the 1970s.
Some Monday Readings
‘A veritable manifesto for modern art’: Gauguin’s last literary masterpiece in private hands arrives at the Courtauld – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.
How a group of ancient sculptures set off a dispute between Greece and Britain – Associated Press via NBC News.
What’s in a collection of Ancient Greek sculptures name? – Mario Trabucco della Torretta at The Critic Magazine.
Winter Light in Spitalfields – Spitalfields Life.
Poetry Prompt: Pearls & Moons - Tweetspeak Poetry.
