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Dublin is also the home of one of the most celebrated of all illuminated manuscripts, and The Book of Kells by Bernard Meehan (Thames & Hudson, £60) is a gorgeous tribute to that extraordinary masterpiece. Given that the work in question comprises no fewer than 680 surviving pages (340 folios), it is inevitable that what we are offered here is a generous selection of highlights, accompanied by a learned and – pun most certainly intended — illuminating commentary.
John Everett Millais by Jason Rosenfeld (Phaidon, £39.95) tackles a major figure in a new way, by the simple expedient of seeking to see his achievement whole. Rosenfeld is one of the troika responsible for the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition currently at Tate Britain, but it is his emphatic defence of the artist’s subsequent career — all too often construed as a story of decline — that eloquently succeeds in balancing the books. As it happens, some of us have long preferred the drich — to employ the appropriate Scots word — late landscapes, often set north o’ the border, to all that PRB stuff.
The other dominant category of book, at least this time round, involves either a single — and highly personal — voice exploring a particular more or less loosely framed topic, or a shared theme seen from a multiplicity of angles. English Graphic by Tom Lubbock (Frances Lincoln, £20) does not conceal its origins in the late critic’s Independent columns, and is arguably all the better for it — deeply quirky but also endlessly stimulating, and above all determinedly visual. Lubbock really looked at art, and makes his readers look with him, which makes him a glorious antidote to the dominance of guide-dog and white-stick art history that all too often appears to rule the roost these days.
Medieval Modern: Art out of Time by Alexander Nagel (Thames & Hudson, £29.95) is altogether more thesis-driven, but is a wide-ranging bravura display of intellectual erudition and exemplary curiosity. Whether, for instance, one ultimately agrees that Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull is a medieval reliquary revisited or not, the idea can hardly fail to stimulate the little grey cells.
Both In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today’s Leading Artists edited by Simon Grant (Thames & Hudson, £19.95) and Sanctuary: Britain’s Artists and their Studios edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi (Thames & Hudson, £48) focus on practitioners, albeit in profoundly different ways. The former is a sort of ‘Desert Island Pictures’ — or more strictly works of art, where the choices are invariably fascinating, but the explanations are considerably more of a curate’s egg. The latter is a sort of update of Robertson, Russell, and Snowdon’s Private View of 1965 (and there are at least one or two artists who are in both), which did admittedly explore the art world in its entirety.
Here, in any event, there are armies of wonderful through the keyhole photographs, but once again the words — in the form of interviews — are not all equally gripping. Interestingly, in 1965 nobody seems to have refused to play ball, whereas in the 2012 manifestation both Hirst and Hockney are missing.
Overviews of periods and styles may look easy to pull off, but are not, so both Baroque and Rococo by Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Phaidon, £17.95) and Pop Art by Bradford R. Collins (Phaidon, £17.95) are to be commended for their artful balancing of the familiar with the less expected. The first does so by ranging both west and east, to Central and South America, but also to the Philippines, while the second looks beyond the narrow confines of Pop to include the likes of Richard Prince and Jeff Koons.
An even harder task is the presentation of a whole new artistic universe from a dangerously familiar period. Yet that is what Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900 by Richard Thomson (Yale, £50) so magisterially accomplishes. By boldly stating at the outset that ‘Naturalism was the dominant aesthetic of late 19th-century France’, he paves the way for a revelatory exploration of the works of all sorts of more or less forgotten artists, who are seen alongside the likes of Monet and Degas. Even turning the pages and looking at the illustrations before reading the consistently compelling text is an education in itself.
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