The humorist Paul Jennings suggested that book reviewers could be divided into five vowel-coded groups: batchers, betjers (‘Betjer I could have written this better than him/her’), bitchers, botchers and butchers. In this review of the year’s art books, I am primarily a batcher — dealing with several books at one go. But from time to time I shall take leave to be a bitcher, though not, I hope, a botcher or butcher.

Two books stand out from the batch as absolute stars. Both are published by Prestel, a Munich-based publisher with tentacles in Berlin, London and New York. I am afraid either of the books will cost you £80, but they are value for money. They are Hokusai by Matthi Forrer and Albrecht Dürer by Norbert Wolf — each massive, superbly designed and written with dense but humane scholarship.

Batcher reviewers often lump together books that have no relation to each other. One thinks of Dr Johnson’s sour verdict on the Metaphysical poets: ‘the most heterogeneous elements, yoked by violence together’. Somebody uncharitable might say that about my present batch; but, in the case of Hokusai and Dürer, we have two kindred masters. One could well claim that Dürer stands in relation to Western art as Hokusai does in relation to oriental art: in each case, the supreme master of line. (I concede that, with Western art, that laurel might be bestowed on Rembrandt. Or Leonardo, whose attempts to represent the whorls and curlicues of sea-spume rival the purling foam-claws of Hokusai’s Great Wave.)

I do have one bitcher quarrel with the author of the Dürer book. Norbert Wolf begins his introduction by reproducing a Picasso self-portrait of 1902. He writes:

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