Martin Gayford

‘Teaching someone to draw is teaching them to look’: the year’s best art books

Subjects range from a Paleolithic bone carving to Banksy’s graffiti, via colour concepts, romanticism, tattoos and mirror painting

Self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer, aged 13. From The Story of Drawing by Susan Owens. [Bridgeman Images] 
issue 07 December 2024

Colour, the painter Patrick Heron once proclaimed, is a continent that artists have yet to explore. The mammoth two-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen, £150) catalogues numerous attempts to map this mysterious chromatic domain, from the late 17th century to the mid 20th. It quickly becomes clear that this area is infinitely vast.

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