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. One only has to glance at the plates of the ‘Viennese Colour Cabinet’ (1794) – a whole column of blue-greens – to realise that.
The effect of these technical diagrams is beautiful in the manner of abstract art. The illustrations from Goethe’s On Colour Theory (1810-12) could easily have been produced at the Bauhaus, while the delicate colour ‘blots’ that accompanied the Georgian flower painter Mary Gartside’s ‘Essay on Light and Shade’ (1810) look positively Abstract Expressionist.
Almost 70 years ago, Niklaus Pevsner called his book The Englishness of English Art a contribution to ‘the geography of art’ (rather than its history). The same could be said of Bendor Grosvenor’s The Invention of British Art (Elliott & Thompson, £40). This is difficult terrain. National schools and characters are out of intellectual fashion. But Grosvenor makes an eloquent and entertaining case that ‘a distinctly British form of art’ was ‘invented’ by the landscape painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The process, he notes wryly, took ‘a few thousand years’.
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Accordingly, Grosvenor begins his account with a horse’s head engraved on a piece of bone around 13,000 years ago, found in a Derbyshire cave (into which he suggests George Stubbs might have peeked). En route, he discusses many works by artists of dubious Britishness, including Holbein and Van Dyck, and attributes the ‘Wilton Diptych’ – sometimes seen as the greatest painting produced in late medieval England – to André Beauneveu, a Netherlandish artist working in France. So: chauvinistic, this book isn’t.
In many ways, including religiously, topographically and climatically, the youthful environment of Caspar David Friedrich had a lot in common with that of his contemporaries Constable and Turner. Friedrich grew up in coastal Pomerania – a flat landscape with enormous skies not unlike those of East Anglia. He was a protestant who believed (or hoped) that divinity infused the natural world.
Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes (Prestel, £45) is the catalogue of an exhibition in Berlin celebrating Friedrich’s 250th anniversary. It is packed with new scholarship and reproductions of marvellous paintings and drawings, which do indeed have an affinity with the British romantics, but are chillier, with greater melancholy, and are even more preoccupied with vast empty spaces. You might say they are more German, except that Friedrich was born, and spent much of his life as, a citizen of Sweden.
Susan Owens’s The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art (Yale, £25) sets a puzzle. Namely, at what point does a work cease to be drawing and become something else, such as a painting or even a sculpture? Wisely, Owens takes the view that drawing cannot be closely defined, ‘nor should it be’. Her own expansive account of it would have pleased such advocates of drawing as Michelangelo, John Ruskin and David Hockney. All of these believed that the practice was fundamental. ‘Teaching someone to draw,’ as Hockney put it, ‘is teaching them to look.’ Accordingly, alongside Raphael, Leonardo and Rembrandt, Owens includes pastels by Degas and Rosalba Carriera, a Cézanne watercolour, a Chinese scroll, a Matisse cut-out (an example of drawing in pure colour) and many other beguiling things which fill this original and highly engaging survey.
MirrorMirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art by Michael Petry (Thames & Hudson, £45) explores a novel genre: art made out of looking glasses and other reflective surfaces. Mirrors have long been essential tools for painters – how else would you make a self-portrait? But only more recently have they become a popular material for what you might call sculpture. Petry collates and describes numerous examples by artists including Yayoi Kasama, Olafur Eliasson, Gary Hume and himself.
In Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art (Yale, £25), Matt Lodder tells the story of drawing indelibly on human bodies, as it has been practised in Europe and America since 1719, a time span that disproves the idea that tattooing is a recent fad. Lodder includes two clubland heroes from around 1900, both sons of MPs, whose torsos were embellished by a society tattooist practising in Jermyn Street. Those pictures are riveting – but as a medium, it must be admitted, tattooing is generally both repetitive and derivative.
Something similar could be said of graffiti, although Banksy would disagree. ‘Is graffiti art or vandalism?’ he once asked, only to answer emphatically: ‘That word has a lot of negative connotations and it alienates people, so no, I don’t like to use the word “art” at all.’ How Banksy Saved Art History (Thames & Hudson, £25) by Kelly Grovier gives away one of his secrets. He may not like the word, but Banksy is highly knowledgeable about the paintings and sculptures of the past. Indeed he often recycles them. His ‘Show Me the Monet’ depicts the pond at Giverny strewn with semi-submerged supermarket trolleys, while Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can has become a Tesco Value equivalent.
Early in his career, or so the story goes, Warhol was advised to paint what he loved –so he made pictures of money. One of these, ‘200 One Dollar Bills’ (1962), features in Money in Art: From Coinage to Crypto by David Trigg (HENI Publishing, £19.99). This survey of an overlooked subject makes the point that coins and notes are popular motifs in recent art (and indeed have been since the Renaissance). It also tends to demonstrate that, visually speaking, money is getting steadily duller. The golden currency in Titian’s ‘Danäe’ is glitteringly attractive; banknotes are duller – and it’s hard to make a picture of Bitcoin (although enterprising artists have marketed NFTs).
Personally, I much prefer art of the physical variety. My photography book of the year is Kasmin’s Camera (Art/Books, £30). John Kasmin was among the most stylish dealers of 1960s London, and like the most successful gallerists, he had a marvellously acute eye – which is also evident in these images from Kasmin’s albums. He took his camera wherever he went. Occasionally someone else, perhaps the subject of the preceding image, would pick it up and snap him. But most of these photos are by Kasmin.
His most celebrated client, David Hockney, features prominently. So do many of the cast of the British and American art worlds of half a century ago – Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Bruce Chatwin, Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin. It adds up to a gallery of who was who in that most glamorous of periods, the day before yesterday.
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