David Ekserdjian

The Duke of Wellington also invades Christmas art books

Apart from Charles Wellesley’s study of the Iron Duke’s victorious portraits, a round-up of the year’s art books inlcudes Judith Zilczer’s A Way of Living, Nicola del Roscio’s The Essential Cy Twombly, David Dawson’s A Painter’s Progress, Jan Verwoert’s Wolfgang Tillmans, Joanna Cannon’s Religious Poverty, Visual Riches, Judith Collins’s Sculpture Today,  Michael W. Cole’s Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini, Emily Braun’s Cubism, Sheila R. Canby’s The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp and The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Toronto

Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning (Phaidon, £59.95, Spectator Bookshop, £53.95) examines its hero’s career from his extraordinarily accomplished — and resolutely conventional — teenage productions, by way of his glorious middle years, on to the final works, which were created when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Lavishly illustrated not only with works by the artist, but also with photographs of him and his friends, it does full justice to his towering — if not always entirely lovable — achievement.

A broadly similar approach to another modern great is adopted in The Essential Cy Twombly (Thames & Hudson, £50, Spectator Bookshop, £42) by Nicola del Roscio, Simon Schama, Kirk Varnedoe, Laszlo Glozer, and Thierry Greub, the obvious difference being that a mere three years after his death, it is far harder to be sure whether posterity will agree with the selection.

Altogether more quirky is David Dawson’s A Painter’s Progress: A Portrait of Lucian Freud (Cape, £35, Spectator Bookshop, £30), which makes no attempt to conform to the standard life-and-works model, and instead offers a fly-on-the-wall — and all but wordless — photographic chronicle of Freud’s life from the mid-1990s until his death in 2011. All human — and quite a lot of animal — life is here, with everyone from HM the Queen (clothed) to a procession of girls and boys (naked) being subjected to the aged magus’s pitiless gaze.

Two superlative photographers are the subjects of major monographs. Clément Cheroux’s Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now (Thames & Hudson, £45, Spectator Bookshop, £40) brings together greatest hits and unpublished novelties to offer a new vision of an established master.

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