What Art Can Tell Us About Love, Nick Trend, Laurence King Publishing, 208pp, £18.99 (hb)
The UK journalist Nick Trend explores how passion, love and sex has fuelled artists such as Francis Bacon, Sandro Botticelli, Caravaggio and Dora Carrington, analysing how lovers and muses have been caught on canvas over the centuries. Trend says that when the artist is in love with his subject, “everything suddenly becomes more complicated”. Famous couples discussed include the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who painted each other for 25 years, along with Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. In a section on Francis Bacon and George Dyer, Trend highlights Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (1963), saying: “There is coldness here as well as desire, especially in the glassy-eyed stare and ugly distortion of Dyer’s nose in the central panel… it was only the beginning of Bacon’s attempts to capture what Dyer meant to him.”
Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art, Giovanni Aloi, Getty Publications, 224pp, £30 (hb)
This overview examines how plants have been represented in art since antiquity, a subject that has been overlooked to a degree. “Despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics,” says a publisher’s statement. Chapters cover topics such as “Words and images: A botanical alliance” and “Colonial roots and symbolic blooms”. “For better or for worse, plants have made us humans. It is now time to give them credit for the immense role they have played in our creative evolutionary journey,” writes the author, Giovanni Aloi, in the introduction. Works featured include Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian (around 1520) and Gustave Courbet’s Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase (1862).
Against Morality, Rosanna McLaughlin, Floating Opera Press, 72pp, £15 (pb)
The central thesis of Rosanna McLaughlin’s timely book is: should art be determined by political ideals? In the era of “wokedom”, she looks at the myths and messages that have built up around famed artists such as Andy Warhol, Dana Schutz and Artemisia Gentileschi, “another artist who has been subjected to a dubious moralistic glow-up”, she writes. “[Gentileschi] has latterly been transformed into a cipher for MeToo feminism and the paradigmatic example of the ‘overlooked woman artist’,” McLaughlin says. A publisher’s statement adds: “McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralising approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all.”
Self-Portraits: From 1800 to the Present, Philippe Ségalot and Morgane Guillet, Assouline, 148pp, £110 (hb)
The dealer Philippe Ségalot and studio manager Morgane Guillet have “curated their ultimate collection of self-portraits, alternating between iconic and lesser-known figures whose portraits deeply moved them”, says a publisher’s statement. In the introduction, the art historian Robert Storr gives an overview of the artists featured, saying: “Most frank is Egon Schiele’s portrayal of his sinewy, emaciated body, on which every chest, belly, and pubic hair quivers with an electric charge. This is portraiture in extremis, a genre that other expressionists and sex-on-the-brain erotomaniac stylists would go on to explore throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.” Other artists featured in the chronological survey include Paula Modersohn-Becker, Elizabeth Peyton and Maurizio Cattelan.
Peter Joseph: A Monograph, Estate of Peter Joseph, Lisson Gallery, 466pp, $80 (hb)
A new monograph outlines the work of the late UK artist Peter Joseph, known for his bold experiments with form and colour who was influenced by Mark Rothko and Old Master painters such as Claude Lorrain and Tintoretto. The publication charts Joseph’s evolution “from his large scale and daring environmental works of the 1960s to his meditative two-colour paintings of the 1970s”, according to a publisher’s statement. Following Joseph’s death in 2020, the Lisson Gallery founder Nicholas Logsdail said that he was “a great master of colour, light, space, proportions, the foreground, the background and the mysterious intermediate space in between”. The monograph coincides with an exhibition in London, Peter Joseph: The Early Works, which focuses on the artist’s career from 1964 to 1978 (until 15 March).
