Art

Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is one of the most interesting artists working in Europe today, a philosophical painter of reality who works and re-works his pictures before he discovers something new, something worth saving. William Feaver, in this grand new monograph, calls Auerbach’s paintings ‘feats of concentration’, and stresses the hard work which goes into their construction, despite their appearance of spontaneity. Feaver has a gift for the evocative phrase: ‘Studied yet impulsive, ranging from darkness to radiance and from the declamatory to the subdued, they are keyed to an air of resolve as unguarded as joy, as involuntary as grief.’ This is a book strong on context. Auerbach emerges

These days, it is easy to take it for granted that Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the most popular of the old masters, yet it was not ever thus. In my Baedeker’s Central Italy (published exactly 100 years ago), he is acknowledged as having been ‘the chief of the Naturalist School’, but it is pointed out that from the outset ‘it was objected that his drawing was bad, that he failed in the essential of grouping the figures in his larger compositions.’ The first major exhibition of his works — in what has only very recently been established as the city of his birth, Milan — did not take place until 1951.

A postal strike would have been a disaster for Van Gogh. Letters were his lifeline and consolation. Not only did he receive through the mail his regular allowance from his brother Theo but, in letter after letter in return, he poured out his thoughts and feelings, recorded his work in progress and conveyed his impressions of books, people and places. In his often solitary existence, he was an avid recipient and kept in touch with a variety of correspondents, especially when he was in the South of France during the last two years of his life. The glory must be shared, however, with Theo, in that he kept Vincent’s letters,

Spectator readers will know that Andrew Lambirth is a romantic, a force for the literary and poetic approach to art criticism, so he is an admirably empathetic guide to Hoyland: In England the subversive underground Romantic spirit has never run dry, it consistently nourishes art in this country and erupts forth in strange and unexpected ways. The late work of John Hoyland is one such unpredictable manifestation. Mel Gooding’s standard monograph covers Hoyland’s career to 2006, but such is the artist’s productivity that, despite serious heart surgery last year, many of the excellent colour plates — the majority in the case of the 46 full-page illustrations — are of new

Patricia Highsmith, as readers will know, was the author of the upmarket thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, among others. She was also a keen artist, and illustrated (rather than wrote) the rare book Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, to text supplied by her friend Doris Sanders. Its pages, somewhat Seussian in tone, include statements such as: ‘Mabel Grable, a sable, reads a fable at the table in the stable near the gable with a cable’; ‘A monk and a skunk and some junk on an elephant’s trunk’; and ‘A veil on a snail.’ The book was published by Coward-McCann, who also handled her

Translated to Borsetshire, John Constable’s courtship of Maria Bicknell would provide more material than any script editor could handle without straining audience impatience beyond endurance. Nine years it took, from initial yearnings and tacit engagement to get them to the altar at St Martin-in-the-Fields and even then, in October 1816, it was the quietest of weddings. Over those years Constable’s ardour was divided. ‘Deplorable as our case is, I would not be without it for the world’, he wrote to his beloved early on when she was at her most inaccessible. That left him plenty of time in which to obsess over his art. Martin Gayford has an eye for

A combination of art history ‘lite’ and the personal touch — a common yoking together these days, even in books supposedly of art history ‘full strength’ — makes for, in Philip Hook’s hands, an engaging read. As a dealer and auctioneer, and the author of several thrillers, he has advantages not given to the general run of such investigative writers. His subject is the rise of French Impressionist painting, after its initial years of critical contempt and commercial failure, to international mass appeal and soaring value. It’s a familiar story, frequently told, and a reader looking for new light on the fortunes of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley et al. will

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, by Tim Knox, photographs by Derry Moore Sir John Soane’s Museum is very nearly a folly — a mad grotto in the midst of Georgian London. It is clearly the monument of someone both eccentric and egocentric. What saves it from being Hearst Castle, Liberace’s palace or Michael Jackson’s Neverland, is that its creator was a great architect — the Bank of England was his masterpiece. In the early 1790s Soane and his rich wife bought No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was rebuilt to Soane’s designs, and they moved there in 1794. This book, with its fine, atmospheric photographs by Derry Moore and

The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, by Tamsin Pickeral Dogs: History, Myth, Art, by Catherine Johns The Horse: A Celebration of Horses in Art, by Rachel and Simon Barnes These three books are concerned with the representation in art of man’s most successfully domesticated wild animals,: the dog and the horse. Dogs, as carnivores, domesticated themselves as early as 14000 BC, picking up scraps of meat left lying around by our prehistoric ancestors. Horses, as herbivores, were not attracted to such scraps. They were captured in the wild and broken in. Dogs were Jacks-of-all-trades. They were guardians of our houses (a Pompeiian mosaic from the second century

Stephen Chambers, by Andrew Lambirth Of the same 1980s generation as Peter Doig and the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin et al), Stephen Chambers has always pursued a far more maverick, and profoundly more interesting, path. Starting out as a well-regarded, heavy-duty abstract painter while still a student at St Martin’s School of Art, he had his perceptions utterly changed by a spell as a Rome Scholar c.1983, the pursuit of a way of painting that could pin down his intensely sensual response to the complexities of the seen world quickly becoming the preoccupation of a lifetime. The outcome is paintings which, in their idiosyncratic blending of figurative

The Allure of Chanel, by Paul Morand, translated by Euan Cameron Should anyone ever ask me that daft magazine question about who you’d invite to your dream dinner-party (‘anyone in the world, alive or dead’) my answer would be short: Mademoiselle Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, on her own, with only an ashtray between us. And maybe an ace simultaneous translator, lest my pidgin French bore her to volcanic rage. She was easily bored and, though she was a lifelong anglophile, she never liked women much. Fantasy dinners aside, this enchanting, tiny book is the closest anyone can get to a face-to-face with Coco. It’s written in her voice (‘that voice that