Joan Miró

Tuesday

Andrew Lambirth

The big picture: two books on artists and their lives

From our UK edition

Michael Peppiatt (born 1941) explains in the introduction to his new book of essays that he has from the start of his career been attracted to the lives of artists, as much as, if not more than, their work. Accordingly, he should find a ready audience with the British, who much prefer the written word to the visual image, and who always seem to spend more time on information panels than exhibits in museums, when not in a side gallery watching documentaries about the artists’ lives. In this book Peppiatt assembles a selection of biographical studies of some of the artists whose work quickens his heart. None of it is new material, but it is usefully gathered in one volume, with a very readable introduction and notes to each section.

Thursday

Alastair Smart

A violent ultimatum ended Giacometti’s brief flirtation with Marlene Dietrich

Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates. Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró. In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of a latter-day Vasari, penning mini-biographies of 32 artists who were associated with Surrealism.