Books

Booksarchive

Book Review: How we almost lost the Mona Lisa

The Spanish involvement with Nazi-looted art and the part played by the Austrian resistance in saving works of art are among the revelations in this book

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The use of American art in the Cold War

This book reveals how the CIA’s promoted US artists as a way of stopping the spread of Communism in the years after World War II

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The Victoria and Albert Museum. The great Kensington Kunstkammer

The museum and the Great Exhibition from which it derives are the subject of five new books

Books: All the marvels of Mughal painting

The latest volume in the catalogues of the Khalili Collection describes the art of the Muslim courts of India

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Books: Expanding on Hallmark's photographic collection

This second edition includes even more of the collection, providing a fine survey of the medium in America

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Books: Modernism behind the Iron Curtain and in wartime Paris

The progress of Modernism in the Communist States and the response of the French Avant-garde to World War I are examined in these two books

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Books: Essays on sex, gender and identity in Dada

Naomi Sawelson-Gorse edits this collection on the often overlooked women of Dada

The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany

Medieval German women’s art and spirituality examined with too much of the gender-studies approach

Books: Recognising the writer, Dalí

A new collection draws attention towards a neglected part of the Surrealist's output

Ceramicsarchive

Two new books examine ceramics from different points of view

One is a technical and stylistic analysis; the other a cultural critique. Both are well worth a read

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Books: Capa's photographs of the Spanish Civil War

Tales of stoicism in the face of extreme adversity

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The lives of the collectors: J. Pierpont Morgan. Everything but the art

This blockbuster biography records the life of the American financier in exhaustive and exhausting detail, but fails to tell the story of his collecting

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Man Ray photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

The book forms part of the museum's paperback photography series

“Private dreams and unknowable pleasures” in early photography

Clementina, Lady Hawarden, a forgotten precursor of Julia Margaret Cameron, is the subject of this book and of the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition

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Books: Wyndham Lewis and the art of modern war

This collection positions Lewis as an “anti-war war artist”

Books: Caroline Tisdall's new book is the way to go on anything Beuys

This substantial volume, predominantly photographic, is the comprehensive account of Joseph Beuys’s life and work

Publishing Tate's colourful past to celebrate its centenary

Histories and anecdotes of the Tate Gallery and the British Museum

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Lives of the collectors: Norton Simon and Hans Berggruen. Culture clash

Similar in many ways, the subjects of these two biographies present contrasting styles of operation in the art market

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Lives of collectors: a faux Frick biography

This biography of Henry Clay Frick takes a psychological approach that leaves much to be desired

Giorgionearchive

Giorgione: the painter of “poetic brevity”

This study is based on a close look at conservation and restoration research, a scientific examination of the artist’s technique, and new documentary evidence

Books: Leonardo's beginnings

This study maintains that Verrocchio’s “Tobias and the angel” in London is the first example of the artist’s hand

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Books: Carlo James explores the history of art conservation

A critical look at old and new conservation and preservation techniques

Guido Reniarchive

Books: Guido Reni, loved by the Victorians, despised by modernists and purists

Reni is in for a late twentieth-century treatment as political activist and secretly gay

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Timothy Mowl's William Beckford biography casts the famed collector as "a sexual and architectural Lucifer"

The story of the Regency dilettante, eccentric and collector is told in all its scandalous detail

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The haphazard methods of art restoration over the past 400 years

Christine Sitwell and Sarah Staniforth (eds), Studies in the history of painting restoration

Collectorsarchive

Collector profile: Sir Paul Getty's two weaknesses, books and cricket

Over twenty-five years this Anglo-American has built up a great library of early books, manuscripts and incunabula

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Portrait miniatures, Little England

Three books demonstrate the revival of interest in portrait miniatures and the leading role of the Victoria and Albert Museum in this field