Well, Christmas has been and gone for another year but if you were lucky enough to get Christmas gift cards, book tokens, or plain old cash this time round, we’re here to get you all booked up with another gallery of books on the themes of art and/or artists. All are available from your favourite monolithic online megastore or, if you prefer, we’ve provided alternative booksellers where possible.
First up is a graphic novel set around Monparnasse in Paris, which was also the haunt of Josephine Baker, an inspiration to Jade Monserrat, whose exhibition, Constellations: Care and Resistance is currently on show in Gallery 11…
Kiki of Monparnasse by Jose Louis Bocquet, Catel Muller and Nora Mahony
Cover © SelfMade Hero
Translated from the French by Nora Mahony, this is an award-winning graphic novel biography of Alice Prin, French model, nightclub singer and painter, who became known as simply Kiki of Monparnasse. In the bohemian and brilliant Montparnasse of the 1920s, Kiki managed to escape poverty to become one of the most charismatic figures of the avant-garde years between the wars. Partner to Man Ray - whose most legendary photos she inspired - she would be immortalised by Kisling, Foujita, Alexander Calder, Maurice Utrillo and Fernand Leger. Kiki was the muse of a generation that seeks to escape the hangover of the Great War, but she was above all one of the first emancipated women of the 20th century.
Have you ever wanted to just step inside a painting? A nice pastoral scene, or a Mediterranean landscape, perhaps? Our next book makes a different choice, although if you know the work of sculptor and performance artist Brian Catling, his selection of painting probably won’t surprise you…
Hollow by Brian Catling
Cover © Coronet
From the artist, and author of the Vorrh Trilogy, comes an epic odyssey following a group of mercenaries hired to deliver a church's ultimate power-a sacred oracle-as the decadence of carnival gives way to the gravity of lent and the mystic landscape grows ravenous - all set within a Bosch painting.
The history of art contains no more imaginative or mysterious paintings that the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. Art historians ask where the weird creatures depicted there came from, and so to do the central characters of Hollow as they fight their way across these landscapes and encounter these creatures. Author B. Catling is the first novelist to engage fully with Bosch's vision and climb imaginatively into it.
In this novel it emerges that Bosch gave colour and form to monsters, 'letting them in' to the real world, and that they were still infesting the landscape when it was painted by Bosch's follower Pieter Bruegel.
Now a wild bunch of mercenaries with a mission to deliver an oracle made of cloth, bones and a loud voice take a dangerous journey to the monastery at the base of the Tower of Babel, where the most terrifying secret in the world is kept. As they travel through a country painted first by Bosch and then by Bruegel, they are confronted and seduced by monsters and see scenes painted by them. These include the devil playing dice, a lewd mock wedding with a dirty bride, an unholy being living inside a hollow tree and riding a giant rat, and creatures indulging in inter-species sexual play as depicted in The Garden of Earthly Delights. A local marauding woman called Mad Meg, with a small army of looting women from Breugel's Dull Gret is one of this novel's stranger characters.
Perhaps it is because Brian Catling is himself an artist (and recently the subject of an Arena special; catch it on the BBC iplayer) that he has been able to create a modern narrative masterpiece which brings the painterly genius of Bosch and Breugel alive on the page.
Back in the day, when Manchester was the centre of the cotton trade, there was also a need for dyers in the town. In fact, some of the lectures delivered in the Royal Manchester Institution’s lecture theatre were on that very subject. In our first non-fiction offering, here’s a book that tells the fascinating story of the world’s first synthetic dye…
Mauve by Simon Garfield
Cover © Cannongate Cannons
A history of science, non-fiction book. 1856. Eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin's experiment has gone horribly wrong. But the deep brown sludge his botched project has produced has an unexpected power: the power to dye everything it touches a brilliant purple. Perkin has discovered mauve, the world's first synthetic dye, bridging a gap between pure chemistry and industry, which will change the world forever.
From the fetching ribbons tying back the hair of every fashionable head in London to the laboratories in which scientists developed modern vaccines against cancer and malaria, Simon Garfield tells the story of how the colour purple became a sensation.
With the re-hang of galleries 3 to 11 well underway as we question whose power is on display and what a public gallery is for, our second non-fiction book questions the way museums and galleries display their works and why perhaps that needs rethinking…
The Whole Picture by Alice Proctor
Cover © Casell
"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again." Financial Times
'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim
Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall?
How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon.
The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today.
The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.
Next up, this classic novel by W Somerset Maugham takes its inspiration from the life of Paul Gaugin…
The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
Cover © Vintage Classics
Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter.
Whilst his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications.
Inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is at once a satiric caricature of Edwardian conventions and a vivid portrayal of the mentality of a genius.
We often know the stories of the artists, but what about those people on the edges of the artist’s life, like the models, the families, the neighbours and those who later encounter the works?
Life Studies: Stories by Susan Vreeland
Cover © Penguin
With her richly textured novels, Susan Vreeland has offered pioneering portraits of the artist’s life. Now, in a collection of profound wisdom and beauty, she explores the transcendent power of art through the eyes of ordinary people. Life Studies begins with historic tales that, rather than focusing directly on the great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters themselves, render those on the periphery―their lovers, servants, and children―as their personal experiences play out against those of Manet, Monet, van Gogh, and others. Vreeland then gives us contemporary stories in which her characters―a teacher, a construction worker, and an orphan, for example―encounter art in meaningful, often surprising ways. A fascinating exploration of the lasting strength of art in everyday life, Life Studies is a dazzling addition to Vreeland’s outstanding body of work.
With Suzanne Lacy’s exhibition Uncertain Futures exhibition, running in Gallery 8, this next book seems an apt choice…
Old in Art school: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter
Cover © Counterpoint
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is "a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age" (Essence).
Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school—in her sixties—to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful, demands of a life fully lived.
How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, "You will never be an artist"? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference?
Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this glorious achievement—bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).
In re-hanging the permanent collection galleries, we’re mixing things up, placing contemporary works next historic pieces to contrast different narratives and create new conversations. Our next book choice tries something similar…
How to be Both by Ali Smith
Cover © Penguin
How to be both is the dazzling, award-winning novel by Ali Smith
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.
The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.
And of course our gallery of books wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the Dutch Golden Age…
The Anatomy Lesson by Nina Siegal
Cover © Anchor Books
A single day in Amsterdam, 1632. The Surgeons' Guild has commissioned a young artist named Rembrandt to paint Dr. Nicolaes Tulp as he performs a medical dissection. In the swirl of anticipation and intrigue surrounding the event, we meet an extraordinary constellation of men and women whose lives hinge, in some way, on Dr. Tulp's anatomy lesson. There is Aris the Kid, the condemned coat thief whose body is to be used for the dissection; Flora, his pregnant lover; Jan Fetchet, the curio dealer who acquires corpses for the doctor's work; the great René Descartes, who will attend the dissection in his quest to understand where the human soul resides; and the Dutch master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about this assignment.
As the story builds to its dramatic conclusion, circumstances conspire to produce a famous painting—and an immortal painter. Vividly rendered, masterfully written, The Anatomy Lesson is a story of mind and body, death and love—and redemptive power of art.
Finally, a novel based on the infamous art robbery of the Elizabeth Stewart Gardener Museum in 1990 when $500 million worth of painting were stolen and have yet to be recovered; a cautionary tale for any gallery security there, if nothing else…
The Art Forger: A Novel by Barbara Shapiro
Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum* still the largest unsolved art theft in history, one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece, the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years, may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing and not seeing the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.
*If you don’t fancy the book, then there’s a fascinating documentary series about the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum robbery called This is a Robbery currently on Netflix.
If you read, or have read any of these, or have any other suggestions for art or artist-themed books and novels that you’ve enjoyed, let us know. We’d love to hear from you.