Over the course of almost eight years, Stéphane Breitwieser, a professional larceny, stole more than three hundred objects and works of art, with the invaluable help of his girlfriend, who conveniently worked as a lookout, and his mother, whose role in this story is much darker and we are not going to reveal it. In the years following his arrest red-handed (a 16th century cornet), he was described as “the most prolific thief in history”, but also as “the selfish thief”, since he never sold the stolen works. , but he kept them for himself in a secret room in his house. “I enjoy art,” was his explanation, perhaps to agree with Oscar Wilde, with one of whose quotes opens The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Taurus): “Aesthetics are superior to ethics.” .
Yes, the passion for art can drive a person crazy, but it can also save them, convert them, liberate them. This is what Thomas Schlesser proposes in his Los ojos de Mona / Els ulls de Mona (Lumen / Empúries), a bestseller throughout Europe that critics have hailed as the new El mundo de Sofía, dedicated to art, and no wonder. , since it is subtitled A novel in 52 masterpieces. There are 52 paintings, sculptures, photographs… one each week, that little Mona will discover with her grandfather on successive visits to museums (Louvre, Orsay, Beaubourg…), while she struggles with an eye problem. she who threatens to make her blind. During those weeks, the gaze of the Giocond, the gypsy laugh of Frans Hals, the serenity of Canaletto’s prints will teach Mona the different artistic currents, the essential names.
“He is the only living person in the world who dresses Dada, loves Dada and lives Dada.” Art shaped the life of the fascinating Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, but she did not give it the recognition she deserved, something that is all too common throughout history. Because “the Baroness,” as she was also known, was a seminal figure in the artistic movements of the beginning of the last century, as groundbreaking in her artistic practices as in her private life. Of German origin, she worked in a cabaret, maintained an open relationship with her husband, some ménage à trois as well, and, settled in New York, was one of the creators of sound poetry and a pioneer in the construction of works from objects that collected in the streets.
In recent years his figure has been subject to recovery; Numerous critics currently consider the Baroness as the true creator of Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain, while her figure is the subject of studies such as the Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven essay. She is the artist who gave shape to the avant-garde of Joana Masó and Éric Fassin (Arcadia).
Within the recovery of female creators obscured by art history we find two especially interesting titles, When Women Started Painting by Anna Banti (Elba), and Women Artists of Ancient Greece, by Marta Carrasco Ferrer and Miguel Ángel Elvira Beard (Kingdom of Cordelia).
We continue with passions, such as that felt by the historian Carlo Vecce for the Renaissance and Leonardo de Vinci, to whom he has dedicated thirty years of his life. These investigations have led him to the conviction that Leonardo’s mother was a Circassian slave, a hypothesis that he raises in his novel Caterina (Alfaguara). Vecce prepares a documented paper on the issue, which is what is usually done in the academic world, but in the meantime he novelizes what could have been the life of the mysterious Caterina, since she was not very civilized, according to our canons and those of the author, tribe in the Caucasus, to Renaissance Florence, after being captured, sold and bought on different occasions, until being freed and supposedly having an affair with Piero Da Vinci, father of the genius.
Another life touched by the passion of art and culture is that of the antique dealer and traveler D.G. Hogarth (1862-1927). From a good enough family to study at Oxford, nothing in his life suggested that he would end up on an excavation in Asia Minor “with only one tent, a few pots and pans but no preserves”, with its consequences on the gastrointestinal system, given the effects of heat on fresh food… The young student was making a name for himself as a gambler until he came across the figure of Caesar, from there to that of Alexander the Great and from there to becoming an apprentice, now called a scholarship holder, by the traveler William Martin Ramsey, getting on a mule and traveling through the Middle East, now with some cans of preserves. D.G. Hogarth tells it all in Accidental Life of an Antiquary (Ediciones del Viento).
With fewer Indiana Jones-like ingredients, art has also moved numerous creators to leave the comfort of their homes and seek inspiration outside, a few kilometers away or on the other side of the world. Travis Elborough presents in The Artist’s Journey (Blume) thirty journeys that changed the lives and perspective of those who embarked on them, with chapters descriptively titled Henri Matisse Dodges the Rain in Morocco, Katsushika Hokusai Climbs Mount Fuji, or Mary Cassat Makes an Impression in New York, the carefully edited book includes maps and photographs.
Anna Cornelia, Elisabeth Huberta and Willemiem Jacoba could say a lot about the passion for art, not in vain were they the sisters of Vincent Van Gogh. For a long time overshadowed by the painter’s relationship with his brother Theo, in recent years the intense relationship they had with the artist has also come to light. Now The Van Gogh Sisters is published in Spanish, by the leading specialist on the subject, Willem-Jan Verlinder (Cátedra). The author reveals that it was an argument with his older sister, Anna Cornelia, that caused Van Gogh to leave the Netherlands forever. Despite this, Vincent was fond of him and wrote “I long to be closer than I am now. “We have barely seen each other once in recent years, and we only half know each other.”
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – whom no one invoked with all his names: his wife had to call him Jean, and the rest, “Mr. Ingres” – left his mark on the history of art in his paintings, but also in his students and in his writings. Ingres wrote about art in disordered notebooks, drafts of letters, loose papers… Collected by one of his students, Elba now publishes Writings on Art, a selection that contains gems as current as “trying to dispense with the study of the classics, or “It is madness, or it is laziness (…) It is the doctrine of those who want to produce without having worked, know without having learned.” We can think of many examples to which this aphorism could be applied. There are also more curious ones: “the drooping nostril is a beautiful means of expression, it indicates tranquility.
In a very different register, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, a great lover of art, offers in The Captivating Look / The Captive Look (Arcadia) fifteen short essays that have as subjects Antoni Tàpies, Miquel Barceló, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus or Lucian Freud. Twelve essays are those we find in Overflowing the Mirror (Galaxia Gutenberg). Joan Fontcuberta, author of an influential work in which he plays with historical and fictional truths through photography, analyzes the future of an artistic practice “that begins with light and the camera lucida but ends dully in the black box of computing and data. Installed in hypermodernity, “life passes through the image”, the photographic gesture and its tools remain, but photography “establishes other links with memory, with truth and with matter.” Pertinent reflections when AI has disruptively emerged.
Contemporary debates, such as those that arise from reading Specters of Time. Aesthetics and historicity in contemporary art (Gedisa); Pol Capdevila refers to art to approach the philosophical dilemmas of our time, from the tyranny of the clock, in-personism, the generalized feeling of the end of history and time. To read carefully and calmly, both oxymoron “contemporary”.
More essays. In The Murmur of Water, María Belmonte leads the reader through mythical fountains and royal gardens, remains of Antiquity and Renaissance and Baroque constructions to explore the power of water through the centuries. Twenty-five thousand square meters to settle in, a sleeping bag, a flashlight and a waning moon. This is how Franco-Italian journalist Andrea Marcolongo spent a night in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, who recounts the experience in Moving the Moon (Taurus). To accompany her “in the face of the little that remains in Athens of the Parthenon marbles” she did not take books by Homer, but a biography of Lord Elgin, the author of the controversial purchase of the Parthenon statues, now in the British Museum.
In El radar americano / El radar americano (Galaxia Gutenberg), Vicenç Altaió does a historical investigation on art, architecture and design based on the legacy of Lanfranco Bombelli. More: Ibáñez, el mestre de la historieta / Ibáñez, el maestro de la historieta (Bruguera), in which Jordi Canyissà answers the question “Why do we like Ibáñez so much”, and we have taken several generations. And an unpublished one, La pell de Barcelona (Univers), which the photographer Francesc Català-Roca prepared for years, but at his death had remained unpublished.
Within the dissemination section, two titles compete to present the history of art in a light-hearted way. A Van Gogh in the living room, by Clamarore (Today’s Topics), plays with typography, colors and photography; What art history books don’t want you to know, by Blanca Guilera (Random), reveals anecdotes and discovers curiosities, such as “what do Frida Kahlo and Taylor Swift have in common?”
A note: pay attention to two books about to reach bookstores; Specifically, The Painter’s Daughters (Alba), a novel by Emily Howes about the daughters and models of the painter Thomas Gainsborough, goes on sale in May. And also in May, on the 8th, Siruela publishes Gris, the essay that the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk dedicates to a color about which Cézanne said that “as long as one has not painted it, one is not a painter.”
