In the beginning there is always Ernst Gombrich: The history of art is now seventy years old with more than eight million copies sold in thirty different translations. To commemorate that so many art lovers, including prominent figures, took their first steps into the world of creation at the hands of the Austrian-British professor, Phaidon is publishing a new paperback edition, with an updated cover and a foreword by Leonie Gombrich, the author’s granddaughter.
In these seventy years, other perspectives have made their way. One of these new approaches is the one proposed by the British historian Katy Hessel in her History of art without men (Attic of books). The thesis is that there could be a history of art without men, just as up to now there has been without women, because despite the fact that they have been hidden, ignored and, on too many occasions, male artists have appropriated their jobs, since the Renaissance we can find women in all tendencies. And before? Well, also, because let’s see, who says that the paintings in the Altamira caves came from a male hand?
Some of the best photographs of the 20th century emerged from a feminine gaze, that of Vivian Maier, and yet until very recently they remained semi-unknown and their story untold. Maier (United States, 1926-2009) worked as a nanny all her life, but she also took photos, with the Rolleiflex that she bought at the age of 25. I didn’t always have a bathroom to develop the images in, so the reels kept piling up and would have ended up in flea markets (in fact, they were already doing so) if they hadn’t been rescued almost by chance a couple of years before they were released. death. It is told by Ann Marks in Revealing Vivian Maier. The untold story of the photographer nanny (Paidós).
Another extremely interesting work photographer and biography is Ilse Bing, to whom the Mapfre Foundation has dedicated exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona (here, until mid-May). The catalog captures a work that combines formal innovation with a marked humanism, the result of a life experience of the kind that makes you think: Bing, with all his genius, had to walk dogs in New York to earn a living.
Museum and exhibition catalogs have become the stars of art books. An example is the catalog that the Museo del Prado / BBVA Foundation have dedicated to Guido Reni, whose exhibition can be visited until July 7: a volume of 450 pages, large format, profusion of illustrations and author’s texts. From the same institution comes Rondas del Prado, curated by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Museo del Prado / Abada ): the writer who could have been an art historian in “another possible life†places the viewer in front of the museum’s paintings, “with eyes wide open.”
Two more titles from museums. Jaume Plensa. Poetry of silence, edited by Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera y Senda on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title currently and until July 23, and by Javier Molins, Rachel Campbell-Johnston and Plensa himself. Also large and magnificently illustrated. Like ID Project, photographs by Jordi Bernadó with texts by Alejandro Castellote and Laura Ferrero (MNAC / Turner). It is a project carried out together with the Barcelona museum, in whose Oval Room it was presented, and in which the photographer proposes portraits of characters united only by the camera and by one question: What is your place in the world? All those portrayed appear from behind, unrecognizable and small.
The complete opposite of the protagonists of Retratarte, by Carlos del Amor (Espasa), who after the success of Emocionarte recreates the lives of those portrayed and of the artists, who are also shown by their way of painting.
Large, in every way, are the illustrations in The Colors of Nature, a chromatic atlas of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms that includes the 54-color nomenclature system created in 1774 by the geologist Abraham Werner, expanded to 110 colors in 1821 by Scottish artist Patrick Syme. This edition of Flipbook, by Patrick Baty, includes reproductions of the original plates of this classification.
The Cambridge University art historian John Gage devoted almost a lifetime of study to the phenomenon of color. In Color and meaning. Arte, ciencia y simbologÃa, examines it convinced that, like language, it is a “historically determined fact whose meaning resides in the various contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted” (Cliff). There is nothing better to enjoy color than Viajes por mi jardÃn, by Nicolas Jolivot (Errata Naturae), and El paraÃso a pinceladas (Espasa), in which Eduardo Barba proposes a journey through garden painting, while the former, with his Large-format illustrations that attend to the smallest details, constitute a work of art in itself.
And if we start with theory, we also end with it. Óscar MartÃnez offers us in El eco pintado (Siruela) a journey through the secrets of art within art, from Vermeer to Velázquez. And Will Gompertz, current artistic director of London’s Barbican and one of the best art communicators ever, teaches us to look like an artist in See What You’re Missing. The world through art (Taurus). Because a forest is not the same forest when you have witnessed the arrival of spring with David Hockney, nor is a cloud a cloud when you have floated in it with Constable.