The Shortlist
The Hollywood History of Art
Christopher Frayling
Reel Art Press
Charles Laughton as Rembrandt, Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo are just a few examples of movie stars playing the heavyweights of art history. Frayling’s impressively researched tome, drawing on script treatments and archival material as well as the films themselves, charts not only how cinema has treated artists but also how it has shaped their images in the popular imagination and influenced the market for their work.
Holbein: Renaissance Master
Elizabeth Goldring
Paul Mellon Centre
As Goldring sifts through the complicated and sometimes sparse evidence for Holbein’s life and work, her subject emerges as a perfectionist who knew and painted the leading intellectual and noble figures of his time. This study places emphasis on Holbein’s art apart from the portraits for which he is best known – designs for jewellery and utensils, sets for court festivities and more – and creates a vivid picture of the world in which he worked.
Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics
Margaret S. Graves
Princeton University Press
Graves looks at how Islamic ceramics have been treated by excavators, dealers, collectors and museums over the last 150 years. Paying particular attention to museum collections in the American Midwest, this elegantly written book also examines artefacts through techniques including microphotography and comes up with some surprising conclusions. Among them is the conviction that many of these forged or creatively restored Near Eastern objects should be regarded as artworks in their own right.
The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History
Thomas W. Laqueur
Allen Lane
In this study of how dogs have been represented in art and what they represent in life, Laqueur performs close and subtle readings of paintings by artists ranging from Carpaccio to Lucian Freud – as well as many surprising and lesser-known works of art. Arguing that in many paintings, a dog can act an entry point to the scene for the viewer, Laqueur’s book might be a way in to art history as a whole.
Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons
Susan Owens
Thames & Hudson
This typically original study, which combines biography with art history, follows Constable across the seasons, with one main section devoted to each of them. Drawing on the painter’s letters and her own visits to the places he depicted, Owens presents us with a close reading of the work of one of the greatest landscape artists and of the English countryside – all in a beautifully produced book that does justice to its unconventional structure.
Nicolas Poussin: catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings
Pierre Rosenberg
Flammarion
This four-volume catalogue raisonné is a monumental feat – the result of a lifetime of research into the artist by the former director of the Louvre, who has previously published the catalogue raisonné of Poussin’s drawings. The entries devoted to some 300 paintings consist of detailed provenances and discussions of dating, lists of preparatory drawings and copies and stylistic analysis by the art historian and curator who knows more about Poussin than anyone else alive.
The winner will be announced on 19 November.
The Shortlists | Artist of the Year | Museum Opening of the Year | Exhibition of the Year | Book of the Year | Acquisition of the Year
