The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History, Thomas Laqueur, Penguin, 400pp, $45 (hb)
Canine fans will appreciate this art historical take on man’s best friend, exploring “the presence of dogs in art from the Palaeolithic era to the present”, says a publisher’s statement. Depictions of dogs by artists such as Giotto, Francisco Goya, Peter Paul Rubens and Paula Rego feature in this survey focusing on the integral role of such animals. “[Dogs] provide narrative coherence; they look out and bear witness, often on the artist’s behalf; they illuminate our understanding of morality and melancholy and some, like us, become celebrities,” says a publisher’s statement. Works featured include Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia (1514), Blind Beggar with Dog by Goya (around 1801-25) and Edwin Landseer’s The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837).
Divine Presence: Depictions of Marble in Late Gothic and Early Renaissance Painting, Karl Kolbitz (editor), Hatje Cantz, 137pp, €68 (hb)
Divine Presence explores the “mesmerising world of marble representations in 14th and 15th century paintings”, analysing masterpieces by more than 30 painters such as Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, Carlo Crivelli and Andrea Mantegna. “At a time when painters pursued naturalistic precision, marble representations often broke from reality, in certain cases anticipating a form of proto-abstraction. This pioneering use of paint foreshadows much later artistic movements and gestures,” says a publisher’s statement. The book includes close-up views showing the brushstrokes and techniques used by the various artists; illuminated manuscripts, liturgical objects, and sacred architecture complement the examples featured.
Drawing: Antony Gormley, Antony Gormley, Jeanette Winterson and Daisy Hildyard (among the contributors), Thames & Hudson, 320pp, £50 (hb)
“What is drawing? What does it mean to draw?” writes the UK sculptor Antony Gormley in the preface to this overview of his drawings dating from 1980 to the present day. “For me, drawing is a form of thinking. But it is also about the medium, using the intrinsic qualities of substances and liquids: a kind of oracular process that requires tuning in to the behaviour of substances as much as to the behaviour of the unconscious, like reading images in tea leaves, trying to make a map of a path of feeling, a trajectory of thought,” he adds. Chapters cover themes and topics such as “weather”, “scratch drawings” and “darkness of the body”.
Matthew Wong: Interiors, John Cheim (editor), The Matthew Wong Foundation, 124pp, £42 (hb)
The work and legacy of the late Chinese-Canadian artist Matthew Wong is explored in a catalogue and exhibition due to take place at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi (9 May-1 November) in Venice, which includes 35 works dating from 2015 to 2019. The show will, according to a project statement, “explore interiors, both physical and psychological”. The exhibition is organised by the Matthew Wong Foundation, which was founded by the artist's parents Monita Wong and Raymond KP Wong in 2020 following the artist's death by suicide in 2019. The curator Nancy Spector writes in the introduction that “Wong was 27 years old when he experienced the transformational aesthetic encounters in Venice that precipitated his emphatic pivot to painting.”
