Biography

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The art world’s Christmas reading

Artists, collectors, critics, museum directors and auction house executives pick their holiday books

Three-part Vuillard catalogue compiled by Montreal Museum of Fine Arts published after 50 years in production

The volume aims to be totally immersive, images rooted in their biographical context with detailed annotations

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A story of politics and class in a new biography of Henry Cole

An exhaustive treatment of the man behind the Great Exhibition, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Prince Albert and much, much more

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William R. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, the reticent collectors

A compelling biography of the father and son who founded the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore

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The lives of the collectors: J. Pierpont Morgan. Everything but the art

This blockbuster biography records the life of the American financier in exhaustive and exhausting detail, but fails to tell the story of his collecting

Books: Caroline Tisdall's new book is the way to go on anything Beuys

This substantial volume, predominantly photographic, is the comprehensive account of Joseph Beuys’s life and work

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Lives of the collectors: Norton Simon and Hans Berggruen. Culture clash

Similar in many ways, the subjects of these two biographies present contrasting styles of operation in the art market

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Lives of collectors: a faux Frick biography

This biography of Henry Clay Frick takes a psychological approach that leaves much to be desired

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Timothy Mowl's William Beckford biography casts the famed collector as "a sexual and architectural Lucifer"

The story of the Regency dilettante, eccentric and collector is told in all its scandalous detail

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Janet Myles, L.N. Cottingham, 1787-1874: architect of the Gothic Revival

Restoring a pioneer of the Gothic Revival to his rightful position

The life of Goro Sakamoto part IV

The distinguished antique dealer recounts how he became a black marketeer

Books: Shame, shyness and self-obsession in new Dalí monograph

Ian Gibson on Surrealism as an escape and the façade of eccentricity

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Books: Small revelations only on lives of Duchamp, Johns, and Bacon

The recent biographies of these art-world giants promise much but aside from anecdotes little is shown of the subjects’ inner lives

David Sylvester's matter-of-fact sagacity in "Looking at Giacometti"

To his credit, Sylvester avoids dwelling on the artist's private life and bears down on the art

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Books: Tracing Francis Bacon and his lost Bohemia

Farson's biography of the tortured artist is a pub crawl around Fifties Soho

Books: New 'comprehensive biography' fails to go beyond the public face of Joseph Beuys

Heiner Stachelhaus' book on the German artist leaves a lot to be desired

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Books: Modigliani and Hébuternein in bohemia

Semi-scandalous biographies of artists are all the rage