Biography
Contrary to expectation, these books provide new information about and expand our understanding of Picasso and his art
Was Picasso gay?
The art world’s Christmas reading
Artists, collectors, critics, museum directors and auction house executives pick their holiday books
The new Dictionary of National Biography is much more comprehensive than the Victorian original it replaces
More artists, more women, more sex
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
The story of the great Augustan collectors of antiquities
An explanation, an adoration and a lament
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
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
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
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
Lives of collectors: a faux Frick biography
This biography of Henry Clay Frick takes a psychological approach that leaves much to be desired
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
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
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
In honour of the Royal Academy hosting the Giacometti retrospective, Giorgio Soavi remembers his close friendship with the sculptor
A profile of a figure at once diffident, self-critical and restless, beholden to few vanities
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
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
Books: Modigliani and Hébuternein in bohemia
Semi-scandalous biographies of artists are all the rage