The Shortlist
Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco
Tim Blanning
Allen Lane
Augustus the Strong has finally found a biographer capable of capturing the complexities of the Elector of Saxony and sometime King of Poland. While much of the book inevitably focuses on Augustus’s many battles, Blanning well describes his extraordinary patronage of artists, musicians and especially porcelain-makers, while reminding us of the role of patronage in projecting absolute power.
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art
Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
Auckland University Press
This groundbreaking survey, a decade in the making, is informed by the authors’ belief that ‘a greater understanding of Māori art – by Māori and non-Māori – is essential for the survival of Māori culture’. They also attempt to set it among the great art traditions of the world, a task in which they brilliantly succeed.
Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso
Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi
Yale University Press
With a title that doesn’t hold back about their subject’s temperament, the authors are free to lay out Cooper’s achievements as a dealer, scholar and champion of Cubism, after he inherited £100,000 at the age of 21. While Clark handles the life, Calvocoressi has the more enviable task of discussing Cooper’s collection, as he devoted himself to Braque, Gris, Léger and, of course, Picasso.
Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900
Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny; revised and amplified by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero
Brepols
The original edition of Taste and the Antique (1981) was a scholarly landmark. In this revised edition Haskell and Penny’s original text appears with expanded footnotes taking account of the wealth of scholarship that has appeared in the intervening years. For Volume Two, almost every sculpture has been photographed in colour from multiple perspectives. The final volume tracks the mutation of the 95 sculptures into other forms: from bronzes and intaglios to posters and anatomical textbooks.
Art in a State of Siege
Joseph Leo Koerner
Princeton University Press
What do Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Max Beckmann’s self-portrait of 1927 and the work of William Kentridge have in common? For Koerner they are all examples of art that, though separated by some six centuries, harness the power of creativity to confront an existential threat, be it religious strife, fascism or apartheid.
Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
Jean Strouse
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Manchester University Press
In 1898 Sargent painted portraits of the art dealer Asher Wertheimer and his wife, Flora, on their silver wedding anniversary. Over the next few years he painted 10 more of their family. In this focused study, Strouse describes the painter’s relationships with its individual members while telling a bigger story about the nature of Edwardian society.
The winner will be announced on 20 November.
The Shortlists | Artist of the Year | Museum Opening of the Year | Exhibition of the Year | Book of the Year | Acquisition of the Year
