The Aardvark Blog

Why buy books on art?
21/06/2026

There are not many bonuses to the process of moving. Recently we have been attempting a double move, a rapid business move of 100s of boxes of books, desks and computers, and a more gradual move of our  personal effects to our newish home.

As I say there are truly not many benefits to this costly process. Costly in terms of personal treasure, and physical resources, as well as in the losses that wrack up as relationships are altered and physical proximities transformed. I am no longer 5 minutes drive from the cheapest fuel in the marches, or yards from the best neighbours I have ever known.

But the one great aspect about throwing your life up in the air is that it makes you see your possessions, interests, priorities and even friendships anew. Through most of my life as a bookseller I have had a sometimes unhealthy obsession with books about art and architecture. But having moved several metric tons of these books, lately I have been wondering why these particular books are so important to me, both in terms of my own library and my professional life..

In particular just what is it about artist mongraphs that is so compelling to me, Don't get me wrong I love books on artistic subjects and am currently wading through a huge book on the rise of Chinoiserie in the 17th to 20th centuries. But the books that mean the most to me are the studies of particular artists.

Yet in all but a handful of cases I am never going to own works by these artists, and do not live in a city where viewing their works could form part of my everyday existence.

Having given some thought to the matter I would like to tentatively offer five suggestions as to why anyone who is responsive to art should own or if unable to own, at least borrow, books on artists.

Before I do so however I think I need to make an important concession to sceptics of art bibliography who may possibly read this. Based on my personal experience I do believe that reading a book on an artist will not make the impact of that artists works any more powerful or immediate. I do not think that your being will resonate any more with his or her works.

Whilst visiting exhibitions has sometimes had a major impact on my feelings ( Frans Hal's was not an artist I would have ever appreciated without seeing them at a Royal Academy show); similarly Cezanne's self-portraits; similarly late Chagall paintings; similarly the sculptures of Ossis Zadkine. The paintings in my own collection that I like the most are by a Canadian artist Reta Summers Cowley. As it happens I have a good book on her that was published by a Canadian gallery, but the fact that I have such a book and have read it several times is not why I find myself staring again and again at her pictures. It provides context and feeds my admiration of the artist's life struggles, but does not make me like the pictures I own of hers one jot more.

So what then can you get from a book?

First and perhaps most importantly, you can get a much better sense of an artist's chronology. Everyone living is driving down a one way street. With apologies to Scott ˜The curious case of Benjamin Button' is a fiction not a memoir. The order in which artists work is ever revealing. In early career technical competency and the ability to absorb influences develop. Seeing how an artist, such as Cezanne, view a consistent subject such as Mont St Victoria is revelatory. Even the best blockbuster exhibition has limitations on what it can include. But often a book is not limited in this way and can include far more text space and many more illustrations than an exhibition can have exhibits.

Secondly, enthusiasm is sexy. Reading the veteran MOMA curator James Thrall Soby on his discovery Giorgio de Chirico, you vibrate with his passion. And he was a writer who knew the artist personally. The same is true of John Richardson's many books on Picasso. Even when say Waldemar Januszczak is writing on Seurat ( an artist who clearly he did not know), his passion makes us look again at pictures that may have become overly familiar.

Thirdly an author always edits and imposes their vision. Before I acquired my copy of Brassai's  'The Sculptures of Picasso' I was impacted by the size and physicality of the works. Brassai chose to free each work from its physical limitations. Small fragile paper sculptures loom as large as the big Picasso/Julio Gonzalez iron works. The quality of the idea is freed from the prison of its physical extent. All the works irrespective of the time spent on creating them are given the same meticulous attention, and are lit and backdropped appropriately. Brassai was asked by the publisher Teriade to undertake the commission of photographing Picasso's sculptures. A small problem of the Second World War arose to elongate this process, and Picasso himself proved an only intermittently receptive supporter of the project ( on many occasions Brassai would turn up and Picasso would decide that he would rather give a lunch party or work on an incomplete painting). As a result the photographs took years to produce, and Brassai was forced to travel through German controlled territory to find the works which had often been stored in closed up houses that Picasso owned or rented. All that time and care show in the finished book. I remember seeing the fantastic Tate Picasso sculpture exhibition some years ago and being deeply excited by it, but the book that Brassai produced has given me a much more nuanced appreciation of the subject.

Fourthly, there is in any good monograph always at least one article that changes the way you think. For example in Andrew Graham-Dixon's book on Howard Hodgkin there is a chapter entitled 'A Painter of Modern Life' in which he locates Hodgkin squarely in the 19th century French tradition of Baudelaire's famous essay ( 'modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent'). I had simply not seen Hodgkin in that way. I had thought about how personal his works were, their rhythmic quality, and the ever confusing position they may have to his vast collection of Indian Miniatures. But I had not seen him as part of that very particular modern project, the project of Gericault and Delacroix amongst others.

Fifthly, when a mongraph is the catalogue of an exhibition, it becomes the memorial of an event, an artefact in itself. As I write this I have taken down from my shelves one of my most prized possessions, a catalogue of the stunning 2014 RA show of Anselm Kiefer that the artist himself signed. This was the first career retrospective of Kiefer in Britain for many years. It is a large square book, its monumentality perfectly attend to the kind of work that Kiefer from mid-caree onwards would create. If I think about Kiefer then I find myself taking the book down from the shelf. It is its own ripple in time, Arthur C Clarke's Sentinel. Such a work is an important way point in an artists career.

There are many other reasons to love and cherish these books, and if I had world enough and time I could probably come up with five more. For ultimately art books feed our curiousity. And those of us who truly love art are nothing if not curious.