13 books on Art to warm up the start of the year

Reading is always a good resolution! If you don’t know where to turn among the quantities of books flowing in constantly in bookstores, you will find among our selection something to rejoice about.

Whether you are an amateur or experienced reader, there will be something for everyone. Intrigue around a painting by the artist James Ensor, essay on the king of fawns by Rosa Bonheur, travel to Japan with Amélie Nothombcatalog raisonné of the sculptor Germaine Richier… One thing is certain, this year, you will not be bored!

Reincarnating Art by Andreas Beyer

“In your body there is more reason than in your best wisdom. » These words from Nietzsche, taken from 4^e Zarathustra’s speech and quotes from the outset by the art historian Andreas Beyer (former director of the German Center for Art History in Paris, renowned for its cutting-edge research), set the tone for the abundant, lively and erudite essay which he has just devoted to body of the artist.

Starting from the observation that “the academic history of art has continued to turn a blind eye to the material conditions of artistic creation” and that the discipline has only been considered as “a history of the spirit”, the author attempts to “determine the fundamental relationship between the body and the workin its multiple and incessant metamorphoses. It focuses on the Renaissancea crucial period when the artist asserts his singularity, his status as creator, in opposition to that of craftsman.

The body of the artist is Giotto Who, the arm stuck along his torso and rotating his hand like a compass, traces a perfect O with a brush when the pope’s messenger asks him for a drawing to provide the sovereign pontiff with proof of his virtuosity. It is also Dürer who considered in the main as the essential condition of its existence; or even Michelangelo in pain, deformed backperched on scaffolding forcing him to act like a contortionist when he works on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

To support his point, open it up to new perspectives – and above all get out of the sometimes too rigid framework of his discipline – Andreas Beyer has fun with delightful visual confrontations between ancient and contemporary works. It thus goes from a work that Felix Gonzalez-Torres created in 1991 and displayed in public space – an image of a bed with unmade sheets bearing the imprint of bodies in love who have just left it – to a series of pillows designed by Dürer. Pillows in whose folds he detects deformed, grotesque facesthe number of which increases as you turn the sheet, like so many introspective visions… A stimulating essay to encourage the viewer to “perceive the works from their own being in the world”. DB