My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting, Martin Gayford and Tracey Emin, Thames & Hudson, 224pp, £25 (hb)
The UK artist Tracey Emin reveals more about her life—in a personal and professional capacity—discussing her cancer diagnosis and why painting matters with typical frankness. In conversation with Martin Gayford, Emin discusses her artistic heroes such as Edvard Munch and how she cried on first visiting the Tate, aged 22. On seeing a painting by Mark Rothko, she says: “I just stood there and looked at this painting and was kind of breathless. I sat down and stared at it. I started to cry and cry and cry. Big emotional sobs. I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t understand why I had been affected by this.” On attending the Royal College of Art in London, where she was a postgraduate in the 1980s, Emin recalls unhappy experiences. “I remember going into the office and saying, ‘I’m going back to Margate. Where are the black people, where are the fat people, where are the thick people? Where are the real people? There are none of them here’.”
Beatriz González, Lotte Johnson and Diego Chocano, Prestel, 304pp, £45 (hb)
The Colombian artist, writer, curator, educator and intellectual Beatriz González—known as la maestra—died in Bogotá on 9 January, aged 93.This monograph traces six decades of González’s “bold reimagining of images, power and memory through painting, sculptural assemblage, and large-scale public interventions”, says a publisher’s statement. Key works discussed include the early series The Sisga Suicides (1965), Kennedy (John Fitzgerald)…(1971) and Interior Decoration (1981). The book accompanies an exhibition at the London’s Barbican later this month (25 February-10 May), which then travels to the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo (12 June-11 October).“She has radically reimagined what art can tell us about power, grief and memory through her paintings, sculptural assemblages and monumental public installations,” writes Shanay Jhaveri, the head of visual arts at the Barbican, in the introduction.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting, Sarah Howgate, National Portrait Gallery, 224pp, £40 (hb/pb)
This catalogue, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery in London (12 February-4 May), draws on the extensive holdings of the Lucian Freud Archive, exploring Freud’s “sustained engagement with drawing as a way of seeing, thinking and working”. “The artist’s preoccupation with the portrait is revealed in particular through 48 sketchbooks, from which many drawings, including some previously unseen material, are featured here,” says Sarah Howgate, the senior curator of contemporary collections at the National Portrait Gallery, in a statement. Contributors include Isabel Seligman, the curator of Modern and contemporary drawings at the British Museum, and the novelist Colm Tóibín who writes: “Before the weight of paint, there was the subtler weight of chalk and charcoal, the lightness of line [with Freud’s practice].”
Still Life (1952) by Faiq Hassan, who is one of the artists featured in Alcove
Alcove: Intimate Essays on Arab Modernist Artists, Vol. II, Myrna Ayad, Kaph Books, 336pp, $45 (hb)
Myrna Ayad has published the second volume in her Alcove series, which features personal reminiscences about Arab Modernist artists. Like the first volume, Alcove II provides information about the artists who flourished from the 1950s to the 1980s across the Arab world. The period was one of celebration and change: from the buzzing art scenes in Beirut and Baghdad, where artists such as Hafidh Al Droubi and Faiq Hassan helped Iraq forge a new postcolonial identity, to artists such as Ismael Shammout who documented the horrors of the Nakba (the term used by Palestinians for their mass displacement). The book is organised as a series of reflections, each given by an artist’s relative or friend, summoning the spirit of the time but also functioning as valuable primary information. Many of these artists have received little scholarly attention—there are new discoveries in each volume, alongside better-known names—and have been partly inaccessible to English-language scholarship.
