Vietnam, Don McCullin, Gost Books,192pp, £80 (hb)
One hundred images McCullin took while covering the Vietnam war for The Sunday Times are published for the first time in this new collection. The book also includes previously unseen texts and images of other ephemera from his time in Vietnam, which he visited 16 times—starting with the Battle of Hue in 1968—including the picture of his helmet with “Times England” emblazoned on the side and his muddied compass. “Sadly, 58,000 American soldiers died and 300,000 were wounded [during the Vietnam war]. It was an extraordinary American misadventure,” McCullin told The Guardian.
Anthony Rudolf, Office Hours in the Studio of Paula Rego, Art Publishing Inc, 256pp, £30 (hb)
The Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego, who died in 2022 aged 87, is known for her dark visual story telling. “A storyteller in pictures, she defied the condescension in which illustrative work and literary reference were held,” wrote the historian and art critic Marina Warner in her obituary for Rego published in The Art Newspaper. The poet and translator Anthony Rudolf, Rego’s muse and partner for 26 years, sheds new light on the processes and practice of Rego. “I’m not sure how many pastels, sketches and prints she did with me cast as a character in different stories,” Rudolf wrote last year in an introductory text for the online exhibition The Anthony Rudolf Collection with Ben Uri Gallery. “In this book Rudolf gives a vivid account of the life they shared and what it was like to inhabit the looking-glass world of Rego’s studio,” a publisher’s statement says.
Andy Holden: Weight of Imagination, Jennifer Higgie, Heni Publishing, 144pp, £29.99 (hb)
In this book, the author Jennifer Higgie guides the reader through the artist Andy Holden’s comfortably absurd universe, presenting a loosely chronological cross-section of works dating from 1999 to today. “Defying, at every turn, a signature style, Holden has explored a vast array of approaches, from delivering lectures and shaping theoretical frameworks, to writing, creating animations, installation, painting and sculpture,” Higgie writes. Pieces featured include Structure of Feeling (2020), an immersive ghost ride on converted mobility scooters through what Holden described as a “post-cartoon landscape”. In the foreword, Pulp’s frontman Jarvis Cocker calls Holden “a human being who wonders what exactly a human being is”.
The True Artist Breaks out of Jail, Ben Okri and Rosemary Clunie, Thames & Hudson, 160pp, $24.95 (hb)
The Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri and the Scottish-born artist Rosemary Clunie have collaborated together on text and image projects for a decade. “Pushing the possibilities of text and image to their limit, this book addresses questions of life in our times through the potent energies of poetry and painting,” a publisher’s statement says. The pair, who explore life’s vicissitudes against the backdrop of wars and climate change, draw on a variety of influences including Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Cezanne, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.
