Art history

“I have been instructed to tell you that what you are proposing is entirely impossible. Nevertheless, in Iran, even the totally impossible becomes possible at times.” Such was the mysterious riddle that confronted the English art dealer Oliver Hoare as he sat across from an Iranian contact in Paris in 1992. He had just presented a madcap plan: to reunite the state of Iran with one of its most prized but long-lost manuscripts.   The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp is an illustrated epic poem comprising 50,000 rhyming couplets. Completed in the mid-sixteenth century, this “book of Kings” is one of the most exquisite examples of Islamic art and poetry ever to have been produced.

Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed to be a novel and felt like neither. Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare, which recalls and converses with Sebald, is such a work. An antic and original creation, it is not exactly a biography of the revolutionary Renaissance printmaker, painter and theorist of geometry and perspective. For the fuller story of Albrecht Dürer, turn to Erwin Panofsky’s mighty monograph, as Hoare does frequently. Instead, Hoare has made a book as much for Dürer as it is about him. Dürer’s life and art are thrillingly encountered.

I’m a lady, I kept thinking, reading these two books. More: I’m a lady art historian. Oughtn’t I to like books by other lady art historians about lady artists and ladies in art? Why don’t I? Why so out of sync with the sisterhood? Start with the positive. Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette follows an interesting, original line: ‘If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face and, by extension, her place in the world.’ Higgie, editor-at-large at frieze magazine and the host of the (excellent) art history podcast Bow Down, considers the lives and ambitions of a series of women artists in the light of the self-portraits they painted.

Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates. Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró. In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of a latter-day Vasari, penning mini-biographies of 32 artists who were associated with Surrealism.