Bridget riley

If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs in Amazônia (Taschen, £100) does so in the most spectacular way imaginable. Not only are they ravishing in themselves; they show us sights that very few have ever seen. To take these shots, Salgado trekked deep into the rainforest, sailed the rivers, visited remote tribes and flew over the vast terrain in the helicopters of the Brazilian air force. During those flights he saw immense vistas over trees, billowing cloudscapes and snaking rivers covering an area larger than the EU. The resulting pictures, all the more powerful for being in

When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ — Josef Albers — would proclaim ‘art is svindle’ in heavily accented English at least ten times a day. By that provocative remark Albers probably meant not so much that art was a cheat but that intellectualising about it is usually bogus. He once thanked his lucky stars that his father was a painter-decorator rather than an intellectual. For him it involved simple forms, clear colours and no nonsense. Albers and his equally brilliant wife are the subject of a remarkable and visually beautiful joint biography, Anni & Josef Albers by