Bel Mooney has rounded up a selection of this year s best art books. Among the UK-based literary critic s picks is Divine Love: The Art Of The Nativity by Sarah Drummond.
What London’s Reading Now: Robert Martineau, Michael Lewis and Rachel Cusk top the list Katie Law
Waypoints: A Journey on Foot by Rob Martineau (Cape, £16.99 )
At the age of 27, Martineau, a former lawyer in London, quit his job and embarked on a 1,000 mile walk with a backpack through West Africa, from Accra to Ouidah on the Beninese Coast. This is his story, beautifully-written, of how his pilgrimage of sorts changed him forever. In a good way.
Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock (Little Brown, £16.99)
Stock tackles several key axioms of trans activism, from the idea that everyone has an inner gender identity that might not match their biological sex to the pressure on people to acknowledge and legally protect gender identity instead of biological sex. A clear-sighted analysis in tricky territory.
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Here, the artist and the art historian offer a fascinating conversation, which defines sculpture as widely as possible (a prehistoric hand axe and Silbury Hill, for example) and illustrates a varied and inspiring analysis with a generous, seductive selection of plates. They consider fluid forms such as ritual and dance, and the whole journey from past to present leads you to look at the familiar anew. Brilliant.
PICASSO AND MAYA
by Diana Widmaier-Picasso and Carmen Gimenez (Rizzoli £155)
This handsome book celebrating an unusual, lavish Paris exhibition devoted to Picasso’s relationship with his elder daughter Maya is a work of art in itself. The artist fell in love with Maya’s mother, Marie-Therese Walter (1909 to 1977), when she was only 17 and he was a 45-year-old married man.