It reads like a company report in measured tones that threaten to announce another year
It reads like a company report, in measured tones that threaten to announce "another year of challenge" or relate how "your Board was most fortunate to obtain the services of..." In other words, it's dull. But it's also authoritative and bristling with integrity - much like the author, whose presence barely registers in the narrative and whose achievements in 18 years of governance are hardly advertised. You get the modern history of the ROH in largely neutral terms And of course, the history of the ROH is solely modern. But they weren't going to let the reopening of Covent Garden pass without some kind of comment; and their respective books of memoirs - Tooley's In House (Faber £25) and Isaacs' Never Mind the Moon (Bantam £20) - bear witness to their two conspicuously dissimilar regimes: that of a gentleman professional followed by that of a bounder from television. Tooley's book is all discretion and sobriety. Supremos of the Royal Opera House don't die (in 50 years only Sir David Webster's managed that), nor do they fade away. They just go into print - and sometimes with indecent haste, if you remember Mary Allen's diaries which came out before the ink was dry on the page or the blood dry on the floor. An even bigger two-volume American book is the giant catalogue Georgia O'Keeffe (Yale £99.95).
More manageable volumes from the States are Edward Hopper Watercolours (Norton £25) and James M Saslow's Pictures and Passions (Viking £25), which is a nicely presented history of homosexuality in the visual arts, as seen from an American viewpoint Saslow is a good writer. His book would make a fine present, and also deserves to be taken seriously.. I found the book really helpful in its understanding of Constable's enterprise. And it's charming too. The Whitney Museum in New York has celebrated the millennium with The American Century (Norton, two volumes, each £40), a catalogue-cum-book that accompanied the recent controversial exhibition. Thorne is specific and makes the whole subject into a sort of aerial treasure hunt. Thorne looks at Constable's paintings, one by one, and demonstrates that the artist was a precise observer of the skies This we already knew, in a general way.
She remarks that many of the artists' houses are nowadays occupied by monied people who are themselves artists of a sort, chaps like Michael Winner. John Constable's Skies (University of Birmingham Press £40) is by John Thorne, who is by profession a meteorologist. None the less we get his drift. Burton genuinely loves the V&A. He's good on its Victorian origins and presents neat summaries of the fortunes of the departments that care for textiles, furniture and the other artefacts that are stored under one South Kensington roof. A rare thing - an institutional history that can be read with relaxed enjoyment. Only a couple of tube stops away is the former artists' area described in Caroline Dakers's The Holland Park Circle (Yale £39.95) An area for for late-Victorian successful artists, that is. In this part of London lived Watts, Leighton, Val Prinsep, Hamo Thornycroft and so on, people who had thrived by their work with the brush and were sometimes millionaires Dakers is a social historian fascinated by style and wealth.
He makes particularly good use of pictures from small provincial galleries. Lambourne is a former keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has found an almost ideal chronicler in Anthony Burton. His Vision and Accident (V&A Publications £45) doesn't quite dare say how unhappy the museum has become in recent years. The book deals with marble, mosaics and glass as well as painting. It's a lovely exploration of a palette that belongs to the city as a whole, the buildings melting into the waters, dusks and dawns. Hills, a sensualist of the eye, has written an appropriately dreamy book, to be read in a gondola as well as a university library. Books about British art are led by Lionel Lambourne's very large Victorian Painting (Phaidon £39.95) The subject is hackneyed, or so one might think Yet we can dig deep into this account Lambourne has produced an intriguing survey. He has two important credentials: not only wide knowledge but a genuine relish for minor artists A giant like Tintoretto would make him run scared.
Paul Hills's Venetian Colour (Yale £45) describes Venice before 1550, so is only partially concerned with Tintoretto. Nichols must have more material in his notes than he has printed. This should have been a bigger book, and its illustrations are cramped. Special thanks are due to Dunkerton, who is in the NG's conservation department at Trafalgar Square. It's not often that scientific studies of ancient painting techniques are explained in such a friendly fashion. Tom Nichols's Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (Reaktion Books £45) is a bold account of a painter whose awesome imagination tends to inhibit cautious historians. But why does Drury so often sound uneasy? It must be because renaissance art, which he so obviously likes, is full of worldly temptation. Three National Gallery curators, Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister and Nicholas Penny, show a total command of the paintings they describe in Dürer to Veronese (Yale £45), an expert, only occasionally forbidding guide to the NG's 16th-century paintings.
