Words And Pictures

The season's best new art books, from a biography of a modernist giant to a compendium of stellar female sculptors.

- Words: Julie Belcove

BROWSING ART BOOKS on a chilly day can be as satisfying as hitting a string of gallery shows. Done right, their unique blend of images, text, and graphic design opens new windows into creative minds.

This season offers plentiful options, with in-depth biographies, thematic histories, and exhaustive anthologies among the choices. And don’t be afraid to stray from the establishment publishers for titles that will never so much as flirt with bestseller lists. In case you're looking for inspiration, we've included one such gem found off the beaten path in our round-up here.

Mondrian By Nicholas Fox Weber

This new, deeply researched biography (US$40) from a respected art historian traces the iconoclastic painter Piet Mondrian from his strict Calvinist upbringing in the rural Netherlands of the late 1800s to his young adulthood in Amsterdam and on to his breakthrough years in Paris and beyond.

A prodigy, Mondrian showed a deft hand with landscapes under the tutelage of his schoolmaster father—a skilled, if unimaginative, draughtsman himself—and his uncle, who earned a lucrative living churning out mediocre Impressionist canvases for the Dutch elite. But when the one-time pupil began to diverge from that standard fare, moving toward pure abstraction by rendering solitary chrysanthemums, then landscapes that veered closer to horizontal strips of colour, his uncle was so appalled, he demanded his nephew drop the second ‘a’ from the family name, Mondriaan, lest the men be linked in viewers’ minds.