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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists by Laura Freeman (Jonathan Cape)
If ever the spirit of a gallery is captured within hard covers, it is Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in this beautiful, original biography of its founder. Each chapter is sparked by one of the objects in the collection — painting, sculpture, stone, seed. Freeman’s writing has Ede’s flair, grace and insight.
Magnum Magnum edited by Brigitte Lardinois (Thames & Hudson)
The Magnum photo agency, founded by Robert Capa in 1947, was so named because its first members always drank champagne at meetings. This book fizzes, too: each photographer presents another’s work, in a compendium spanning 87 names, from Cartier Bresson to Martin Parr, in an updated edition of this classic 2007 work. Negotiating who spoke about whom and who didn’t, says editor Lardinois, was like organising a party of teenagers to share tents.
All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (Bodley Head/Simon & Schuster)
Who knows a museum like its guards? Seeking solace after his brother’s death, Patrick Bringley spent a decade looking after treasures in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Greek vases, an Iroquois turtle rattle, Picassos. His every word about them is illuminating. The big picture is art’s power to console and unite.
Books of the Year 2023
All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:
Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle and Andrew Dickson
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: Critics’ choice
Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker by Aoife Brady (Yale/National Gallery of Ireland)
Lavinia Fontana, born in 1552 and the first woman in Europe to become a professional artist, is astonishingly little known. This catalogue to a Dublin exhibition (sadly it didn’t travel) unpacks the drama of her painting, life — 11 children, a husband who kept house while she worked — and milieu of enlightened Renaissance Bologna.
An Atlas of Es Devlin by Es Devlin, edited by Andrea Lipps (Thames & Hudson)
An exquisitely designed gift book that keeps giving. Nine hundred pages open to offer fold-out sculptures, fragile little paintings, paper cuts, mechanical models, mirrors. They distil in miniature the genre-bending kinetic creations of the artist and designer who has set the stage for Beyoncé and Adele; experimental opera and the London Olympics; Trevor Nunn and AI poetry recitals.
Tell us what you think
What are your favourites from this list — and what books have we missed? Tell us in the comments below
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