Best summer books of 2022: Visual arts

20th Century Indian Art: Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary
edited by Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, Rakhee Balaram, Thames & Hudson £85

Indian art has found an immensely impressive range of historians and commentators, and a global context, in this enormous, significant scholarly landmark. Micro stories and the big picture, peripheries and the centre, colonial and postcolonial assumptions, modernism’s freedoms and constraints: every tightrope is walked with balance and insight.

Donatello: The Renaissance
edited by Francesco Caglioti, Marsilio Editori €72

“Life bursting out of stone” was Vasari’s description of Donatello’s revolutionary naturalistic, expressive depictions of saints and men which launched Renaissance sculpture. This (English) catalogue of the once-in-a-lifetime show now at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi is both a record of and — if you can’t get there — a substitute for, its beauty and erudition.

Matisse & the Joy of Drawing
by Christopher Lloyd, Modern Art Press £35

Matisse the master of colour also aimed life-long to make drawings “with a large variety of feeling and a minimum of means”. Lloyd unfolds the miracle of his brevity of line — in charcoal, ink, pencil, paint, gouache cut-outs: how so few marks convey such supple, powerful, defining images.

Love Life: David Hockney Drawings 1963-1977
by Chris Stephens, The Holburne Museum/Pallas Athene £25

Beautiful boys in bed, Celia in summer frocks, light filtering through hotel windows, Vichy water and Howard’s End on a Provencal café table: Hockney’s limpid virtuoso 1960s-70s drawings and watercolours in this (limited edition) decorative catalogue to his current exhibition in Bath, are pure summer pleasure between candy-pink covers.

Leonhart Fuchs: The New Herbal
by Werner Dressendoerfer, Taschen £125

A masterpiece of Renaissance publishing reproduced — Fuchs’ original, hand-coloured 1543 herb manual illustrating 500 plants, including New World specimens like tobacco and cactus. The Tubingen botanist-doctor set out to produce a medicinal guide, but he was a stunning painter and typical humanist in his intense observation of nature — a joyful explorer.

Summer Books 2022

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Thursday: History by Tony Barber
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: Critics’ choice

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café