September Book Bag: from the importance of colour in Mesoamerican cultures to a collection of famous artists’ sketchbooks

Figurine Carrying a Dog from Tlatilco, Mexico (1200-400BC), which features in We Live in Painting: The Nature of Colour in Mesoamerican Art Museo Nacional de Antropología, México / Inah-Canon
This catalogue explores “colour’s material and cosmological significance [,] allowing us to view ancient and contemporary Indigenous Mesoamerican cultures in a different light”, writes Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in the foreword. The book follows two interconnected lines of inquiry: technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image. Chapters cover topics such as “reviving natural dyes in Chiapas and Oaxaca” and “painting technologies in Guerrero”.
Chila Burman was a member of the British Black Arts movement in the 1980s and one of the first South Asian women to make political art in the UK. This monograph examines her exuberant “radical feminist” practice across four decades, encompassing paintings, prints and video. A publisher’s statement says: “Since the mid 1980s her work has explored the experiences and aesthetics of Asian feminism and female empowerment, and the impact of imperialism, colonialism, race and class.” In 2020, she was commissioned for the Tate Britain Winter commission; “Her work remains infused with messages of female empowerment and a desire to explore multiple cultural contexts and identities,” wrote Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, who is one of the book’s contributors.
Sketchbooks once owned by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Angelica Kauffman, John Constable, Edward Burne-Jones and Beatrix Potter give new insights into the creative processes and techniques used by such famous artistic figures. “Serving as portable companions, they accompany artists on their physical and mental journeys, offering intimate glimpses into their sources of inspiration and frequently blurring the boundaries between art and journal,” says a publisher’s statement. The sketchbooks are all drawn from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
A Tang dynasty ceramic figure of a camel © Trustees of the British Museum
This exhibition catalogue is “ambitious in its scope and vast in its geographical range”, exploring the Silk Roads as a web of interlocking networks linking Asia, Africa and Europe, spanning Japan to Ireland and the Arctic to Madagascar, according to a publisher’s statement. Key objects featured include a dagger and sheath decorated with gold, garnets and glass from Korea (400AD) and the Franks Casket, which is crafted from whalebone and was made in northern England around 700AD. Ceramics from Tang China recovered from a shipwreck in the Java Sea in 1998 are also among the treasures featured.
This overview of the British artist Tracey Emin’s paintings looks at the development of her technique and themes through 300 works dating from the 1990s to today. “The paintings featured in the book reveal her liberating approach to art-making, taking inspiration in her early years from artists such as Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch and later, Cy Twombly,” says a publisher’s statement. The book also includes an interview between Emin and the artist (and former Lucian Freud assistant) David Dawson, in which they discuss emotions, dreams and her life-long interest in psychometry.

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