April Book Bag: From A Matthew Wong Catalogue To A History Of Dogs In Art The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A new cluster of art publications offers an unusually broad view of how artists look, observe, and build meaning. The titles range from a history of dogs in art to a study of marble in late Gothic and early Renaissance painting, alongside a survey of Antony Gormley's drawings and a catalogue tied to an upcoming Matthew Wong exhibition in Venice.

Thomas Laqueur's The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History, published by Penguin, follows the presence of dogs in art from the Palaeolithic era to the present. The book moves across centuries and media, bringing together works by Giotto, Francisco Goya, Peter Paul Rubens, Paula Rego, Albrecht Dürer, and Edwin Landseer. Its central argument is that dogs do more than accompany human figures: they help organize narrative, witness events, and sharpen the emotional register of an image.

Karl Kolbitz's Divine Presence: Depictions of Marble in Late Gothic and Early Renaissance Painting, published by Hatje Cantz, turns to the visual problem of marble in 14th- and 15th-century painting. The volume examines works by more than 30 painters, including Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, Carlo Crivelli, and Andrea Mantegna. Close-up reproductions highlight brushwork and technique, while illuminated manuscripts, liturgical objects, and sacred architecture extend the book's visual field. The project also suggests how painters pursuing naturalism sometimes arrived at effects that feel unexpectedly close to proto-abstraction.

Drawing: Antony Gormley, published by Thames & Hudson, gathers work by the British sculptor Antony Gormley (b. 1950) from 1980 to the present. In the preface, Gormley frames drawing as a form of thought as much as a medium, and the book is shaped around themes such as weather, scratch drawings, and darkness of the body. Contributions from Jeanette Winterson and Daisy Hildyard widen the conversation around the work.

The final title, Matthew Wong: Interiors, edited by John Cheim for The Matthew Wong Foundation, accompanies an exhibition at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice from 9 May to 1 November. The show will include 35 works dating from 2015 to 2019 and is described as an exploration of interiors, both physical and psychological. The foundation was established in 2020 by Monita Wong and Raymond KP Wong after the artist's death by suicide in 2019. In her introduction, Nancy Spector notes that Wong was 27 when his transformative encounters in Venice helped redirect him toward painting.

Taken together, the books reflect a familiar art-world impulse: to return to looking closely, whether at an animal, a surface, a line, or a life cut short too soon.

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