May Book Bag: From A Guide On Entering The Art World To A Publication About Artists Influenced By Ovid's Metamorphoses The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A new cluster of art publications ranges from classical myth to the practical mechanics of making a career. Together, the books sketch a familiar art-world tension: the pull of history on one side, and the demands of professional survival on the other.

At the center is Metamorphoses: Ovid and the Arts, edited by Francesca Cappelletti and Frits Scholten and published by Hannibal Books. The volume takes Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Latin narrative poem written around 8 AD, as a lens for understanding how classical antiquity continues to shape Western culture. In her introduction, Cappelletti describes the theme as a natural one, given the poem's long reach. The book follows that argument through sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini, Auguste Rodin, and Louise Bourgeois, as well as paintings by Titian, Antonio da Correggio, Caravaggio, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Peter Paul Rubens.

One chapter, by Lucia Simonato, focuses on Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the way the 17th-century Italian sculptor absorbed contemporary written interpretations of Ovid's passages. That emphasis on reception, rather than simple illustration, gives the book its intellectual weight.

Hettie Judah's How to Enter the Art World, published by Hoxton Mini Press, turns to the present with a more pragmatic brief. Judah frames the book as a guide for artists whose lives are“complicated, demanding and, well, human.” Its chapters address self-presentation, the art market, and what she calls“the horror show,” a section on NFTs and other scams. The book also offers advice on grants and on approaching curators and critics, drawing on what Judah describes as lived experience across the art world.

The roundup also includes Derrick Adams: Prints, with contributions by Judy Hecker and Krista Franklin, from Tandem Press, and Whistler's Legacy by Daniel Sutherland, published by Penn State University Press. Sutherland's study examines the people who helped shape James Abbott McNeill Whistler's reputation, including Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell and Maud Franklin. It also returns to three recurring themes: Whistler's dandy image, his reputation for quarrelsomeness, and the origins of the Nocturnes series begun in the 1870s.

Taken together, these books suggest how art publishing continues to move between scholarship, biography, and practical instruction - a reminder that the art world is sustained as much by interpretation as by production.

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