Art Catalogues

Art catalogues... the large, expensive books that reproduce everything you've just seen in the exhibit... but they're usually so pretty and lovely. If you know there's space on your coffee table or that you'd end up purchasing every postcard possible anyway, then you can justify the expense... and rarely do I ever regret when I purchase an art catalogue, because they're usually beautiful works of art in and of themselves. Such is the opinion of others and that's why there's an awart for art exhibition catalogues (at least in Britain)... and the award went to Undercover Surrealism for a surrealist exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

It was an unusual exhibition because it illustrated, with Surrealist works, the views of a French critic, Georges Bataille, who thought that Surrealism had not gone far enough. The Surrealists hoped through dream and unreason to reveal a better, higher order in human life.
The catalogue presented such things as Picasso’s bird like an evil black star, Jacques-André Boiffard’s close-up of a big toe like a one-eyed monster and Eli Lotar’s abattoir pictures with their lumps of flesh and skin.
John Eskenazi, the scholar and dealer in Asian art and a member of the jury, said that it was an exceptionally focused exhibition with stupendous research behind it, and that this was reflected in the catalogue.