HBL Book of the Week: The Art Museum

Wednesday 30 November 2011

The Art Museum (Phaidon, 2011)
At last week's If Conference, art publisher Phaidon's editorial director Amanda Renshaw personally introduced delegates to The Art Museum - a new, curated guide to the history of art captured in 2700 works and 992 pages. The book is organised like a physical museum, containing a 'permanent collection' as well as rooms dedicated to especially important artists or art movements.

The Art Museum (Phaidon, 2011)
The Art Museum took a global team of editors and art experts ten years to distil into a hardback publication, and is the only place in the world where Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, ancient Chinese ceramics, gold artefacts from Peru, Hokusai woodblocks, and Picasso portraits are gathered together.

HBL loves: The ambition of the project at a time when many critics are pronouncing print dead. As Renshaw said, "Art is a language. It's a language of looking."