A bit wham-bam in its style of presentation, but visually stunning nonetheless, The Cairo Museum: Masterpieces of Egyptian Art (Thames & Hudson, £45 in UK) is a big, ravishing volume crammed with crystal clear images drawn from what is with reason described as "the finest and most celebrated collection of Egyptian artifacts in the world". A book that is an aesthetic experience in itself.
Scandinavian art, out of the European mainstream, has come in for deserved attention in the last few years. A major exhibition currently showing in Ottawa is accompanied by a beautiful study Baltic Light: Early Open Air Painting of Denmark and North Germany (Yale, £35 in UK). Superb reproductions of early, lesser known work by Casper David Friedrich, and outstanding painters like Eduard Gaertner and Johann Christian Dahl, make it worthwhile. As good as a week by the sea.
Coinciding with a major exhibition in Washington DC, Edward Hopper: The Watercolours (Norton, £25 in UK) by Virginia M Mecklenburg, explores a less well known but stunning side of the painter's work, one agreeably bound up with a biographical saga.
The great thing about The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (Abrams, $29.95) is that not alone do you get a comprehensive guide to the Long Island museum that houses an unrivalled collection of the work of one of the century's greatest sculptors, you also get an informal running commentary on virtually every piece by Noguchi himself.
Also for mention is the unique and indispensable annual journal of Irish art, the Irish Arts Review Yearbook 2000 (£40 hardback, £26 paperback) with regular features including a diary of the art year, an assessment of new architecture, book reviews, and historical and contemporary profiles. As critic, curator and academic, Robert Rosenblum has long been a central figure in the American art world, and On Modern American Art (Abrams, £25 in UK) is a handsomely produced, illustrated selection of his essays..
Fra Filippo Lippi made an unlikely painter of exquisitely beautiful, delicate Madonnas. A "shameless scrounger", he quit the Carmelite order when he was only 18, and was lucky to find a generous patron in Cosimo de Medici. Now, Mega Holmes has written an account of how his talent was nurtured and shaped by the Carmelites in her stunningly produced Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter (Yale, £45 in UK) Now I'm looking forward to starting Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes (Allen Lane, £30 in UK).
