Braque has suffered from two main drawbacks to full recognition of his stature - his overshadowing by Picasso, and the concentration by critics and scholars on his early, Cubist works in favour of his later ones. Those who saw the major exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London last year will not need to be told how one-sided and inadequate this view is, and how nobly Braque upheld the great French - and European - traditions of painting right to the end. Braque: The Late Works, by John Golding (Yale, £25 in UK), was timed for the Royal Academy show, and is in effect a kind of super-catalogue for it. It is interesting to read of Braque's close relationship and even collaboration with poets, including the great Rene Char, who wrote eloquently about his pictures.
Picasso: The Early Years, 1892- 1906, edited by Marilyn McCully (Yale, £40 in UK): in view of the widespread idea of Picasso as a child prodigy, a fully-fledged genius from his early teens, perhaps it needs to be said that much of the work of these years is not very good, even if it includes the "Blue" and "Rose" periods. Though he acquired academic competence early, he had to forget much of what he had learned when he came to develop a "modern" style of his own, initially with only the mildly advanced artists of the Catalan Revival to guide him. So we find him running feverishly through a whole gamut of styles from Toulouse-Lautrec to Puvis de Chavannes, and beginning to find his feet as he approaches the period of the first Cubist pictures. The quality of the draughtsmanship is undoubted, but the great painter is still only tentatively emerging from his chrysalis of immaturity. The erotic works almost always look the best, which is prophetic of Picasso's career as a whole; and without Fernande Olivier's splendid, sculptural body to fire him up, I suspect his start might have been much slower.
Correggio, by David Ekserdjian (Yale, £45 in UK): Parma, that rather uninteresting town in Northern Italy, is famous for its ham and its cheese and not much else. Yet the cathedral contains Correggio's great painted ceiling, a miracle of High Renaissance art which takes flight futuristically into Baroque. Correggio (real name Antonio Allegri) worked in a relatively provincial and isolated milieu, though he seems to have visited Rome and looked at Raphael's work, and he died in his mid-forties. His soft, voluptuous harmonies are unique to himself, and in works such as the Jupiter and Io in Vienna he painted some of the world's great erotic pictures. In the 18th and 19th centuries Correggio was ranked as one of the great Renaissance masters, but our own time has almost shamefully neglected him, and a book such as this one is well overdue. Lorenzo Lotto, by Peter Humfrey (Yale, £35 in UK): Lotto is one of the great Venetians, the virtual peer of Bellini and Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto. Yet his work is far less popular and less known than theirs, mainly because for much of his career he lived and worked off the beaten track away from Venice, Florence or Rome. Berenson wrote a fine study of him a century ago and this scholarly book should help to clear away some of the mists surrounding this lonely, haunted, rather enigmatic artist who died a lay brother in Loreto. Lotto is the Expressionist of his time, tense and introverted, closer in many ways to Germanic art than to the serenity and worldlines of his Venetian contemporaries. Those who find his religious pictures strained and mannered should at least look at his portraits, the best of which are the equal of Durer's or Rembrandt's.
Baule: African Art Western Eyes, by Susan Mullin Vogel (Yale, £30 in UK): Baule is the art of the Ivory Coast, and like most African art (Benin bronzes and a few other styles excepted) it is not easy for a Westerner to approach, since its expressive world and aims are so different from ours. Many Baule artefacts are ritual objects, and there is much stress on wooden masks which are generally worn while dancing; a kind of "possession" is an accepted phenomenon, and the goods or costumes of ancestors have a special importance. The book demands close reading if one is to enter even partly into the spirit of the works illustrated or reproduced.
Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna, by Magdalena Dabrowsky and Rudolf Leopold (Yale/Molton, £40 in UK): Schiele has become rather an overexposed artist, particularly since the centenary of his birth in 1989, though his talents - particularly as a graphic artist - are unquestioned. He was the product of an unhappy home, a syphilitic father and an unsympathetic mother, and his edgy, nerve-ridden style is close to the so-called miserabiliste art which flourished (if that is the word) briefly in postwar France. The psychological content of Schiele's art shows him a true contemporary of Freud, while his sexual boldness looks several decades ahead of his own brief life (he and his young wife both died in the influenza epidemic of 1918). The 150 works - mainly graphic pieces, but not mere sketches - reproduced and discussed in this volume are earmarked for the new Schiele Museum in Vienna.
Gericault in Italy, by Wheelock Whitney (Yale, £45 in UK): Gericault was barely past boyhood when he went to Rome in 1816, and as he was always horse-mad, the famous races in Rome were food for his visual imagination. Most of the works he created in Italy were really large oil sketches, mainly on paper - Gericault painted relatively few "formal" canvases in his short life and seems always to have had inhibitions or self-doubts about undertaking large-scale works. However, his sketches have all the energy and fire of his intense temperament, and they are not all of horses; figure drawings are included, too, and some erotica which was not shown in the artist's lifetime.
The Oxford History of Classical Art, edited by John Boardman (OUP, £19 in UK): though the format is slightly cramped and some of the photographs are disappointing in quality, this large paperback is an excellent introduction both to Greek and Roman art (incidentally, it makes the point that Roman art was in any case largely created by Greeks). Written by various hands, the book begins in prehistory and ends at the start of the Middle Ages with the art of Byzantium. We are taken through primitive Greek art to the age of Pericles and the Parthenon, and through both republican and imperial Rome, as well as forays into North Africa and other outposts of Greco-Roman culture.
Cindy Sherman Retrospective, by Amada Cruz, Amelia Jones and Elizabeth Smith (Thames & Hudson, £22.50 in UK): Cindy Sherman's photographs, in colour, are usually of herself in various roles, poses and costumes, sometimes guying Hollywood myth, sometimes merely quick-change whims, sometimes guying fashion . . . anyway, the general idea is familiar by now. Though all this has been linked to the fashionable cant about exploring identity, etc, it is generally good entertainment in itself and Sherman, as has been said, exhibits many of the qualities of a good cinema actress, though acting in "stills". The exhibition to which this book is linked comes to the Barbican in London next year.
Kandinsky, by Thomas M. Messer (Thames & Hudson, £16.95 in UK): Kandinsky was highly influential in his lifetime, but even more so after his death when Abstract Expressionism claimed him as its own. Whoever was or was not the first abstract painter, he was undoubtedly a pioneer of it and unlike Malevich, for instance, he never went back into figurativism. Thomas Messer pays due tribute to Kandinsky the theorist and pedagogue, but he never loses sight of him as a painter, down to the last years in wartime Paris.
Flowers, Flowers, Flowers; Shoes, Shoes, Shoes; Style, Style, Style; Yum, Yum, Yum, all by Andy Warhol (Little, Brown, £7.50 each in UK): these neatly packaged little books show the intimate, charming side of Warhol, the one in which his elegant draughts manhip, visual wit and New Yorker-ish sense of style are seen at their best, without the brashness or meretriciousness of his larger works. The titles tell what they are about - the last of the four, in case you had not gathered the point, is about food. They are fleshed out with excerpts from his writings and sayings, reduced to epigrammatic form. Excellent value, of their kind. Cats As Cats Can, by Tomi Ungerer (Tomico/Town House and Country House, £7.99): to call Ungerer a cartoonist of genius is inadequate; he is simply a graphic artist of genius. Whether in blackand-white or in colour, these drawings are unfailingly funny, imaginative, and witty, with a surreal or black humour frequently coming in (or out). He likes cats, of course, but they don't always come off best. Creator by now of a hundred-odd books, Ungerer seems to have a flow of ideas and sheer invention which would keep a dozen New Yorker cartoonists busy full-time.
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times; this is the second part of a two-part review