Coffee table art ... Taschen's Giotto book
The German art publisher Taschen's winning combination of imaginative, ambitious ventures and low-cost, accessible books has made it fashionable and respected.
I share the admiration for projects like its republication of Napoleon's nutty scholarly enterprise The Description of Egypt - an attempt to turn a whole culture into a vast illustrated volume. And yet, whenever I fork out for a Taschen book I end up feeling cheated by incredibly sloppy standards when it actually comes to the central issue - in a picture book - of picture quality. This was no problem in the first Taschen book I ever bought, on Jeff Koons. It becomes a bit annoying when you're trying to understand Monet.
The panache of Taschen blinds us to its failure to ever, ever reproduce a painting accurately. Take its apparently generous collections of the complete Van Gogh and Monet. Both these artists are exclusively visual; what matters is what you see. "Only an eye, but what an eye", as Cezanne said of Monet. Their colours are what matter. Taschen doesn't make any attempt whatsoever to accurately replicate these colours - the books are full of harsh images of paintings whose magic relies on chromatic delicacy. The publisher doesn't seem to care if a Monet water lily comes out as a crass violet blob. Maybe the Cologne-based Taschen is insidiously trying to make French Impressionism look more like German expressionism?
Less flashy publishers take far more care over the look of images. It is, of course, impossible to turn a painting into a photograph without losing something - but you can try. Thames and Hudson's World of Art series gives you careful, solid little reproductions, so do Phaidon's rival Art and Ideas books. If you've got more money, the Italian publishers Scalo gorgeously reproduce entire fresco cycles.
Does the rise of Taschen indicate a wider failure of idealism in the making of art books? The most beautiful popular art book I own is a paperback Phaidon reprint of a book on Michelangelo by one of the firm's founders, Ludwig Goldscheider. It contains black and white photographs of Michelangelo's sculptures that, although more than 50 years old, bring you closer to the works than any of today's glossier volumes. Goldscheider was one of the inventors of the popular art book; looking at his classic Michelangelo makes you realise we're being shortchanged.
