This week’s competition prize is Rogues Gallery: A History of Art and its Dealers, published by Profile Books (£20.00). Click here for your chance to win.
Philip Hook takes the lid off the world of art dealing to reveal the brilliance, cunning, greed and daring of its practitioners. He describes the rise and occasional fall of the extraordinary men and women who over the centuries have made it their business to sell art to kings, merchants, nobles, entrepreneurs, and museums.
The cast of characters includes Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists’ champion; Herwath Walden, who first brought Modernism into the limelight; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, high priest of Cubism; Leo Castelli, dealer-midwife to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art; and Peter Wilson, the charismatic Sotheby’s chairman who made the auction room theatre. Philip Hook’s history is one of human folly, greed and duplicity, interspersed with ingenuity, inspiration and acts of heroism. Rogues’ Gallery is learned, witty and irresistibly readable.
For your chance to win simply answer the following question and submit your details here before midday on 17 March.
Q: Picasso’s most famous set of etchings is named after which French art dealer?
For our last competition prize we offered America’s National Gallery of Art by Philip Kopper, published by The National Gallery of Art, Washington and Princeton University Press (£62.95). The question was:
Q: Which American financier and philanthropist founded the National Gallery of Art in Washington?
Answer: Andrew W. Mellon
Congratulations to the winner: Stephen Little