May Book Bag: from a guide on entering the art world to a publication about artists influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses – The Art Newspaper

Metamorphoses: Ovid and the Arts, Francesca Cappelletti and Frits Scholten (editors), Hannibal Books, 192pp, $50 (pb)

The Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Latin narrative poem dating from around 8AD and comprising around 250 myths, is considered one of the most important works of classical antiquity. “Metamorphoses in [relation to] art is a perfectly logical theme given the immense influence that the Latin poem has exerted, and continues to exert, on Western culture,” writes the co-editor, Francesca Cappelletti. The authors aim to show Ovid’s impact on art, presenting sculptures by Benvenuto Cellini, Auguste Rodin and Louise Bourgeois along with paintings by Titian, Antonio da Correggio, Caravaggio, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Peter Paul Rubens. A chapter on Gian Lorenzo Bernini by Lucia Simonato explores how the 17th-century Italian sculptor “absorbed the rich body of [the] worded, contemporary interpretations of Ovid’s passage”.

How to Enter the Art World, Hettie Judah, Hoxton Mini Press, 192pp, £14.95 (hb)

The author and curator Hettie Judah’s latest tome is billed as a “grown-up guide for any artist whose life is complicated, demanding and, well, human”. Chapters cover topics such as “putting yourself out there”, “the sell [art market]” and “the horror show”, which looks at “the NFT [non-fungible token] and other scams”. The book includes tips and guidance on a vast range of pertinent art world issues, from how to apply for grants to ways of contacting curators and critics. “Everything you will find in these pages derives from the lived experiences of artists and others in the art world,” writes Judah.

Derrick Adams: Prints, Judy Hecker and Krista Franklin (contributors), Tandem Press, 112pp, £30 (pb)

More than 20 of the prints produced by the Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist Derrick Adams between 2019 and 2025 are presented alongside poetry inspired by his work. The Party Guest 1 and 2 (2020-21) series “honours the historic sanctity of churches, barber shops and salons, venues that served as havens for Black communities when they weren’t welcomed to assemble freely in other places,” says a publisher’s statement. In an interview with Katie Geha, the director of Tandem Press, Adams discusses his printmaking experiments. The prints “echo the collage-based formal language Adams is known for, while pushing the work into new material and expressive territory”, writes Geha.

Whistler’s Legacy, Daniel Sutherland, Penn State University Press, 274pp, $42.99 (hb)

Daniel Sutherland focuses on individuals who helped build the legacy of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, including his close friends, Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell, and the artist’s mistress and muse Maud Franklin. Sutherland focuses especially on three key issues: Whistler’s cultivated image of the dandy, the artist’s reputation for quarrelsomeness, and the origins of the Nocturnes series begun in the 1870s. The book “frames Whistler’s established image via popular culture to provide a fuller portrait of one of the most consequential artists of the 19th century,” says Catherine Carter Goebel, the director of the Centre for Whistler Criticism in Illinois.