Art books on Australian painting worth keeping on the shelf

There is a particular kind of happiness in finding a fat exhibition catalogue in a second-hand shop, the spine slightly sunned, someone's pencilled notes in the margins of the essay. I live in Hobart, and a good part of my shelf space is given over to books like that. Some are surveys that try to tell the whole story of painting in this country. Some are catalogues from shows I would never otherwise have known about. A few are books I disagree with, which are often the ones I return to most.

This is not a list of the "best" books on Australian painting. It is a shelf: a way of putting together a small library that will help you understand what you see on gallery walls. It starts with the big survey histories, moves to catalogues and monographs, offers a way to judge a catalogue before you buy it, and ends with where to find all of this without spending much.

Start with a survey, then argue with it

A survey history gives you the map. It tells you roughly who came before whom, which painters were talking to each other, and where the arguments were. The trick is to read more than one, because every survey is an argument about what matters, and the authors do not all agree.

Bernard Smith, Australian Painting

Bernard Smith's Australian Painting was first published in 1962 and has been revised and extended several times since. Later editions carry additional chapters by Terry Smith and, in the most recent, Christopher Heathcote, which take the story towards the end of the twentieth century. It is a serious, closely argued book, and for a long time it was the standard history. If you find an older edition second hand, do not worry too much about which one: the core chapters on colonial painting, the Heidelberg School and the first half of the twentieth century are the part most people go to it for.

Read it slowly. Smith was interested in how painting connected to ideas about society and nationhood, and you will come away seeing the familiar names in a wider frame.

Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia

Robert Hughes wrote The Art of Australia when he was still in his twenties, before he left Australia to work overseas. It first appeared in 1966 and was revised in 1970. It is quicker and sharper than Smith, opinionated in a way that is either bracing or maddening depending on your mood, and very readable. It is also a book of its moment: the coverage of recent art at the time of writing is generous, and the later decades are, of course, missing. I like to read a chapter of Hughes and then the matching pages of Smith, and see where they part ways.

Christopher Allen, Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism

This is one of the Thames and Hudson World of Art paperbacks, first published in 1997. It is compact, illustrated throughout, and a sensible single volume if you only want one survey to carry around. Allen's interest is in the conditions that shaped art made in a transplanted colonial society, rather than in any idea of an essential national style.

Andrew Sayers, Australian Art

Andrew Sayers wrote Australian Art for the Oxford History of Art series, published in 2001. Its great virtue is structural: it gives Aboriginal art and the art of the settler colonies equal weight, and treats them as part of one history rather than as separate chapters at either end. Sayers was a curator at the National Gallery of Australia and later the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery, and the book has a curator's eye for objects.

Sasha Grishin, Australian Art: A History

The big one. Sasha Grishin's Australian Art: A History was published by Miegunyah Press in 2013, and it is the book I reach for when I want to check where a painter fits in the second half of the twentieth century. It covers painting alongside sculpture, printmaking, photography and more, and it gives a lot of room to the last fifty years. It is heavy enough that you will read it at a table, not in bed.

John McDonald, The Art of Australia, Volume 1: Exploration to Federation

The critic John McDonald's first volume, published in 2008, covers the colonial period in long, detailed chapters. If the nineteenth century is where your curiosity lies, it gives you far more than any single-volume survey can.

Books that fill the gaps the surveys leave

The older surveys have blind spots, and a good shelf fills them. Two books I would put next to them:

• Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art. Another World of Art paperback, first published in 1993 and updated in several later editions. Caruana was for many years the senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the National Gallery of Australia. It is a clear, region-by-region introduction, and the newer editions carry the story into recent decades.
• Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists 1840-1940. Published in 1980 and often described as the first history of Australian women artists. It is out of print but turns up second hand, and it introduces painters who are now far better known than they were when it came out.

Exhibition catalogues: the best value in art publishing

Survey histories give you the map. Catalogues give you the country. When a state gallery mounts a major exhibition, especially a retrospective of a single painter, it usually publishes a catalogue with new essays, a full list of works, many colour plates and often a detailed chronology. These books are researched by curators with access to the archives and the paintings themselves, and they often stay the most thorough account of an artist for years afterwards.

If there is a painter you care about, the most useful question to ask is: was there a major retrospective, and is there a catalogue? For John Olsen, for example, look for the catalogue from a major state gallery retrospective rather than a slim book of reproductions; the essay on John Olsen on this site is a good primer to read before you go hunting. The same goes for any painter whose career is long enough to have earned a full survey show.

Smaller catalogues are worth collecting too. Regional galleries publish modest but careful catalogues for touring shows and prize exhibitions, and commercial gallery catalogues for solo shows sometimes carry an essay that is the only extended writing on a younger painter. Those are the ones that quietly become rare.

A monograph is not always a catalogue

A monograph is a book about one artist, usually written by one author, often published by a trade or university press rather than a gallery. It can be more personal and more interpretive than a catalogue, and less complete in its list of works. Ideally you own both kinds for the painters you love most: the catalogue for the facts, the monograph for the argument.

How to judge a catalogue in five minutes

Here is what I do when I pick up a catalogue I do not know, in a shop or a library. It takes about five minutes, and it has saved me from carrying home a lot of handsome but empty books.

1. Turn to the back first. Is there a list of works with titles, dates, media, dimensions and collections? Is there a chronology and a bibliography? A catalogue with all three is a research tool. One with none of them is a picture book.
2. Count the essays and check who wrote them. One long essay by a curator plus a couple of shorter pieces is a good sign. Look for footnotes. An essay with no references may still be beautiful, but you cannot follow its trail.
3. Look hard at three plates. Find a painting you have seen in person, if you can, and compare. Is the colour roughly right, or has everything been pushed brighter? Are details reproduced, so you can see brushwork? Are works shown with their dimensions nearby?
4. Check the date range of the works. A retrospective should span the career. A catalogue for a single show covers a few years, which is fine, but you want to know which you are holding.
5. Read the first page of the main essay. If it is clear and specific, the rest probably is too. If it is a fog of abstract nouns, put it back.

As a worked example, imagine two catalogues for the same painter on a second-hand shelf. One is a large hardback from a commercial show, sixty pages, forty full-page plates, a two-page foreword, no list of works. The other is a softcover from a state gallery retrospective, a little battered, with three essays, a chronology, a bibliography and a full list of works with collection credits. The first is nicer to flick through. The second is the one you will still be using in ten years.

Reading with your eyes as well

None of these books is a substitute for standing in front of a painting. Plates flatten texture, change scale and tidy up colour. I find it useful to read about a painter and then go and look, and then come back to the book with new questions. The guide to looking at a painting slowly is a good companion for that second step, and the note on Philip Hunter is a small example of how a short piece of writing can change what you notice in a painter's surfaces.

Keep a pencil in the book. The margin notes of a previous owner are part of the pleasure of second-hand copies, and your own will be part of the pleasure for whoever comes after you.

Where to find art books, new, second hand and free

New books are the easiest part. Any good general bookshop can order in-print titles, and the shops at state galleries carry their own recent catalogues as well as a range of surveys. Gallery shops are often the only place to find a current catalogue in the first year or two after an exhibition, and some galleries sell older catalogues from their own stock long after the show has closed. It is worth asking at the counter.

Second hand is where the shelf grows. Many of the books above are out of print or have been superseded by later editions, which means older copies turn up regularly and often cheaply. Look in second-hand bookshops with an art section, at charity book fairs, and through the large online marketplaces for used books. A few habits help:

• Check the edition and year before buying. With Bernard Smith in particular, the later editions carry more chapters, but an earlier one is still very much worth having.
• Ask about condition. Large art books suffer from damp, foxing and cracked spines, and plates can stick together if a book has been stored somewhere humid.
• Do not dismiss ex-library copies. They are often well protected in plastic jackets and priced low.

Then there are libraries, which are the best deal of all. Your local public library can usually borrow a book from another library through interlibrary loan if it does not hold a copy itself. State libraries hold large art collections and will let you read them in the building. The National Library of Australia's Trove search will tell you which libraries hold a particular title, which is the fastest way to find a rare catalogue. Some state galleries also run research libraries that the public can use by appointment, with runs of catalogues that no bookshop will ever see in one place. University libraries sometimes allow community borrowing for a fee, and their art history shelves are usually deep.

My own rule is simple. I borrow first. If I renew a book twice, I start looking for a copy of my own.