Cecil Maguire: Towards a Retrospective Davison Gallery, 2002 pp.154. Large Format p/b. Stg50/e90 ills 64col Readability: [Nothing to read] Reference Use: 1 Design & Durability: 2 Quality of Plates: 4 In 2001 Joga Press produced a coffee table book on Colin Middleton, clearly designed as a promotional volume. The Cecil Maguire, which is in almost exactly the same format, increases the irritating fussiness of design of the former volume, and also jettisons that was most useful. Instead of the 15,000 word judicious essay on Middleton, we get a one-page puff by a collector and another one-page puff by the gallery owner. Instead of a bibliography we get two pages of newspaper extracts. Sample: ‘Maguire is that rare thing; a competent academic in the old sense. Competent means adequate. Academic (in the old sense’. means that he can draw but is a century behind the times. If this is the best that a promotional volume can do, Mister Maguire is entitled to wonder what a critical response might be. This volume does him no favours. It has the advantage of producing a large number of colour illustrations. Most of these occupy two pages. In most cases the image occupies between a third and a half of one page, and the facing page gives us details except that the details are usually no larger than on the facing image, and sometimes even smaller, while the designer amuses himself by slotting in dinky little outline squares or infilled squares of grey-blue or the like, and for good measure frequently leaches out the colouristic interest of a work by surrounding it with a blue-grey colour field. Even the page numbers have more life than the works because the designer has made a feature of them, making them large, spinning all sorts of circles around them, and adding little arrows on the assumption that we are incapable of turning a page. Put another way, the design shows no confidence in the actual art, which is rather a pity but in a volume subtitled Towards a Retrospective, when the exhibitions’ checklist silently omits the details of the artist’s first three exhibitions, provides an index of works which is not alphabetical (and so useless), and doesn’t do basics in terms of telling us who the artist is, what his development was, and so forth, one can only hope that the same people are never let loose on an actual retrospective.   Basil Blackshaw: Paintings 2000-2002. S B Kennedy Blackstaff Press/MAGNI, 2002 pp.60. Oblong format h/b. Stg£12.99 e19 ills 34 col ISBN 0-85640-734-8 Readability: 5 Reference Use: 2 Design & Durability: 3 Quality of Plates: 3 This is the catalogue to the recent Ulster Museum exhibition of Basil Blackshaw’s latest work. It contains a straightforward, well-written short overview of Basil’s career by the Ulster Museum’s Head of Fine & Applied Art, S B Kennedy, a brief but telling memoir by Kenneth Jamison (one of the few decent Irish writers on art) and thirty-eight colour illustrations of distinctly variable quality, many of which do not work well on the page as the scale is minimal in relation to their overall size – Blackshaw’s work cries out for enlarged details. There is no list of reproductions and a distinctively slim bibliography. It’s about time someone did a proper retrospective, and not just the halfway-house version that the Ormeau Baths Gallery did in 1995.   AIB Art 2, Editor: Dr Frances Ruane AIB 2002 pp.144. Large format p/b e25 ills 94 col. ISBN 0 900903937 Readability: 3 Reference Use 3 Design & Durability 4 Quality of Plates: 4 Any institution that collects Irish art has my vote of thanks. This is a sequel to the 1995 catalogue and concentrates mainly on contemporary art. The title page informs us that this is a collection of Modern Irish Art but it clearly is not as English, Polish & American artists, amongst others, are included here–some academic rigour would not go amiss. The plates are good, the introduction the usual marshmallow, and the brief artist’s biographies are helpful, though it is a pity no one thought to cross reference the artists to their respective plates, or to provide a checklist of works, or to provide bibliographies. After all, shouldn’t this be of some use as a reference tool?   Meath County Council – Art Collection 1955 –2002 Editor: Gerardette Bailey Meath County Council 2002, pp76, Large format p/b. e15 ills col 72 iSBN 9781900 923033 Readability: 3 Reference Use: 3 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 4 If only all County Councils could do something like this! It’s not perfect but this admirable little book has an illuminating contextual essay by Brian Harten which is refreshingly honest about the haphazard way–until recently–that the collection grew, and which provides a succinct socio-political context for the collection and brief but often trenchant comments on many of the individual artworks. All of the illustrations are in colour. There are good brief biographies but unfortunately, as with the Allied Irish Catalogue, there is no cross-referencing of artists to respective plates, no list of works, and no individual bibliographies.