On catalogue raisonnés, the complete stories of artists’ works

For artists, students, and art enthusiasts alike, a catalogue raisonné offers more than just an exhaustive inventory of an artist’s life’s work; it provides an unparalleled window into their creative journey. To celebrate Book Publishers’ Day, Toby Treves, art historian, author and publisher, explores the intricate and demanding process of creating these monumental works. Drawing on his own experiences crafting catalogues raisonnés, for Peter Lanyon and Lucian Freud, Treves reflects on their value, not only as vital resources for understanding an artist’s legacy but also as indispensable tools for curators, historians, and passionate fans.

Among the most dreaded proposals an art publisher ever reads are those entitled ‘The Complete Works of ….’. Dreaded because ‘…’ almost certainly does not warrant such a publication, dreaded because almost nobody buys such books, and dreaded because they cost a fortune. And yet, I have spent a large part of my life writing and publishing them.

A catalogue raisonné is an illustrated record of an artist’s entire output, normally in a defined medium, and I have written 2½ (Peter Lanyon x 1, Lucian Freud x 1½ - I wrote the prints and co-authored the forthcoming volumes on the paintings). Between them, they took about 15 years of intermittent work. So why did I do it? Well, it may seem pompous but the answer I give is that the work of those artists is exceptionally important.

‘Important’ is an over-used word when it comes to art and it needs defining. What I mean by it is that an artist’s work changed or at least shunted the direction of art. How do Peter Lanyon or Lucian Freud, for instance, meet that standard? Well, art history has argued that Lanyon used a language of painting first available to artists in the twentieth century to express a common experience of the land that earlier pictorial languages had struggled to articulate, while it has been said Freud rescued portrait painting from what at one point seemed to be a grimly saccharine future. These are not insignificant achievements within the small world of painting or the bigger one of culture. How much has Lanyon’s expansion of landscape painting affirmed something we feel, even know? How much has Freud’s depiction of people and other animals affected our own thoughts and feelings about them? Of course, you might say not at all if you don’t know their paintings, but such work operates indirectly on our culture, just as so many unread classics do. They change the climate in which we live even if we’ve not seen or read them ourselves.

So, if that’s the justification, what about the work of making such a book? It takes years to research a catalogue raisonné. The first one I published took the author 20 years to compile, and even then it still needed two more years of work to make it publishable. 20 years to catalogue about 800 paintings is a long time, but by no means exceptional. Cataloguing is more than reproducing a painting with the correct physical details, though it is that too. It involves finding the painting (imagine how long it would take to solve 800 lost property cases), going to see it (a reproduction on screen or paper is not even close to being a substitute), double checking the recorded physical details against the object itself, organising photography, working out the picture’s history of ownership and of exhibition, and then trawling through everything that’s ever been written about it to see where errors have occurred in the published record or something especially consequential has been disclosed or missed out, and summarising all of that, if needs be, in a commentary. It soon tots up. And imagine doing that on your own, probably for little or no money for 20 years. And then calculate what everything else costs: travel, photography, editing, reprographics, permissions, design, printing - £500,000 would be normal and £1,000,000 and more are not unheard of. Few artists warrant that kind of commitment and even fewer, or their estates, can afford it.

But for those that do and can, what is the use of the end result? The first catalogue raisonné ever published was on Rembrandt’s prints. It was written as a sales tool and the author helpfully gave a list of which prints he thought were best. Some people think that that’s all they are today, but in fact they are much, much more than that. If I told you a car has four wheels, an engine and a chassis, you’d get an idea of what a car is but you wouldn’t understand how it works or have anything useful to say about any individual car. If you were a student researching an artist, you would probably read the relevant monographs and get some idea, probably someone else’s, about the artist’s achievements, and you’d try to see as many works as possible, probably only a small fraction of their output. And with that fragmentary knowledge, you’d be able to cobble something together. But imagine how much more you would do if you could see everything that the artist had done and knew more or less the correct order in which all the works were made. Wouldn’t you be much nearer the creative path that the artist travelled? And then imagine you knew who had collected each work, and where the paintings had been shown and what people had written about them, all in a historical sequence. Wouldn’t you have a much better understanding of the achievement and significance of the oeuvre? Now imagine you’re a curator thinking about an exhibition or an art historian writing a book. Aren’t you going to make a better exhibition and write a better book armed with such a wealth of information? And finally, imagine you’re just an enthusiast, wouldn’t you just have more to love?

What comes as a surprise is that the readership for these books is between 80-90% students, art historians, curators, book collectors and fanatics. The art trade is just 10-20% of the market. So, attend to that broad readership. Accuracy is important - much of the authority of the book rests on it - as are clear, informed writing (not a given in art books), rigorous editing, intelligent book design, well reproduced images and excellent printing. You need to pass all those hurdles and others to make a good catalogue raisonné. And you need a lot of planning, commitment, time, money and patience. Without them, you’ll make a bad one, and it’s better not to do it at all than do that.

About Toby Treves

Toby Treves is an independent art historian and a former Collections Curator of 20th Century British Art at Tate and CEO of Modern Art Press. In 2023, he founded Art Publishing Inc., a company dedicated to producing beautiful books about art from around the world. He is a Trustee of the Paolozzi Foundation.

Treves has authored several notable publications, including Peter Lanyon: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings and Three-dimensional Objects (2018), and Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints (2022).

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