The Sunday Times art book of 2008

Art; The Definitive Visual Guide edited by Andrew Graham-Dixon (Dorling Kindersley £30 )

This staggeringly impressive, wonderfully well-designed book is almost what it claims to be. It's a guide to the world's painting and sculpture from prehistory to the present day, and with no fewer than 2,500 illustrations it's certainly visual, though words do play an important part as well. Pleasingly, too, this isn't just a chronologically arranged compendium bursting at the seams with reproductions; it also tells you about artistic movements, schools, techniques, materials and the achievements of individual artists. Even with the inclusion of some lightweight artists, it's a near-perfect overview of art history.

It's about now that you usually start to notice books about impressionism and post-impressionism multiplying on shop shelves as incontinently as CDs featuring reindeer. Not this year, however, though I must confess to finding three such items in this usually congested category. One of them is The Treasures of the Impressionists by Jon Kear (Deutsch £25), a shortish introduction, whose main attraction is clearly thought to be a series of inserts - facsimiles of sketches, letters and suchlike. Cézanne's Watercolours by Matthew Simms (Yale £30) is gimmick-free. The illustrations alone leave me gaping at the miraculous luminousness and concision of Cézanne's depictions. And Monet: Water Lilies - The Complete Series by Jean-Dominique Rey and Denis Rouart (Flammarion £24.95) illustrates every one of the 251 Nymphéas paintings, some the size of cinema screens. It's an appealing book with a useful text, yet the quality of the reproductions wins no prizes. This is inevitable, given the scale and elusive imagery of most of the pictures.

It was the indistinctness of one of Monet's studies of haystacks that helped persuade Kandinsky of the need for compositions without any recognisable subject at all. The Russian's daring and deliberate progress towards abstraction and beyond is meticulously traced in Kandinsky, a huge and heavy volume edited by Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg (Prestel £99). The essays are illuminating, the documentary photographs and comparative material are instructive, sometimes even surprising, and the reproductions of the paintings, many of which are printed the same size as the originals, are of the highest quality. This otherwise handsome and desirable book is irksome nevertheless. The pronounced vertical format means that too many paintings are reproduced as details or extend across two pages with an irritating join in the middle. You may be somewhat consoled by the separately bound facsimile of Kandinsky's important print portfolio, Small Worlds (1922), that accompanies the book. This, a masterpiece of modern printmaking, is a highly acceptable present on its own.

Kandinsky spent most of his artistic career in Germany, but when the first world war turned him into an enemy alien he reluctantly returned to Moscow with his former wife, leaving his German mistress behind. In what would soon become Soviet Russia the consummate bourgeois, his property expropriated, became improbably involved in revolutionary art politics until, in 1921, artistic infighting drove him back to the West. Kandinsky therefore fits into the timeframe of John E Bowlt's smartly designed Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia's Silver Age 1900-1920 (Thames & Hudson £24.95), a richly illustrated account of cultural life during the most innovative and productive period in modern Russian history. Bowlt's text is admirable but the book's main appeal is the illustrations, all 640 of them, including paintings and posters, buildings and craft objects, and photographs of the royal family and selected revolutionaries, as well as of Diaghilev and his collaborators, among them Stravinsky, hostility oozing out of every pore.

It was, of course, an image inspired by the Bolshevik revolution - the bloodied face of the nurse from Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin (1925, and therefore too late for Bowlt to mention) - on which Francis Bacon based the heads of his screaming popes. He habitually painted from photographs, most torn from magazines and books, wilfully folded, daubed with paint and discarded feet-deep on the floor of his studio. Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison (Thames & Hudson £39.95) illustrates some 200 of these ephemeral images (everything from gay porn and pictures of skin diseases to, yes, stills from Potemkin), all furnished with brief explanatory notes. If you're a Bacon fanatic with an insatiable appetite for information about his guarded working methods you'll like this book. You'll also be drawn to Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (Yale £18.99), an anthology of interviews and essays, several unpublished, a few repetitive, all relevant. Peppiatt writes about Bacon with refreshing and sometimes revealing candour.

Bacon appears in several places (in one, seemingly pulling his trousers down) in Lucian Freud's impressive On Paper (Cape £50). With an introduction by Sebastian Smee and an essay by Richard Calvocoressi, this is an extravagantly illustrated, satisfyingly fat volume about Freud's drawings in every medium. It spans his entire career from juvenilia signed in old German script to recent, densely worked etchings. Some of it looks clumsy, but more is mesmerising in its clairvoyant intensity. All of it suggests that Freud's most considerable achievements are the result of his abiding desire to reconcile drawing and painting. The texts are helpful, too, though this isn't chiefly a book to be read.

If you're looking for something that'll last you from Christmas to Auld Lang Syne there are plenty of choices, beginning with Ruth Butler's truly original examination of the lives of the long-suffering wives (and quondam mistresses) of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master (Yale £18.99). There's Andrew Graham-Dixon's Michelangelo and the Sistine Ceiling (Weidenfeld £14.99), too, and Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World (Granta £15.99), a journalistic investigation of artistic phenomena such as the Turner prize and Artforum magazine. Reliant on gossip and glamour, but serious in purpose, the book would have benefited from a consistently critical stance and sense of the ridiculous. A more thought-provoking, at times even jaw-dropping read is The Shameful Peace by Frederic Spotts (Yale £25). How French artists and intellectuals coped with the German occupation - and how their occupiers treated them - is the great unexamined aspect of modern French cultural history. Be prepared to have your comfortable ideas shattered: here's Jean Cocteau, an eager guest at the gala opening at the Orangerie of an exhibition of work by Hitler's favourite sculptor, Arno Breker; and here are Vlaminck, Derain and other celebrity fascist-fanciers about to leave the Gare de l'Est on an all-expenses-paid tour of the Reich. Another rewarding read is Jackie Wullschlager's biography, Chagall: Love and Exile (Allen Lane £30). Chagall, especially the later, whimsical and repetitive Chagall, isn't to everybody's taste, but his life, starting in Vitebsk and ending on the French Riviera, does have some enthralling episodes. Wullschlager, with access to previously unexploited archives, has done her subject full justice.

The Chagall biography would make a tremendous Christmas present; so, for the right recipient, would a book I was almost too bigoted even to open. You'll know what I mean if I give you the title: 5,000 Years of the Dog in Art by Tamsin Pickeral (Merrell £29.95). I'm glad I overcame my prejudice, for it turns out that this is not a selection of the sort of pictures usually found on table mats but an intelligently chosen and entertainingly varied pack of canines, dating from prehistory to the present day, with long, erudite captions. For those who'd prefer something far less serious and respectable for Christmas, there's Kirby by Mark Evanier (Abrams £21), a heavily illustrated biography of Jack Kirby, the breathtakingly gifted graphic artist who, with Stan Lee, created all those muscle-bound superheroes for Marvel Comics, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk among them. Is it art? It's more than that: Kirby's extreme foreshortenings and anatomical exaggerations are unthinkable without the example of no one less than Michelangelo.

Talking about gifts with specific recipients in mind, let's consider Lives of the Great Artists by Charlie Ayres (Thames & Hudson £9.99) and the younger members of the household. With an appealingly bright red cover and green endpapers, it consists of short, simple but engaging introductions to 20 artists from Giotto to Van Gogh, each of them accompanied by their best-known works and suggestions for independent projects. Vasari it isn't, but Vasari wouldn't suit an eight-year-old, however bright. The parents, on the other hand, would certainly prefer two monographs about old masters, Fra Angelico by Diane Cole Ahl (Phaidon £24.95) and Ingres by Andrew Shelton (Phaidon £24.95). Both have a terrific selection of illustrations, and both have long, comprehensive texts, which some may find a shade too academic. These books look splendid, too, not least because of their silk binding.

“Academic” is a dirty word, I know, but even - I mean especially - the Courtauld-educated like getting art books for Christmas. So, if I'm honest, what I'd like, please, is one of the most remarkable art books of the year. It's Salon to Biennial by Bruce Altshuler (Phaidon £45), which documents the most important group exhibitions in Europe and North America between 1863 and 1959. These include the epoch-making Salon des Refusés (which challenged the hegemony of the Paris Salon), the 1913 New York Armory Show and the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. The contents of each are illustrated, as is a multitude of installation shots. Complete with contemporary reviews, it's an art historian's heaven.

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