The invisibility of South Island artists of originality or skill (or both) in the recent minor tsunami of tomes discussing our art history is but one example.
Peter Simpson quite properly reminds us that the remarkable Leo Bensemann's work is not reproduced in Michael Dunn's New Zealand Painting: A Concise History (2003), nor is he mentioned in Hamish Keith's The Big Picture (2007), let alone in Francis Pound's The Invention of New Zealand (2009).
"Bensemann," Simpson remarks, "is still largely absent from art-historical discourse."
His work, he adds, is also absent from the collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, an unintelligible omission given Bensemann's links with southern cultural affairs and personalities, not the least of them being Charles Brasch.
Still, I guess if you live in provincial Hicksville you are bound to be ignored by the Auckland sophisticates and the Wellington glitterati.
So I do hope Simpson's pictorial biography, Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, helps raise a few eyebrows further north - and stirs the apparent somnolence in the Octagon.
First, let me say that this is not by any means a penetrating biography of an artist who was also a most complicated individual.
Simpson barely touches on what seems to me an obvious area of exploration as to the origins of some of Bensemann's early work and perhaps the initial creative impulse - his sexuality.
And his personal life after his marriage is hardly touched upon, yet clearly he enjoyed a long and evidently happy alliance with a fellow artist.
The letters Simpson quotes, especially those exchanged with Douglas Lilburn, suggest areas of sensitivity perhaps too soon to be analysed, even 15 years after the artist's death.
Simpson's focus is on the creative output, not the input, and within that limitation is quite the best of this selection under review.
Younger generations will have forgotten Landfall's place in our cultural history: Leo Bensemann was its printer, its designer, and Brasch's right-hand man, from the beginning. He was one third of the Caxton Press for 40 years or so, a leading light in the pre- and post-war arts scene in Christchurch, at the time the centre of our cultural pond, a major figure in The Group when it mattered and stuck with it later while the North sneered.
He was no provincial nonentity.
His drawing skills, properly taught, were unmatched, as was his engraving, his typography, his book designs, his imaginative drawings - the "fantastica", with their origins in Bensemann's own German filial links - his portraits and his later landscapes.
His was an oeuvre numbered at very much more than 500, pretty good for a frequently dismissed "part-time" artist.
I do think Simpson occasionally lapses by gilding his subject and his appropriate place in our history, and the post-Caxton part of the book is much less interesting than the earlier years; these are minor criticisms, and I commend the book to all readers.
In Capturing Mountains we are given a reasonable glimpse of this extraordinary nonagenarian's life and career, along with plenty of reproductions of his works - but little insight.
Deans himself offers a typically down-to-earth appreciation of his place as an artist who does not pretend to aspire to the heights (except when climbing in his beloved Southern Alps) and who clearly thinks his chief critics are fools for thinking he ever did: "I've always found the New Zealand natural environment so thrilling that what I really wanted to do was record it in paint in as clear a way as I could - express my feelings about it for other people who like that sort of thing too, to enjoy."
Well, that's an honest opinion from a craftsman, classically trained in drawing, who chose a different and as it turned out, exceedingly popular, path of expression.
Capturing Mountains does not pretend to be objective, any more than does Simpson with Bensemann, but Brown tells Deans' story capably and it's a story many readers will enjoy as much as they enjoy the artist's paintings.
Siddell - Sir Peter as we must call him these days - is, like Bensemann and Deans, an iconoclast in the art-historical received wisdom.
He is self-taught and did not become a full-time painter until his 30s after success in such art awards as there were in the 1970s, and after being noticed by a commercial art dealer.
The Art of Peter Siddell is an odd book, neither one thing nor the other.
It is not an autobiography, although the artist contributes a sketch in words of his life and interests and his motivations: "The enormous gap between my initial idea and the finished painting leads to a dissatisfaction which, I suppose, keeps me working."
Another honest admission.
Michael Dunn attempts to place Siddell in the continuum in an essay that is sufficiently provocative in some of its conclusions to arouse rigorous dinner-party debate; but the bulk of the book consists of reproductions in chronological order of Siddell's work.
He is an exceptional painter in the sense of his originality, and in the distance of his creativity from the symbolic order or precedence the cultural police would have us accept.
• Bryan James is the Books Editor and author of E. Mervyn Taylor: Artist: Craftsman, an illustrated biography.
