WOLFGANG Paalen has the dubious distinction of being the only surrealist to have been eaten by wild animals.” Now that, I would contend, is an opening line.

It comes from Desmond Morris’s brief chapter on the Austrian painter in his latest book Lives of the Surrealists (Thames & Hudson, £24.95), which turns out to be a very moreish thing.

Morris, best known for writing The Naked Ape, but himself a surrealist painter on the side, here does a Vasari on the artists who fell under that banner. And so here we have an A to Z of surrealism; from Eileen Agar to Dorothea Tanning, via Breton, Dali, Magritte and Picasso.

It’s a gossipy, salacious read. And at times pleasingly judgmental. Of Andre Breton, Morris acknowledges that he was the most important figure in the history of surrealism. “Having established that,” he continues, “it must be said that he was a pompous bore, a ruthless dictator, a confirmed sexist, an extreme homophobe and a devious hypocrite.” Paalen, by the way, suffered from depression and took his own life in a remote part of Mexico where he was discovered (“reputedly” Morris adds) and devoured by a pack of wild pigs.

Looking at Art with Alex Katz (Laurence King Publishing, £14.99), if anything, offers even more peppery opinions. It’s an A to Z of artists accompanied by handsome reproductions and the American artist’s short, succinct, punchy appraisals which combine a neat mix of artspeak and demotic opinion. Mark Rothko, he says, is “decorative but beautiful, proficient and pompous”. Kazimir Malevich’s The Black Square, meanwhile, “makes all other black squares by other artists seem lame”. Someone give the man a BBC Four documentary.

Kelly Grovier’s A New Way of Seeing (Thames & Hudson, £29.95) offers a similar format; in his case he is looking at the history of art through close attention to 57 paintings. It’s an attempt to unlock the secrets that lie half-hidden on the canvas. Looking for what he calls the “eye-hook” in every artwork, Grovier reveals that Titian’s sumptuous Bacchus and Ariadne is, in fact, a painting about flatulence, and that Velazquez’s portrait of the Spanish court Las Meninas may also contain a coded allusion to hallucinogenic euphoria.

Phaidon’s two-volume retrospective of The Art of Lucian Freud, by Martin Gayford, is comprehensive, beautifully realised and, it has to be said, quite expensive at £395. But you do get a lot of bang for your buck. A little more affordable is Gayford’s Modernists and Mavericks (Thames & Hudson, £24.95), an account of the post-war London painting scene which takes in Freud, as well as Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Bridget Riley, among many others.

Starting with the war and following the story through to the 1970s, Gayford’s account is authoritative and learned, with a wry line in deadpan asides. (Talking of the art dealer Robert Fraser, he writes: “As a dealer Fraser had many virtues, though paying his artists, or other bills, was not among them.”)

It’s the story of two generations of artists; those who lived through the war and those who were both during or after it, charting their different outlooks and ideas about what art should be, and the tensions and collisions that result.

Gayford’s book is illuminating cultural and social history. I’m hoping for a sequel that takes us forward to Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.