Derek Jarman died of AIDS-related complications the day before Parliament failed to reduce the age of consent for gay men to 16. Thus, on the morning of the vote, the broadsheets were saturated in glowing obituaries for one of the most out of all gay icons and, since 1991, a literal saint. Derek Jarman always had a sense of occasion.

What those obits evidenced was how much more than just a Queer (his word) campaigner Jarman was. A genuine Renaissance man of British Art, disciplines jostled for space in his crowded cannon - painter, set designer, gardener, accomplished author and, most visibly, brilliant film-maker. Now, two years on, this beautiful book - produced to coincide with the first major London retrospective - is a welcome and largely successful attempt to contextualise the different strands of Jarman's rich creative life. While it doesn't fail to take on the sexual and political (that would be to betray his legacy) it puts the work centre stage for the first time since the HIV+ diagnosis at the end of 1986.

His career began and ended as a painter. In the 60s he was at the Slade, hanging with Hockney, furnishing sparse, surreal landscapes with his fascination for Egyptology. By the end he was out on his own: the collage paintings embedded found objects - beach detritus, kids toys, medical paraphernalia - in thick black patina; the huge final canvases with paint plastered across homophobic headlines, words slashed - Blood, Fuck Me Blind - through the elephant-hide skin. Inevitably, as reproduced in here they convey only a fraction of the sheer physicality (and, occasionally, smell) of the originals. Politeness wasn't in it. Sometimes the sloganeering bordered on the naive (even silly), but then their creator was not one for excessive contemplation. These canvasses radiate with the fear, anger and frustration of the final months.

He was relying on natural talent to carry him through by the end, the slough of despond that might reasonably have been expected to descend from his death sentence projected back into the work. As is made clear in these pages, Derek Jarman was no perfectionist; but then few perfectionists could have achieved seven features, four books, numerous paintings and assorted design work in just these eight years alone. And that despite his increasing ill-health and, eventually, blindness.

Jarman was never afraid, was proud even, of being a Queer Artist. Even AIDS Artist - something that terrified old acquaintance and fellow sufferer, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. But what this book - and to a greater extent the exhibition - seeks to do is stake a claim for him as a significant post-war British artist. In 1986 he was nominated for the Turner Prize, the most well known if not the most prestigious of all UK arts prizes. What for others (think Damien Hirst) has become a badge of office, is mentioned only once in this book, and that in the useful Chronology at the back. Jarman was not - could never have been - a member of the establishment. For all his undoubted aesthetic and technical prowess, the work first and foremost came to be about what most preoccupied its author. He once famously protested indifference towards art lacking an autobiographical input.

There are 151 illustrations here, 90 in colour. They form a backbone, the most useful archive yet of his painting. The better known films are, rightfully, represented by a far smaller selection of stills. Nine brief, stimulating, highly readable essays bolster the images, from the likes of Matt Cook (writing), Christopher Lloyd (gardening), Michael O'Pray and Gary Watson (film), and Peter Snow (design).

This book is far from exhaustive. There are serious academic texts to written about his lasting impact on art in general and Queer art in particular. This is not that book. If the essays tell us little that we didn't already know, visually it communicates a whole area of Jarman's career almost untouched in published form beyond a handful of obscure (often Japanese) catalogues. In the end it's rightfully a celebration, of a remarkable artist and a quite remarkable man.