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Since 1994, ____ has published eight books of drawings and painting

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Since 1994, ____ has published eight books of drawings and painting

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The Best Art Books of 2021

With travel restrictions still in place, many looked to art books this year when they couldn’t visit the museums and galleries they loved most. Below is a look back at some of the year’s best books, as picked by the editors of ARTnews and Art in America , from elegant catalogues that paired nicely with the year’s finest shows to forward-thinking tomes of criticism that drew out new strands of art history.

Afro-Atlantic Histories edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo (DelMonico Books and Museu de Arte de São Paulo with D.A.P.)

For the past several years, the Museu de arte de São Paulo has been mounting game-changing, expansive surveys under the name “Histórias,” with topics including Brazil, dance, women and feminism, and more. The most acclaimed one, 2018’s “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” began its U.S. tour this year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, before heading to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Accompany this slimmed-down, more focused version of the show is this new volume: “a hybrid of sorts—it cannot be properly called an exhibition catalogue,” according to editors Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo. The almost-400-page tome presents beautiful images of the works that were in the original exhibition, along with new ones shown in the U.S. tour, as well as a bevy of new texts, including ones by Deborah Willis, Kanitra Fletcher, and Vivian A. Crockett. An Afro-Brazilian woman living in the U.S., Crockett offers these important words: “If contemporary discourses in the United States privilege the ethos of refusal, Afro-Atlantic Histories takes the opposite approach: providing so much visual evidence of these legacies of violence that their impact cannot be refuted. Art-historical mea culpa , if you will.” — Maximilíano Durón

Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990–2001 edited by Howie Chen (Primary Information)

During the 1990s, the Asian American group Godzilla grew from a small New York contingent to some 2,000 participants nationwide. This volume, edited by independent curator and Art in America columnist Howie Chen, is the first anthology of writings to chronicle the collective’s art projects, curatorial activities, and critical discourse. Spurred by the activism of key members such as Ken Chu, Margo Machida, Byron Kim, Eugenie Tsai, Bing Lee, and Karin Higa, Godzilla addressed “institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other issues.” Protests included conscience-raising campaigns against the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Chinese in America. —Richard Vine

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum)

The catalogue for this year’s deeply intriguing and interrelated two-part Jasper Johns survey at the Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of art is as probing and prismatic as the exhibition itself. Sequences of work assembled thematically in different locations create a dialogue from page to page, as when a section on “Dreams” at the Whitney is followed by “Nightmares” at the Philadelphia Museum. Commissioned writings by a wide variety of writers—R. H. Quaytman, Ralph Lemon, and Colm Tóibín, to name just a few—go beyond what’s shown at either institution. — Andy Battaglia

Marcel Duchamp (Hauser & Wirth)

Fit snugly in an inviting orange slipcase, Marcel Duchamp dutifully reincarnates Robert Lebel’s 1959 monograph of an artist as enticing and enigmatic as any before or since. Written and designed after years of collaboration between the author and Duchamp himself, the book reproduced from Grove Press’s first English-language edition surveys the artist’s paintings and readymades as well as unclassifiable works like The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) , which gets an entire deep-dive chapter of its own. And then there’s a supplemental volume—assembled in part by Lebel’s son Jean-Jacques Lebel—that tells the story of how the book came together and how its reputation has evolved over time. — Andy Battaglia

Shigeko Kubota: Viva Video! (Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd.) and Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (Museum of Modern Art)

This year, the trailblazing video artist Shigeko Kubota finally got her due, with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a retrospective traveling to three cities in Japan. The shows gifted us with not one but two new definitive volumes on the Japanese American artist (1937–2015), whose poetic video sculptures consider themes of nature, death, and her art historical heroes—among them Marcel Duchamp and her husband, Nam June Paik. Both books are chock full of archival materials, fascinating photos, and scholarly essays that illuminate an intriguing body of work that has spent far too many years in the shadows. —Emily Watlington

Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History by Elizabeth Ferrer (University of Washington Press)

Curator Elizabeth Ferrer starts off this radical gathering of Latinx photography with a simple premise: “The impetus for this book is derived from a basic fact: by and large, Latinx photographers are excluded from the documented record of the history of American photography. And yet they have been highly active practitioners of the medium, nearly since its inception in 1839.” In 10 chapters, Ferrer presents a concise history of the ways in which Latinx artists have been quintessential to the development of the medium, starting with its roots going back to the 1840s, moving into the documentation of activist movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and offering specific focuses on “LA Chicanx,” “Puerto Rico, Connected and Apart,” and “Conceptual Statements.” — Maximilíano Durón

Deana Lawson edited by Peter Eleey and Eva Respini (Mack Books)

Published to accompany photographer Deana Lawson’s largest museum survey to date, at the ICA Boston, this photobook features 15 years’ worth of work by the photographer, in which studio and documentary photography blend with intergenerational references to pop culture and contemporary life. Here, retro magazine editorials and family-photo-style pictures of Lawson’s own making converge. In Lawson’s staged scenes taking place in domestic interiors and occasionally outdoors, friends, relatives, and models—most of whom are Black—are seen at times in each other’s embrace or alone, staring vacantly at the camera. These images, which the late critic Greg Tate, one of the book’s essayists, once described as “convulsively charismatic,” offer mesmerizing portraits of Black subjectivity that are both stark and sensual. They allow us to peer into their sitters’ personal histories while also drawing on the broader histories of their social worlds. “Lawson’s pictures draw attention to what the camera cannot capture—and in turn, to the many aspects of Black life that exceed forms of representation,” former MoMA PS1 chief curator Peter Eleey writes. —Angelica Villa

Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? A Reader edited by Adam Pendleton and Alec Mapes-Frances (Museum of Modern Art)

Adam Pendleton’s latest “reader” comprises an interdisciplinary selection of texts key to his current exhibition at MoMA, but Stuart Comer’s framing of the book as a “score” seems most apt. Fonts, textures, graphic elements, painted lines, and the visual fuzz of scanned documents form a rhythm across the pages while the texts invite a chorus of voices, from the demands of Occupy and Black Lives Matter protestors to the “call and response” form that late film scholar James Arthur Snead framed as being central to Black culture. Visual markings across some reproductions alternately invite and inhibit reading, suggesting a controlled glimpse into Pendleton’s library. Read this book, but also heed Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poetic text: “close your eyes and listen.” —Mira Dayal

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful edited by Seth Feman and Jonathan Fredrick Walz (Columbus Museum and Chrysler Museum of Art with Yale University Press)

Riding a wave of Alma Thomas mania that kicked off when the Obamas hung a painting by her in the White House in 2015, two museums in the South—the Columbus Museum in Georgia and the Chrysler Museum in Virginia—mounted a full-dress survey for the artist, whose dazzling abstractions recreate cosmologies using what the artist referred to as “Alma’s Stripes.” The show’s magisterial catalogue is a rare volume that manages to complement its related exhibition nicely and also stand on its own. There’s been a lot of writing about Thomas in the past half-decade, some of it spurred on by an earlier Studio Museum in Harlem show in 2016, but this catalogue exposes new parts of Thomas’s oeuvre. Among its best offerings is an essay on Thomas’s carefully honed persona by curator Tiffany E. Barber, who writes, “The act of painting for Thomas was also an act of performance.” —Alex Greenberger

Locating Sol LeWitt edited by David S. Areford (Yale University Press)

There are many ways to interpret Sol LeWitt’s famed rule-based wall drawings. As art historian David S. Areford explains in his introduction to this edited volume of essays, scholars and curators have positioned his work as both resolutely rational, anticipating the logic of computers, and essentially irrational, like a child’s babble. The texts within attempt not to sway opinion but to highlight a wider range of LeWitt’s processes. Anna Lovatt focuses on his “malfunctioning machines,” experiments that led to dead-ends or re-routings in his oeuvre. Erica DiBenedetto explores his site-specific wall drawings in a medieval tower in Spoleto, Italy, where he annotated “niches, mantlepieces, ceiling beams, lamps, electrical sockets, a fireplace.” The book offers an incisive look at a practice that is both “ironically excessive” and “absurdly rudimentary,” as James H. Miller writes—one that’s comprised of intersecting lines of thought, pointing in every direction. —Mira Dayal

Art & Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art by David Elliott (University of Chicago Press)

Over the past 50 years, British-born David Elliott has been the head of four museums in Europe and Asia; director of biennials in Sydney, Kiev, Moscow, and Belgrade; and organizer of some of the era’s most revelatory regional-focus exhibitions. In this compendium mixing new and previously published essays, he weaves an account of his own nomadic career into a wide-ranging survey of contemporary Asian art, based on the playful premise that Asia’s 20th-century adoption of Western garb heralded the assimilation of modern social and aesthetic principles across the world’s largest and most culturally diverse continent. Examining both global art stars and lesser-known artists and movements, Elliott wrangles intensely (and sometimes humorously) with colonialism’s exploitive vs. liberatory dialectic. —Richard Vine

Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw edited by Mark Pascale, Esther Adler, and Edouard Kopp (Yale University Press)

Self-taught artist Joseph Elmer Yoakum (1891–1972) was “discovered” by the mainstream art world in the last decade of his life, when he began hanging his drawings in the window of his storefront apartment in Chicago. Mostly stylized landscapes depicting places possibly visited in reality—he claimed to have traveled with a circus in his youth—or perhaps only in his imagination, their undulating forms and vigorous patterning offer a delirious take on the notion of the sublime in nature.Yoakum’s work was first championed by School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Whitney Halstead and later by the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists that included Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, and Roger Brown. This elegant monograph, which includes an essay by Halstead, accompanies a traveling exhibition of Yoakum’s work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. —Anne Doran

The Mayor of Leipzig by Rachel Kushner (Karma Books)

With her remarkable 2013 novel The Flamethrowers , whose protagonist is recent art school grad from Nevada newly arrived in 1970s SoHo, Rachel Kushner established herself as one of the very few writers capable of portraying the art world in fiction without falling back on satirical cliché. Her latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig , a very slim novella published as a very attractive hardcover by Karma Books, is once again set in the art world, this time following a present-day midcareer artist who has traveled to Germany to prepare for an upcoming museum show in Leipzig. There’s little in the way of plot, but plenty of hilarious, sharply observed vignettes about artists’ social and professional obligations. —Rachel Wetzler

African Artists from 1882 to Now (Phaidon)

Among numerous misconceptions about African art is the idea that artists from the continent are “curiosities or latecomers,” as art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu writes in the introduction to African Artists from 1882 to Now . Proof abounds in the lavishly illustrated tome, which for the uninitiated can serve as a bracing intro to the past 130 years of African art. Famous figures like El Anatsui, John Akomfrah, and Chéri Samba come under consideration, but it is the lesser-known and under-recognized artists who shine—like Manuel Figueira, a Cape Verdean artist who paints abstractions based on his country’s landscapes, or Lerato Shadi, a South African based in Berlin who meditates on the Black female body in her performances. — Alex Greenberger

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert with Erin I. Kelly (Bloomsbury Publishing)

In this fascinating remembrance of his life story and the art he has made, Winfred Rembert recalls his encounters with racism, the American prison system, and the innovative means by which he spun lived experiences into art by expressively painting them onto leather. In addition to being unusually clear-eyed, Rembert’s memoir is notable for its openness. “I feel like I am putting my audience in another world when I get them interested in Black life,” he writes. —Alex Greenberger

Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition (Museum of Modern Art)

The Berlin-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985)—best known for her iconic furry teacup sculpture—is the currently subject of overdue traveling retrospective. Titled “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” it includes some 200 objects highlighting the wide-ranging output of the artist, who some have inaccurately labeled a one-hit wonder. Her wide-ranging oeuvre, which spans geometric abstract paintings to jewelry designs, is illustrated in this new catalogue. The standouts remain the Surrealist objects that showcase Oppenheim’s signature wit and humor, but essays by the show’s three curators also draw out other aspects of her work. —Emily Watlington

Alice Neel: People Come First edited by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

After a 2020 filled with online viewing rooms, Alice Neel’s career-spanning show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a respite—something that definitely needed to be seen in person. It comprised more than 100 painted portraits, drawings, and watercolors featuring an astounding array of New Yorkers: immigrants, activists, celebrities, and expecting mothers in a style that melded abstraction and figuration. The exhibition catalogue is a vital supplement, containing essays on Neel’s aesthetics and her personal engagement with feminism and the civil and gay rights movements. Neel always focused on the people in her paintings; the show was faithful to the spirit of her work in this way. But this book is valuable in that it brings the artist forward, too.  —Tessa Solomon

Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole (University of Chicago Press)

These are dark times, with an ongoing global pandemic, an urgent climate crisis, and escalating race-related violence. Aptly, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole takes up the concept of darkness for his latest book of essays. Merging art criticism, travelogues, political discourse, and diaristic forms of writing, he foregrounds the diversity of Blackness and its shifting cultural meaning. In one essay, for example, he addresses the colonial history of Africa, which he refers to as the “Dark Continent,” and offers alternative narratives on Blackness. Other essays focus on art critic John Berger, photographer Lorna Simpson, painter Kerry James Marshall, and the 2018 film Black Panther . Perhaps most important, in this divisive year especially, is Cole’s attempt to find greater purpose and a sense of belonging. After all, as Cole writes, “Darkness is not empty.” —Francesca Aton

We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World by Jasmin Hernandez (Abrams)

This visually stunning coffee book is an important visual record of artists and curators of color who are making a profound impact on the art world. Written by Jasmin Hernandez, who started the closely followed art blog Gallery Gurls in 2012, We Are Here offers beautiful original photography that are accompanied with accessible Q&A-style interviews with the likes of Firelei Báez, Tourmaline, Derek Fordjour, Genevieve Gaignard, Renee Cox, Naima J. Keith, and Jasmine Wahi. For any person of color considering a career in the art world, the inspiring messages and wisdom on offer make this book a must-read. — Maximilíano Durón

Hello Future by Farah Al Qasimi (Capricious)

It’s difficult to choose the most memorable image from  Hello Future, Farah Al Qasimi’s photobook exploring the intersection of gender, politics, and aesthetics in the Persian Gulf. The Emirati artist has a keen eye for the glorious riots of pigments, pattern, and texture found in mundane spaces, like the glowing calligraphy of a storefront or the fluorescent floral print of an abaya. Al Qasimi is part of generation of young Gulf artists experiencing immense change to their home in the form of migration, globalization, and cultural investment. Her sumptuous images chronicle a people and place grappling with how to meet their future. —Tessa Solomon

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Critics’ Picks

Best Art Books of 2022

Holland Cotter, Jason Farago and Roberta Smith round up their favorite books, from museum catalogs of high-profile shows to photographs by Native artists to the treasures of Ukraine.

By Jason Farago ,  Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith

Lots of NFT art collections nose-dived in this year’s crypto crash, but a well-stocked library will never lose its value. Museums, galleries and art institutions have not yet lost faith in high-quality print publications in this screened-out century, and even as venues for cultural debate keep shrinking — pour one out for Bookforum , the lively art-adjacent book review that shuttered this week — art publishing remains in fine fettle, with more titles every year than even the most committed bibliomaniac could peruse. My fellow critics and I have selected here some of the best we read in 2022: splashy or studious, affordable or investment-grade, all of them worthy of a space on your shelves. — JASON FARAGO

Jason Farago

Saving Cultures Amid Transformation

‘dare to know: prints and drawings in the age of enlightenment’.

It was the “stay woke” of its day: Sapere aude , “dare to know,” a Latin motto that Immanuel Kant raised to a moral command. This dense and very handsome overview of 18th-century European graphic arts (the catalog of a show on view at Harvard through Jan. 15) takes the form of a dictionary whose 26 chapters, from Antiquities to Zealotry, cast a sharp new glare on the Enlightenment’s transformations in science, economics, religion and liberty. Anatomical studies face off with satires of quack doctors, watercolors of erupting volcanoes with cross-sections of slave ships; and if Enlightenment reason is found somewhat wanting, its philosophers also furnish us tools for its own critique. ( Harvard Art Museums / Yale University Press )

‘Treasures of Ukraine: A Nation’s Cultural Heritage’

This urgent new title introduces us to more than 100 buildings and art objects, from prehistory to the Baroque era to the bomb-shelter present, in the nation we now finally see as the heart of Europe. With chapters on Orthodox icons and Catholic cathedrals, Soviet avant-gardism and nationalist folk crafts, this book illustrates a culture whose very diversity now puts it in danger — and indeed some works pictured, such as stone statues near Kharkiv dating from the 9th to 13th century, have already been destroyed. The Ukraine war is a culture war, and these are the stakes. All proceeds from the book’s sale are being donated to PEN Ukraine. ( Thames & Hudson )

‘Recaptioning Congo’

The curator and Rutgers professor Sandrine Colard organized one of the most ambitious shows I saw this year, at Antwerp’s photography museum: an excavation of photographs from Congo under Belgian colonial rule , by Europeans and Africans, as propaganda and as free expression. The trilingual catalog is even more expansive, and unfolds rare amateur photo magazines, 1930s studio portraiture, missionary and ethnographic documentation, and also wrenching but important photos of colonial atrocities (framed here with uncommon care). A talented slate of African writers, including the novelists In Koli Jean Bofane and Annie Lulu , offers crucial readings. ( Fotomuseum Antwerp / Lannoo )

‘On Bramante’

Is there any application today of Renaissance classicism to our glutted cities, anything the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica can teach builders of condos and duty-free concessions? Pier Paolo Tamburelli, an architect and editor of the now defunct cult magazine San Rocco , insists in this spirited treatise that Donato Bramante’s spatial innovations can propel a new practice of “architecture as public art.” Strange, sometimes flippant, as conversant with Rem Koolhaas as with Pope Leo X, this book is a rare effort to rethink our present deadlocks through historical models — and its ironic Neo-Classicism is beautifully buttressed by Bas Princen’s spare photographs of Bramante nerve centers: Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie , where Leonardo painted “The Last Supper,” or the cloisters of Rome’s Santa Maria della Pace. ( MIT Press )

‘In the Name of the Image: Figurative Representation in Islamic and Christian Cultures’

So much of this century’s fanaticism and insularity has rested on a stubborn error about art and religion: Christians like pictures, Muslims don’t. The far richer truth is that the world’s two largest religions both have long histories of creating images and destroying them — as detailed in this learned book, the catalog for a major show I saw last spring at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Looking at Byzantine coins, Persian miniatures, and images of Jesus and Muhammad both preserved and scratched out, Axel Langer and a dozen other scholars dissolve the clean Occident-Orient opposition inherited from the 19th century, and reveal how iconophilia and iconophobia go hand in hand. ( Hatje Cantz )

Holland Cotter

Serendipitous Pairs and Single Masterworks

‘speaking with light: contemporary indigenous photography’.

One of the year’s singular beauties was this catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth (through Jan. 22). The earliest pictures here, dating from the 19th century and taken of Indigenous North Americans by non-Native photographers, emphasize exoticism, controllable otherness. The richly varied work of 20th- and 21st-century Native artists who make up the bulk of the book, edited by John Rohrbach and Will Wilson, moves beyond constricting categories and has the power of poetry. ( Radius Books )

‘Geles Cabrera: Museo Escultórico’

Now 96 and sometimes referred to as Mexico’s “first female sculptor,” for half a century Geles Cabrera produced small-scale, semiabstract cast and carved female forms and displayed them in her own custom-built garden-museum. For a compact career survey, Americas Society created a mini-version of that museum and published a tiny takeaway souvenir catalog that distills the essence of a treasurable artist’s life and work. ( Americas Society/ISLAA (Institute for Studies on Latin American Art )

‘Smokehouse Associates’

For a few years, beginning in 1968, four young New York artists — William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia and Billy Rose — turned Harlem into abstract art heaven. Calling themselves Smokehouse Associates, they painted neighborhood walls with brilliantly colored abstract murals and enlisted local residents in the creative team. This book, by Eric Booker, was produced by the Studio Museum in Harlem, which came into being at this time (Williams was instrumental in its founding too). It wonderfully catches the energy, in interviews with the original artists and through a generous sheaf of photographs of empty lots being cleaned, walls being prepped, kids playing and pitching in, and artists doing their totally wow-inspiring thing. ( Studio Museum in Harlem ; distributed by Yale University Press )

‘Simone Martini in Orvieto’

The first English-language publication in 30 years devoted to the resplendent 14th-century Tuscan painter focuses on a single altarpiece owned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and spins interlocking narratives around it: about the artist himself, about the Umbrian city for which he made important work, about the genre of gold-ground painting he perfected, and about the path that brought the altarpiece to Boston, where it is the centerpiece of an exhibition through Jan. 16. Edited by Nathaniel Silver. ( Yale University Press )

‘Códice Maya de México: Understanding the Oldest Surviving Book of the Americas’

The Gardner publication reads like an adventure story, and so does another study of a single work, this one from the Getty Center in Los Angeles and edited by Andrew D. Turner. The Códice Maya de México, an illustrated book in the form of a paper scroll painted by an unknown Mayan artist around 1100 A.D., remains mysterious in its precise meanings, celestial and earthly. Historians writing in the Getty catalog offer fascinating theories on both. And thanks to a foldout insert, we get to peruse the Codex itself, which is as visually inventive as any graphic novel you’ll ever see. ( Getty Publications)

‘Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy’

When future art historians seek perspectives on our era of billion-dollar auctions, carbon-footprint art fairs, and market-driven diversity, this collection of essays by the American critic Ben Davis is a text they’ll consult. An alert data hoarder, a shrewd analyst, and a propulsive stylist, Davis views the hot-air balloon called the art world in a broad political context. He writes with the coolness of a sociologist, the passion of someone with a horse in the race, and the smarts to avoid both cheerleading and snootiness. ( Haymarket Books )

‘Beautiful, Gruesome and True: Artists at Work in the Face of War’

While Davis’s restricts his beat primarily to the United States, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s trim, tough book takes a global view of current art by focusing on politically minded artists living elsewhere: Amar Kanwar in India, Teresa Margolles in Mexico, and a collective called Abounaddara in Syria. They are among the most persistently daring artists we have, and Wilson-Goldie tells us why. ( Columbia Global Reports )

‘New York: 1962-1964’

Designed to match the physical dimensions of old-time Life magazines, “New York: 1962-1964” is the catalog for a fabulous Jewish Museum exhibition on new American art and culture in the early 1960s, which the museum did much to promote at the time. Even more than the exhibition itself (through Jan. 8), the book, conceived and edited by Germano Celant, is a packed time capsule, one that includes a detailed timeline of three fire-starting years of public violence, disobedience and liberation. With blast-from-the-past (and echoes-in-the-present) images on every page, it has the pull of a fast-paced documentary film. ( The Jewish Museum / Skira )

‘Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces’

Comparably engaging is the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art’s stellar survey “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” (through Feb. 18), which chronicles a piece of cultural history from a decade later: the brilliant 12-year run of the first Black-owned commercial art space to gate-crash New York’s white art world. Just Above Midtown opened its doors in 1974 and kept them open, on a shoestring budget, for 12 years, giving debut shows to extraordinary artists in the process. The book captures the JAM vibe, and its lead essay by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, one of the MoMA show’s curators, that gets my vote as best of the year. ( Museum of Modern Art / The Studio Museum in Harlem ).

‘This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965-1975’

Finally, rounding out the saga of a city, and an art world, in the process of inclusionary transformation, I found a page-turner in another Americas Society book, the catalog for the exhibition “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965-1975.” It’s a chronicle of young artists who migrated north to the city to visit or to stay; who mingled — or didn’t — with Latino artists already here; and who, by being here, permanently changed what “art” and “American” meant. ( Americas Society/ISLAA (Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. )

ROBERTA SMITH

From Louise Bourgeois to Planet Lace

‘threads of power: lace from the textilmuseum st. gallen’.

It turns out that some books can, indeed, be judged by their covers: Their exterior beauty can signal an interior of visual and textual pleasures. So it is with the handsomely proportioned, lace-embossed exterior of “Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen” at the Bard Graduate Center (through Jan. 1).

Inside, the history of Lace is told in about 17 highly focused essays that cover a great deal of cultural, political and economic as well as lace-making history without being overwhelming. It’s a big ongoing saga, made newly comprehensible here with the latest research, clear prose and lots of pictures. ( Bard Graduate Center, New York; distributed by Yale University Press )

‘Letters to Gwen John’

This marvel of interwoven narratives hinges on imaginary letters written by a living painter, Celia Paul (born 1959), to an admired deceased one, the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876-1939). Their common ground includes reticent, largely figure painting styles; formative but damaging relationships with difficult older artists (Rodin and Lucian Freud, respectively); and the embrace of solitude as essential to art making, in part because of the domination of male artists. Paul reaches out to John to examine her own life, art, relationships and her work habits, creating a portrait within a self-portrait, flanked by memorable sketches of their feckless lovers. ( New York Review Books )

‘Women Holding Things’

Over the years, Maira Kalman has used her talent for writing and painting in different ways — most often in illustrated books. But rarely has she combined them with such complex resonances as in her latest, “Women Holding Things.” The book’s 85 images — many of them based on appropriated material — constitute a large exhibition; they continue Kalman’s droll evocations of the School of Paris heated up with intensely contemporary reds, magentas and olive greens. With them and their various captions and texts, she pays homage to the people known for holding things together, and includes a few men as well. Depicting relatives, cultural heroes and invented women, Kalman’s images encompass both everyday pleasures and incomprehensible loss, always affirming art’s sustaining grace. ( Harper Design, distributed by HarperCollins Publishers )

‘Louise Bourgeois Paintings’

The catalog “Louise Bourgeois Paintings,” and the revelatory exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are the first of their kind. Together, they introduced 50 examples of the artist’s 100 or so almost entirely unknown paintings. Evincing a singularly personal Surrealism and quantities of red, these works were made between 1938, when Bourgeois first arrived in New York, and 1949, when she turned to her sculpture career. Both show and catalog were overseen by Clare Davies, associate curator in the Met’s department of modern and contemporary art, who has commissioned an insightful essay from the art historian Briony Fer. But there’s another bonus: Beyond the paintings in the show, the catalog reproduces around 25 more, meaning that three-quarters of Bourgeois’s contribution to modern painting can now be seen in one place. ( Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York )

An earlier version of this article misidentified the Italian artist Simone Martini’s region of origin. He was Tuscan, not Umbrian.

How we handle corrections

Jason Farago , critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad. In 2022 he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism. More about Jason Farago

Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic of The Times. He writes on a wide range of art, old and new, and he has made extended trips to Africa and China. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2009. More about Holland Cotter

Roberta Smith , the co-chief art critic, regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. Her special areas of interest include ceramics textiles, folk and outsider art, design and video art. More about Roberta Smith

The top art books of 2023—chosen by The Art Newspaper’s book team

There is something for every art lover among our pick of the publications—from a forgotten 17th-century painter to a lively history of dyes.

Jacqueline Riding

Contributing editor, books.

Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer, edited by Diana Seave Greenwald (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum/Princeton University Press)

Full-colour throughout, this fabulous volume —as close as commercial publishing gets to an artist’s book—explores the importance of travel for the African American sculptor Betye Saar. Interweaving the explanatory text and images of Saar’s assemblages (found material combined with the artist’s own drawings and paintings) are full-page facsimiles of her fascinating travel journals.

Canova: Sketching in Clay by C.D. Dickerson and Emerson Bowyer (Yale University Press)

This beautiful catalogue combines up-to-date scholarship and scientific analysis, stunning photography by Luigi Spina (close-ups reveal Canova’s fingerprints) with an elegantly understated design that cleverly mimics the raw material in discussion: from the plain cover and matte paper, to the reduced palette of black-white-terracotta.

Elisabetta Sirani by Adelina Modesti (Lund Humphries)

Lund Humphries’s Illuminating Women Artists series, co-published with Getty Publications, is doing great work in bringing cutting-edge scholarship to a broader audience while restoring women artists and their incredible, often forgotten, careers to the canon. Here the extraordinary life of the 17th-century painter Elisabetta Sirani —once considered “the best brush in Bologna”—is the focus of Adelina Modesti’s brilliant, fully illustrated biography.

Gareth Harris

Book club co-editor and chief contributing editor.

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now , edited by Phaidon with an introduction by Raphael Fonseca (contributor) (Phaidon)

Phaidon is known for its accessible art surveys that provide readers with digestible information about an art history genre or geographical centre. This extensive, authoritative overview includes more than 300 Modern and contemporary artists born or based in Latin America, highlighting established artists such as the Mexico-based conceptualist Francis Alÿs and, crucially, lesser-known figures including the Lima-born philosopher and drag queen Giuseppe Campuzano. Queer artists are especially well represented with the late Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión—his delicate embroidered pillows and blankets reference his HIV diagnosis—a key inclusion.

Natural Light: The Art of Adam Elsheimer and the Dawn of Modern Science by Julian Bell (Thames & Hudson)

The 17th-century German artist Adam Elsheimer painted only around 30 small cabinet paintings in oil on copper panels, but Julian Bell cleverly outlines how these miniature works had a big impact, influencing Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Claude Lorrain. In his introduction, Bell writes: “I want to bring out not only the lyricism and humanity of his pictures, but the complexity of his thinking and the ways in which it bears on the debates about nature that were circulating in his era.” Bell presents his thesis in an expert and accessible way, lifting the lid on a figure who has largely slipped under the radar.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, c o-edited by Victoria Avery and Jake Subryan Richards (Bloomsbury Publishing)

This exhibition catalogue is an important reminder of how the transatlantic slave trade underpins the institutions of Cambridge, examining how the Fitzwilliam Museum was partly founded on slave money. The catalogue provides concise, astute insights into racism, resistance and privilege through objects such as an 18th-century teapot made in Staffordshire, showing a white couple drinking tea prepared by a Black servant. Barbara Walker’s revelatory Vanishing Point series (2017-ongoing) erases the dominant white figures in Western European paintings and makes the Black subjects visible by drawing them in fine detail, finally bringing them to the fore.

José da Silva

Book club co-editor and exhibitions editor.

In Pursuit of Color, From Fungi to Fossil Fuels: Uncovering the Origins of the World’s Most Famous Dyes, b y Lauren MacDonald (Atelier Éditions & D.A.P.)

Don’t know your cochineal from your crottle? Lauren MacDonald’s fascinating guide to the natural (and not so natural) sources of some the world’s most striking dyes is filled with colourful histories and anecdotes, from farmers taking their cochineal insects into their homes during storms to the crottle fungus’s use in colouring Harris Tweed and (allegedly) treating whooping cough. There are also playful elements in the design of the book, with buyers randomly assigned one of three primary colour covers and at the back of the book, there is a pull-out guide with techniques for dying and a handy glossary.

Holbein at the Tudor Court by Kate Heard (Royal Collection Trust)

Accompanying an exceptional exhibition of Hans Holbein the Younger’s drawings at the Queen’s Gallery in London, is a small catalogue written by the show’s curator, Kate Heard. Holbein’s paintings are delightful, but his preparatory drawings of the same sitters are genuinely moving, such is their realism and intimacy, transporting us back almost 500 years. There are profiles of the sitters—the Tudor period’s movers and shakers—but where the catalogue is more interesting is in its details of Holbein’s methods (embellishing certain cheekbones ) or things you may have missed (“a touch of greenish watercolour in the eyes”).

This article was updated on 15 December to add Jake Subryan Richards as co-editor of Black Atlantic