Book Review
The Jewish Sisters in Renoir’s “Pink and Blue”
Author Catherine Ostler follows the lives of the two cherubic girls, whose rarefied lives in an elite, artistic French family would be toppled by the horrors of the Holocaust.
Book Review
Book Review
It’s Time to Talk About Classism in the Art World
In his memoiristic new book, photographer Mark Alice Durant weaves his personal experiences into a larger rebuke of the economic inequality that governs the art world.
Book Review
Guadalupe Rosales’s Portable Archive of East LA
In two new books, the artist weaves her archive of photos, ephemera, and flyers into the story of ’90s Chicanx youth culture, tracing both a personal and collective coming-of-age.
Book Review
Beverly Buchanan at the Raw Edge of Art
Instead of leaving the South behind, the polymath artist carried it into her writings, zines, paintings, and “shack sculptures” that echo the architecture of her childhood.
Book Review
The War on Art Is Repeating Itself
As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression.
Book Review
John Berger in His Own Bruised Time
The late novelist and art critic asked Tom Overton to wait to write his biography until after his death. The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so.
Book Review
The Trafficker Who Furnished the Museums of LA
A team of researchers excavates the story of Earl Stendahl, a mid-century gallerist who shamelessly stole ancient Mesoamerican objects and marketed them to the institutional art world.
Book Review
Finding Vermeer in Unexpected Places
Artists, filmmakers, poets, and the art market itself still bear traces of the Dutch painter’s influence, writes historian Ruth Bernard Yeazell in “Vermeer’s Afterlives.”
Books
Dorothea Tanning Beyond Max Ernst’s Shadow
A new biography attempts to make the case for Tanning’s independence and artistic strength in her own right, but remains frustratingly tethered to her husband.
Book Review
“Thinking From Black” Is a Glossary of Possibility
Artists, poets, and scholars mull over words of their choosing in this book, offering new definitions of phrases from which Blackness proliferates: “world,” “water,” “care.”
Book Review
Turning Turner’s Legacy
“Turner and the Slave Trade” recasts Romanticism’s relationship to nature and landscape painting as a vehicle for colonial propaganda.
Book Review
The Unsung Craftspeople Who Built Ancient Egypt
A new publication reflects a growing interest in the lives of the makers behind the civilization’s arts and crafts, long marginalized and erased by mythologized depictions of the ancient world.