Book Review
A Warts-and-All Biography of the Man Behind the Barnes Collection
The Maverick’s Museum examines Albert C. Barnes’s complex legacy, from his support for the Harlem Renaissance to his incongruent interactions with Black art and culture.
Book Review
Book Review
The Paradoxical Promise of Postwar Liberation
Art history has struggled to address a contradictory artistic output that engaged with Japan’s modernization and occupation, a new book argues.
Book Review
How the Wound Man Healed Medieval Europe
In a new book, art historian Jack Hartnell reconsiders the gruesome image as “one of the period’s most sophisticated repositories of medical hope.”
Book Review
Unpacking the Ageist Myths of Western Art
Scholar Larry Silver sheds light on depictions of old age in Greek, Biblical, and European art history, but misses a deeper exploration.
Book Review
The Poetry of van Gogh’s Montmartre Years
Miles J. Unger’s new study on the artist is in part a critical biography and in part an impressive and sensitive account of his creation of some key paintings.
Book Review
Art Loves You Back When People Don’t
Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds follows a painter whose devotion to a filmmaker keeps her from living her life, even as she gains access to the supposed upper echelons of the art world.
Book Review
André Breton After the Surrealist Manifesto
In the French poet’s later writings, now available in an English translation, his ideas about the movement he founded begin to mingle with our own.
Book Review
This Novel Is the Art World’s Black Mirror
We all know the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. You’ve seen them at the gallery openings, on Instagram. In fact, there’s a good chance you are them.
Book Review
How Liberty Fabrics Weaves Design and Art History
Kassia St. Clair, who specializes in color, explores its historical connection to artists and art movements in a book timed with the company’s 150th anniversary.
Book Review
Ruth Asawa Proved That Mothering Is Inherently Artistic
Jordan Troeller’s book about the Bay Area sculptor and her artist-mother community shows us how reciprocity and caretaking become the work itself, not just the subject or the conditions.
Book Review
How Helen Chadwick Took the Piss Out of Art
A biography of the late artist, who used everything from raw meat to bubbling chocolate, acts as an anecdote to historical amnesia around her pioneering material experimentation.
Book Review
The Friendship That Transformed Frida Kahlo
The cover of a new book draws you in for Kahlo, but you will stay for Mary Reynolds, the innovative bookbinder and partner of Marcel Duchamp.