Best of 2025
Our Favorite Art Books of 2025
This year, we read too many incredible books to count — here are a few that stuck with us, including tomes on Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Cassatt in Paris, and Ruth Asawa and mothering.
Books
Book Review
The Rembrandt Thief Who Came Out On Top
Myles Connor is one of the very few people alive to have come out ahead after lifting an artwork from the wall of a museum, as Anthony M. Amore explores in his new book.
Books Newsletter
Louise Bourgeois’s Newest Biography
The countdown to 2026 — and the deluge of end-of-year lists — has begun in earnest, but we're not quite done with 2025 yet. This week, our reviewers tackled two colossal subjects: monuments and the late great Louise Bourgeois. Monumental by Cat Dawson invites us to contemplate a world of
Book Review
Louise Bourgeois’s Life Was as Monumental as Her Art
Writing one of the first comprehensive biographies of a major artist could prove daunting, but taking on Bourgeois's long life in art might be called heroic.
Book Review
Monuments Were Never Meant to Last Forever
Art historian Cat Dawson’s new book invites us to contemplate a world populated by subversive monuments — or one that does away with them altogether.
Guide
15 Art Books to Gift This Holiday Season
A Ruth Asawa catalog for the disenchanted, artsy almanac for the planners, Prospect Park photo book for the New Yorkers, Vermeer tome for the Golden Age fans, and much more.
Book Review
Barkley L. Hendricks’s Studio Was a Wonderland of Inspiration
A photo book documenting the late artist’s colorful, cluttered studio shows an amalgamation of decades’ worth of inspiration.
Feature
Pyaari Azaadi’s Epic Mission to Mend the World
Our relationship as artist and critic deepened in a profoundly unexpected way as we faced darkness together.
Feature
Writing My Own Artistic Origin Story
I didn’t speak until I was almost seven. But just because I was not speaking, did not mean I was not listening.
Book Review
Before Wonder Woman, There Was Fantomah
Fletcher Hanks, a cantankerous cartoonist who was active only from 1939 to ’41, left behind a complex legacy and bizarre body of work. A new book offers clues about his enigmatic life.
Feature
A Brief Art History of Grief
Scholar Roger Luckhurt’s richly illustrated book chronicles the ways we memorialize the dead across the world, tracing burial practices from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Books
100 Assignments From Nayland Blake
While these assignments will not turn someone else into me, they will provide the practitioner with a path to the deviations within themselves.