White Girls and the Global South
Happy spring! If you've been stuck in a reading slump like me, look no further.
Happy spring! If you’ve been stuck in a reading slump like me, look no further. We've got a Swedish painter’s gripping portraits of her own aging process, delicious French poster design, a wondrous alchemical manuscript, and more to cure your art book woes this season. Find your next read below, plus Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang’s thoughts on the latest art-world novel to focus on disaffected White women — there's plenty more where that came from — and Nageen Shaikh on the Indian modernist painters who dreamed of international solidarity long before “Global South” became a mainstream term.
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor
7 Art Books for Your March Reading List
Read up on the hidden history of occult influences on modernism, French sign painters, the Finnish painter who bucked convention, incarcerated artists, and more.
Haroutiun Galentz: The Form of Colour
A new English-language monograph repositions the Armenian–Lebanese painter as a cosmopolitan modernist whose work demands to be read beyond national canons.
From Our Critics
Please, No More Disaffected White Girls
Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth is navel-gazing, ouroboric, masturbatory — a Dimes Square novel for Dimes Square people. | Lisa Yin Zhang
Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy (2025)
Before the “Global South,” Indian Modernists Dreamed of Solidarity
Historian Atreyee Gupta unravels the threads of catchall terms like “Global South” to trace the connections between Indian painters and anticolonial figures like Frantz Fanon. | Nageen Shaikh
Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization and the Third World Project in India (2025) by Atreyee Gupta
From the Archive
The Early-20th-Century Photographer Who Magnified the Alien Beauty of Plants
Using a homemade camera, Karl Blossfeldt captured the sculptural details of plants, from the geometry of a seed pod to the alien curl of a fern. | Allison Meier
A Fresh Look at Flowers in Photography
Can photographers capture the vitality of flowers compellingly, innovatively, and beautifully? A new book gives a resounding yes. | Lauren Moya Ford
A Pioneering Photographer’s Legacy In Algae
In 1843, Anna Atkins created the first book illustrated with photography. It took over a century for her pioneering work to be recognized. | Allison Meier
