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Art and Culture: Critical Essays Paperback – January 1, 1965

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Beacon Press
• Publication date January 1, 1965
• Dimensions 5.4 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0807066818
• ISBN-13 978-0807066812
• See all details

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From the back cover, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Beacon Press; Edition Unstated (January 1, 1965)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807066818
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807066812
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• #462 in Arts & Photography Criticism
• #668 in Essays (Books)
• #831 in Art History (Books)

About the author

Clement greenberg.

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University of Iowa Press

Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri. From the art of Sonia Delaunay to contemporary photography, from the docks of Malaysia to Leonora Carrington’s home in Mexico City, and from reflections on modern Black British paintings to meditations on the female gaze, these essays bring together blazing insights to the visual world, with personal, intimate reflections. With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Art Essays is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.

“As joyous as it is intelligent,  Art Essays  proves once and for all that the best essays enchant us with the same splendor and humor and passion as the best novels or the most striking paintings.”—Merve Emre, University of Oxford

“This brilliantly stimulating book canonizes the art essay as the form of the moment and shows what it makes possible. Boldly claiming that the novel is now a satellite orbiting the essay, it gathers essays by exciting contemporary novelists on art and watches the critical, creative, and formal sparks fly.”—Kathryn Murphy, University of Oxford 

Chloe Aridjis Tash Aw Claire-Louise Bennett Teju Cole Geoff Dyer Sheila Heti Katie Kitamura Chris Kraus Jhumpa Lahiri Ben Lerner Orhan Pamuk Ali Smith Zadie Smith Heidi Sopinka Hanya Yanagihara

eBook, Perpetual

Publication details.

Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place

Playful Letters

Art Quilts of the Midwest

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• Art Essays: A Collection

In this Book

• Alexandra Kingston-Reese
• Published by: University of Iowa Press
• Series: New American Canon
• View Citation

Contributors: Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Claire-Louise Bennett, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, Chris Kraus, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Lerner, Orhan Pamuk, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Heidi Sopinka, Hanya Yanagihara

Table of Contents

• Title, Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Art Essay
• Thematic Guide to Approaching the Essays
• A Leonora Carrington A to Z
• Chloe Aridjis
• You Need to Look Away: Visions of Contemporary Malaysia
• How Paint and Perception Collide in the Work of Late Surrealist Dorothea Tanning
• Claire-Louise Bennett
• There's Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More
• Now We Can See
• Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping?
• Sheila Heti
• A Walk around the Neighborhood
• Chris Kraus
• The Space between the Pictures
• Jhumpa Lahiri
• pp. 104-115
• Damage Control
• pp. 116-129
• When Orhan Pamuk Met Anselm Kiefer
• Orhan Pamuk
• pp. 130-135
• We Must Not Be Isolated
• pp. 136-146
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Imaginary Portraits
• Zadie Smith
• pp. 147-160
• Hey, Necromancer!
• Heidi Sopinka
• pp. 161-167
• The Burning House
• Hanya Yanagihara
• pp. 168-178
• Permissions
• pp. 179-182

Additional Information

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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Phillip Lopate The Art Of The Personal Essay

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The best art books of 2022

PhD candidate in the History of Art, University of York

Disclosure statement

Eliza Goodpasture does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of York provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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The category of “art book” is vast, like art itself, but the best ones mix beautiful, interesting images with engaging and intelligent text. The books on this short list range from groundbreaking scholarly texts to dreamy, personal reflections, but all find that balance between image and narrative that makes an art book special. Each pushes the boundaries of scholarship, book design and ways of thinking about art and history in exhilarating ways.

1. Diane Arbus Documents

This book about the seminal and controversial 20th-century photographer Diane Arbus is remarkable and perhaps unique. It was published to accompany the rehang of the record-breaking 1972 MoMA Diane Arbus exhibition at David Zwirner and Fraenkel Galleries in New York, as they jointly took up representation of the artist’s estate.

But it is not a catalogue of the exhibition, and features hardly any of Arbus’s photographs. Instead, it is a collection of written essays, reviews, scholarly articles and a few letters by and about Arbus. The written works have been reproduced as they were originally published, which makes the book feel like a scrapbook.

Reviews of the original exhibition must be read on yellowed newsprint, surrounded by 1970s advertisements. The text itself becomes an object, almost a work of art. Here, Arbus’s photographs are reproductions of reproductions in articles. It’s an amazing visual feast that makes the case for the aesthetic value of ephemera.

Photography has always grappled with the meaning of reproductions and the importance of the authenticity of a work of art that can be printed over and over. Rather than resolving this debate, this book embraces the ambiguity. Rarely is the whole conversation about an artist gathered together in this way, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Very little interpretative text has been added, although the passages that are there to explain each section of collected texts do a succinct job of keeping the reader oriented on the journey through Arbus’s legacy from the 1970s to the present day.

2. Letters to Gwen John

Contemporary British painter Celia Paul’s exquisite encounter with the early 20th-century modernist English painter Gwen John evokes an imagined figure of the artist rather than a biographical one. In so doing, it also brings Paul herself into greater clarity as an artist and person.

Over the course of 18 months, Paul writes letters addressed to Gwen John, whom she has never met. Indeed, they were never even alive at the same time – Paul was born in 1959, 20 years after John’s death. Paul muses that she has always felt a connection to John, not just because of the similarities in the way they paint.

As the relationship between the two women builds through Paul’s one-way correspondence, the connections between them do seem to be uncanny. Both women had romantic relationships with famous older male artists (Paul with Lucian Freud, John with Auguste Rodin); both aggressively defended their solitary, ascetic homes; both made small and unfashionable work that eventually found acclaim; and both had close but conflicted relationships with their mothers and siblings.

Through Paul’s eyes, John comes to life in a way she never could to a historian. The way that she is able to critique and evoke the drama of being in a relationship with an older, powerful male artist, for example, is nuanced and vulnerable rather than objective. This strange and magical exercise in imagination and friendship across time and space is an utterly revelatory piece of art writing.

3. The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between the Two World Wars

Frances Spalding’s latest book continues her move towards a focus on networks and groups of artists, after several decades of writing notable biographies, such as her acclaimed 2016 work Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist .

Here she writes about the years between the two world wars, which have traditionally been overlooked in the history of English and British art, arguing that the dichotomy between the “real” and the “romantic” is not as clear-cut as it has been made out to be. Both qualities are generally excluded from narratives of modernism in favour of a focus on abstraction and conceptual innovation.

Spalding disrupts this traditional categorisation in a moment of reckoning with the boundaries of “English art” and “British art” – her book is distinctly concerned with English art, not with a far-reaching British art that is now understood in terms of Empire.

In this beautifully illustrated volume, she engages with a vast cast of artists, many of whom are rarely discussed, such as Anna Airy , or whose later careers are often forgotten, like Walter Sickert . She examines the retreat from modernism after world war one, the legacies of trauma, industrialised warfare and the changing gender roles caused by war.

Her analysis is not limited to individual artists, but also includes arts institutions: museums, government-run funding programmes (or lack of), and exhibiting bodies large and small. The book deftly weaves together visual analysis and social history to give the reader a thorough picture of the development of English art in this pivotal historical moment.

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830

With this groundbreaking work, Paris A Spies-Gans confronts head-on the challenging questions about how to write a history of women artists. She uses a data-driven approach to counter assumptions made through the field of art history that women did not enter the artistic profession in significant numbers until the late 19th century.

Focusing on exhibition records from the Royal Academy in London, and the French Salon des Beaux-Arts , she demonstrates that more women were represented in these key venues in the 18th century than are represented in museum collections in the same cities today (7-12% then to about 5% now).

She avoids overly quantitative pitfalls by weaving individual stories and archival documents through her narrative, and by continuing to return to the big question: why has the success and prominence of women artists in this period been so completely forgotten? When we ask “why have there been no great women artists?” as Linda Nochlin famously did, how are we defining “great”?

The book is not only engrossing and stuffed with ravishing images, but also offers a truly pioneering rebuttal to “revisionist” art history by claiming that, in this case, no revision is needed: women artists were already great.

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The best art books for summer 2022—as recommended by artists, curators, museum directors and dealers

From artist biographies and essay collections to a dystopian novel, surf culture and a rock’n’roll autobiography.

Araba Opoku Image Courtesy of Gallery 1957, © Nii Odzenma

The Art Newspaper’ s Book Club shines a light on art books in their myriad forms and brings you exclusive extracts, interviews and recommendations from leading art world figures. Sign up to our monthly newsletter

Araba Opoku, artist

What artists wear  (2021, penguin) by charlie porter, infinity net: the autobiography of yayoi kusama (2020, tate) by yayoi kusama (translated by ralph mccarthy).

“Clothes to me are like horoscopes—with an artist’s choice of clothes you can deduce, to some extent, their personality. The extensive dissection of the art and the artist, through the clothes we wear, is a topic that [has so far been] lightly touched on or hidden. I’m obsessed with clothes and the innate power they possess. Every day is a performance, and clothes are another tool in an artist’s arsenal [which are] useful in enacting and completing the scene. Porter captures the various ‘archetypes’ associated with artists. He emphasises the shift from the ‘codification of patriarchy to the breaking of the canon’. Infinity Net makes me feel like I am staring at a mirror and my reflection happens to be Yayoi Kusama. We enter through her mind, struggles and life. It’s an exciting journey through infiniteness.”

Clarrie Wallis

Clarrie Wallis, director of Turner Contemporary

Point break: raymond pettibon, surfers and waves (2022, david zwirner books) by jamie brisick and brian lukacher.

“To me, summer reading can bring unseen depth to moments undertaken for spontaneous joy. In our family, this passion is coupled with surfing, so Point Break hits a chord with years of sun-soaked holidays. Raymond Pettibon began his iconic surfing and surf culture series in 1985, producing large-scale colour paintings and small monochrome ink drawings combined with text, a hundred of which are brought together with several essays in this volume. These works remind us of the ocean’s inherent danger but also radiate pure rapture and convey the nihilistic pleasure of the sport. Two texts by female big-wave surfers, Emily Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore, describe how surfing gives you an awareness and appreciation of the natural world that has much to do with the sublime.”

Emma Talbot (2021) Photo: Tiwi

Emma Talbot, artist

The fifth sacred thing (1993, bantam) by starhawk.

“ The Fifth Sacred Thing is an ecotopian fiction that describes a polarised, post-apocalyptic mid-21st century America. One faction, neo-pagans who live sustainably, are invaded by soldiers of a fundamentalist Christian nation that has maintained a grim, dystopic capitalist existence. Narrated from the point of view of a 98-year-old woman, the novel seems horrifyingly prescient and reading it today would be a perfect introduction to the powerful work of Starhawk, an activist who is gaining increasing recognition in the contemporary art world as a sage, important voice.”

Melanie Pocock Photo: Ken Cheong, 2018

Melanie Pocock, curator at Ikon

Black paper: writing in a dark time (2021, university of chicago press) by teju cole, the year of magical thinking (2005, alfred a. knopf) by joan didion.

“While this summer feels optimistic for many—with restriction-free travel now viable—it seems strange to turn to books that reflect on dark times. Yet during my own sun-soaked holiday abroad, I found comfort in Teju Cole’s and Joan Didion’s writings on the darkness that shadows everyday life and art. In Black Paper Cole addresses a wide range of subjects, from the colour black in art to the politics of refusal, beguiling readers with ‘the wisdom latent in the dark’. Didion also invites us to see the light at the end of the tunnel in The Year of Magical Thinking , her candid account of the year following her husband’s sudden death. The light that Didion evokes, however, is far from the happy endings of Hollywood films (a milieu with which she was familiar through her screenwriting) but the epiphanies that only intense grief can trigger. Among these are the importance of letting go and the realisation that, in the face of death, change is the only constant.”

Sue Webster Photo: Robert Fairer

Sue Webster, artist

A drink with shane macgowan  (2001, pan macmillan) by victoria mary clarke and shane macgowan.

“I love a good biography, especially a rock’n’roll one. I love finding out what it takes to make a genius and the extraordinary stories of how one gets from A to B against all odds.  A Drink with Shane MacGowan ain’t your average biography but a series of transcribed conversations between Shane and his wife Victoria Clarke conducted in the back of taxis, propping up bars, dining out in posh restaurants and waiting to get deported in airport lounges. This book delves into the extraordinary and unconventional mind of one of the most uncompromising musicians of our time with an encyclopaedic knowledge of traditional Irish music, culture, philosophy, theology and all things Punk—spewed from the lips of a man who started drinking, smoking and gambling at the age of 11.”

Joe Scotland Courtesy of Studio Voltaire

Joe Scotland, director of Studio Voltaire

Bee reaved (2021, semiotext(e)) by dodie bellamy.

“ Bee Reaved is a collection of recent essays by Dodie Bellamy, which the writer selected after the death of Kevin Killian, her partner of 33 years. I take pleasure in Bellamy's writing—she is straightforward, honest and smart. Texts reflect on a number of artists’ work, such as Mike Kelley and Mary Beth Edelson. But the essays I really enjoy are the ones that take a more direct personal narrative. The Violence of the Image is a good example, dealing with abuse caused by having an online bully and stalker. Bellamy reflects on the violence inflicted on her with sharpness and humour.”

Christopher Le Brun © Maureen M. Evans

Christopher Le Brun, artist

An image for longing: selected letters and journals of a. r. ammons (2014, els editions) by a. r. ammons.

“These days in the studio, on stepping back from the paintings, I have The Selected Poems of A. R. Ammons by my chair. He shares a way of writing that the best modern American poets possess—works that retain the freshness of the moment even as they wade out to thoughts that lie in the deeper current. But for summer reading I need more of a narrative, so I would take An Image for Longing , his selected letters and journals, which is an ideal guide and background to his most significant work. Opening it at any place you will find insights into the life of the artist and the state of art and poetry, always made in a conversational easy tone, and mixed frankly and humorously with his efforts to attain public recognition.”

Tristram Hunt

Courtesy V&A

Tristram Hunt, director of Victoria and Albert Museum

Napoleon's plunder and the theft of veronese’s feast (2021, thames & hudson) by cynthia saltzman.

“I would recommend Napoleon’s Plunder and the Theft of Veronese’s Feast : a superbly well-written account of Napoleon’s plundering of European art, all for the good of the Enlightenment. It so deftly mixes the life of Napoleon, with art history, with the legacy of Veronese, and asks fascinating questions around provenance, restitution, and the lifetime meaning of paintings.”

Johanna Eiramo Courtesy of Finnish National Gallery and Jenni Nurminen

Johanna Eiramo, director of digital programme at the Finnish National Gallery

The women i think about at night (2018, otava) by mia kankimäki.

“Once you hit that delicious lull between seasons, when you’re feeling energised by rest but not yet ready to turn your mind towards things to come, my recommended read would be The Women I Think About at Night . From Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola to Nellie Bly, Kankimäki recounts the pure determination of ten women pioneers who maximised their potential when many thought that they possessed none. This book is a perfect mixture of history, positive energy and the wonder of travel. And the will to persevere on your unconventional journey, no matter what.”

Simon Wallis Photo: Hannah Webster

Simon Wallis, director of the Hepworth Wakefield

Utz (1988, jonathan cape) by bruce chatwin.

“I’ll be rereading one of my favourite novels, Utz by Bruce Chatwin. It’s a perfect miniature that says so much, so succinctly, about the curious and compulsive act of collecting art. The novel traces the fortunes of its enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz, who despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, asserts his individuality through an obsessive devotion to collecting Meissen porcelain. Utz , in part, builds on Chatwin’s experiences of working in the art world [at Sotheby’s, starting as a porter before working his way up and running the antiquities and Impressionist art departments]. During this period, he travelled extensively for his job and for adventure, also using these trips to buy antiques that he would resell to supplement his income. Utz is an engrossing little book that reflects on the uses, obsessions and consolations of art. Chatwin said: ‘My completely two-faced attitude to works of art is very, very strongly imprinted here. I love works of art and I absolutely hate them at the same time.’ It’s an ambivalence well worth considering through Utz, a captivating anti-hero.”

Joasia Krysa

Joasia Krysa, curator of the Helsinki Biennial 2023

The mushroom at the end of the world ruins (2015, princeton university press) by anna lowenhaupt tsing, decolonial ecology: thinking from the caribbean world (2021, john wiley & sons) by malcom ferdinand, towards a poetics of artificial superintelligence (2015, after us magazine) by nora n. khan.

“As I’m working on the next edition of Helsinki Biennial, I’m spending this summer revisiting various writings that have shaped my thinking. In particular, I’m returning to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World Ruins , which uses the example of matsutake mushrooms—which thrive in human-disturbed forests, including in Lapland, and is a delicacy that became part of the globalised commodity trade—to highlight pressing ecological and economic issues. I’m also reading Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology , [where he uses] the slave ship to reveal continuing inequalities today, and revisiting Nora N. Khan’s essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence , which talks about a future world emerging in which humans are not the central intelligence but ‘irrelevant bystanders’. Despite their critical undertones, these writings are fundamentally optimistic in helping to identify new scenarios for worlds that can emerge from what we are experiencing now.”

Jo Stella-Sawicka

Jo Stella-Sawicka, director of Goodman Gallery, London

The jive talker: or how to get a british passport  (2022, republished by september books) by samson kambalu.

“This summer I can’t wait to read Samson Kambalu’s  The Jive Talker, a riotous memoir of his journey from Malawian childhood to becoming an Oxford Don, and culminating in his work [ Antelope ] being shown in Trafalgar Square on the Fourth Plinth this autumn.”

Bruce Boucher

Bruce Boucher, director of Sir John Soane’s Museum

The real and the romantic: english art between two world wars (2022, thames & hudson) by frances spalding, joseph wright of derby: painter of darkness (2020, yale university press) by matthew craske.

“Frances Spalding’s  The Real and the Romantic  had me at the cover with its enticing watercolour of a railway carriage and landscape by Eric Ravilious. An authoritative text and judiciously selected illustrations provide a great escape into the interwar years, which seem an age more and more like our own. For some shade amidst the current heatwave, I also plan to turn to Matthew Craske’s  Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness , for a dash of chiaroscuro.”

Conrad Shawcross Photo: Daniel Alka

Conrad Shawcross, artist

Inventory of a life mislaid (2021, harpercollins) by marina warner.

“I’ve been reading my mother Marina Warner’s new memoir of her childhood in Egypt. I think this book is a real breakthrough, as it so beautifully and seamlessly splices the fog of the real but distant memories of her childhood with her unrivalled knowledge of myth, culture, and fairy tale. It results in real recollections imbued with rich magical references; the edge of what is real and what is imaginary always remains in a state of ebb and flow.”

Ghislaine Wood © Piers Macdonald Photography Ltd

Ghislaine Wood, deputy director of the Sainsbury Centre

1000 years of joys and sorrows (2021, bodley head) by ai weiwei, the pursuit of art: travels, encounters and revelations (2019, thames & hudson) by martin gayford.

“Science fiction is my usual holiday escape, but this year I’m taking two autobiographical works. Beyond the powerful work that he creates, I, like many people, have tremendous admiration for Ai Weiwei’s brave commentary on totalitarianism and his confrontation of the Chinese authorities. His memoir spans 100 years of China’s turbulent history and explores how the life and legacy of his father, the celebrated poet Ai Qing, provides a context for his practice as an artist. For a lighter read, I am also taking Martin Gayford’s  The Pursuit of Art , which has been recommended as a great travel book. It follows Gayford’s journeys around the world to see art and artists.”

Gabriela Salgado Photo: Emma Blau

Gabriela Salgado, director of The Showroom

Learn to act: introducing the eco nomadic school  (2017, atelier d'architecture autogérée) edited by katrin böhm, tom james and doina petrescu.

“This book sheds light on the innovative work of several local community groups spread around six European countries. Under the umbrella of a school, the authors connect the projects to explore a form of self-organised, trans-local and peer-led learning. Inspired by civic engagement and alternative economies, this visionary guide harvests the groups’ creative contributions to their environment. In a light touch manner, it comprises projects ranging from low-tech architecture and rural activism to arts practice, seed preservation and academic research. Food for thought.”

Jennifer Scott

Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery

Jennifer   Scott, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Patch work. a life amongst clothes   (2021, bloomsbury) by claire wilcox.

"The best thing about summer for me is an all-too-fleeting moment when you float into a rested and reflective state of mind. Events from the past—recent and distant—start to make sense simply because you’ve stepped away from everyday pressures. In Patch Work , Claire Wilcox evokes that calm ordering of thoughts and memories that comes through distance and time. As a memoir of her life, and an ode to the skill of curating, her carefully crafted words lull you into a reverie. The sections can be dipped into like the shelves of an archive, each one rich with meaning, opening up visual recollections attached to material stuff. By sharing her stories of love, loss, confidence, and vulnerability, described with the precision of an exhibition label, she holds back enough of the messy details to make her deeply personal recollections feel universal and liberating."

Pippy Houldsworth

Pippy Houldsworth, founder and director of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Ruth asawa: citizen of the universe (2022, thames & hudson) by emma ridgway and vibece salthe.

“Ruth Asawa’s life story is one of resilience, independence, and inspiration—a journey to assert her own identity in a world of contradiction and misunderstanding. Brought up by Japanese parents in California, Asawa’s world was turned upside down when the attack on Pearl Harbor led to the indiscriminate detention of Japanese American citizens. The book, and the exhibition it accompanies, traces Asawa’s practice from her family’s detention through to 1980 and sees her casting off both ‘Japanese’ and ’American’ labels, assuming her place as a ‘citizen of the universe’. Set against the barbed wire and chain link fences of that childhood internment camp, Asawa’s biomorphic wire sculptures seem to turn suffering and confinement inside out, blooming into a transcendent and liberating experience.”

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By Jillian Billard

May 11, 2018

I don't know about you, but when it gets warm out, the first thing I want to do is sit outside and read. With spring finally in full swing, we're getting ready for those lazy-in-the-park days with a list of books to keep us inspired while we bask in the sun. Here are ten books written by artists about art that are sure to get your creative juices flowing.

HOW TO SEE: LOOKING, TALKING, AND THINKING ABOUT ART BY DAVID SALLE

David Salle's book How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art is a look at art theory and criticism from the artist's perspective. Rather than projecting meaning and philosophy onto a work, as contemporary critics are often wont to do, Salle offers an alternative way of looking at a work that focuses primarily on aesthetic choices. Writes acclaimed author Salman Rushdie, "If John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a classic of art criticism, looking at the 'what' of art, then David Salle's How to See is the artist's reply, a brilliant series of reflections on how artists think when they make their work. The 'how' of art has perhaps never been better explored." Salle is interested in the way that art works, down to its fundamental core. Speaking about the works of his contemporaries and friends, Salle offers an intimate, humorous, and readable approach to art criticism, teaching us how to open our minds and see with the artist's eye.

PAUL CHAN SELECTED WRITINGS 2000-2014

Hong Kong-born, Nebraska-raised visual artist Paul Chan is known for wrestling with dualities and deriving influence from a diverse array of voices, many of which are aesthetically and dialectically at odds. Though he is widely regarded as a video artist, Chan's relationship to language has always been an integral part of his practice. In 2010, Chan founded Badlands Unlimited , a publishing company that has put out a number of titles ranging from art criticism to poetry to artist's books to erotic fiction. In this selection of critical essays, the artist muses on both the joys and frustrations of the inherent paradoxes of modern and contemporary art, philosophical thought, and language. Drawing reference to a varied scope of artists and thinkers, from Chris Marker and Henry Darger to Marquis de Sade and Theodor Adorno, Chan reflects on the literary motivations and inspirations for his own work. It, like the variety of influences he draws from, is at once a serious and delightfully humorous read.

INTO WORDS: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF CARROLL DUNHAM

Speaking of titles published by Badlands Unlimited, The Selected Writings of Carroll Dunham is a must-read for anyone interested in a look at contemporary art history and culture from an artist's perspective. You've probably seen Dunham 's cartoonish paintings of nudes in colorful landscapes that blend abstraction with figuration, but did you know he's also a really great writer? Featuring intimate interviews with artists such as Peter Saul and in-depth musings on artists ranging from Kara Walker, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, Dunham offers an alternative art history of the past 100 years with equal parts wit and a keen, discerning eye. The book features an introduction from the Chief Curator of the Whitney Museum, Scott Rothkopf, and a publisher's foreward from Paul Chan.

IMAGING DESIRE BY MARY KELLY

Imaging Desire is a selection of critical writings from conceptual artist Mary Kelly from 1976 to 1995. In these essays, Kelly poses vital questions about the practice of making and talking about art, and argues for an art criticism that stems from psychoanalysis, feminism, and semiotics. For over twenty years, Mary Kelly attempted to push political and sexual boundaries with her transgressive writings and large-scale narrative installations. This collection of texts illuminates the intersection between her thoughts and visual renderings. As the title suggests, Kelly is interested in discovering the relationship between image and desire, and attempts to reframe the way we think about and look at art. Beyond the scope of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Kelly's writings are vital in discussing theoretical elements of art today.

THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONO RA CARRINGTON

If you're a fan of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), then you are going to love. this. book. Famed for her wildly imaginative paintings that are at once as dark as a Hieronymous Bosch and lighthearted as a children's book illustration, Leonora Carrington has illustrated the deep recesses of her mind with a deft hand. Now, for the first time ever , all of the witty and macabre fictional written fantasies of this phenomenal thinker are compiled in one place. (Did you even know she wrote fiction? I sure didn't!) Satirical, hilarious, achingly beautiful and surreal, these stories offer a new perspective into the fantastical psyche of this artist. Of the book, Sarah Resnick of Bomb Magazine writes “the British-born Carrington, who in her youth moved to Paris and befriended the Surrealists, is perhaps better known as a painter of dreamlike tableaus in which wild-maned, wispy androgynes consort with half-human beasts and spindly plant life...yet prose makes available to Carrington a wry deadpan that painting does not—these stories are funny.” At once tender and grotesque, these stories are just an absolute delight.

In her book Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl asks "what is the function of art in the era of digital globalization?" In a world so fraught with environmental destruction, growing inequality, overarching digital technology and surveillance, and inherently capitalist-driven art market where many major museums are funded by corporations such as arms manufacturers, how do we continue to make and appreciate art? Don't worry though, as depressing as that all sounded, Steyerl's exposure of the paradoxes of the art world in the midst of globalization is ultimately enlightening. (I mean, she still makes art). For anyone making art in this day and age, Steyerl's work is an essential read.

Ok, so Yvonne lays out a pretty clear and succinct descriptor that will likely discern whether or not this book is for you, so I'm just going to let her do the talking. "If you're interested in Plato," writes the artist, "you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals––including breakfast––have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading." In this memoir, the dancer, choreographer and filmmaker offers an intimate look at her personal journey with art. Filled with excerpts from her diary, letters, program notes, and snapshots, Rainer deftly illustrates the path of a woman artist in postwar America; tracing her early life as an orphan to her flourishing in San Francisco and Berkeley and her eventual settling in New York City, where she lived and worked alongside artists Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham , Robert Rauschenberg and Yoko Ono and co-founded the iconic Judson Dance Theater in 1962. This book is not concerned with art theory and philosophy, but rather in understanding the trials, travails, and ecstatic moments of living as an artist.

WHERE ART BELONGS BY CHRIS KRAUS

In her book Where Art Belongs , writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus talks about the use of time as material for art making. Kraus is most known for her musings on the life of the artist, namely what it means to be a creator and thinker and a social being in the world simultaneously.  She argues that “the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.” She speaks about the often doomed but nonetheless valiant efforts of small DIY art communities and makes the case that these collectives are what have kept art and creativity alive since the infiltration of a disembodied digital lexicon. Writes scholar McKenzie Wark, "in this book we get post-post-punk angelinos, sex worker art works, (and) a tribute to an artist who sailed away off the edge of the world..so if any of those things are of interest, buy this book." It's certainly an inspiring read that offers hope for the contemporary art world, despite its many faults.

FUCK SETH PRICE BY SETH PRICE

Funny title aside, contemporary artist Seth Price's Fuck Seth Price is a provocative short read about what it means to be an artist in today's social, political, and digital climate. In the book, which teeters between fiction, essay and memoir, Price chronicles an unnamed fictional protagonist as he moves throughout the confusing contemporary world and muses on a variety of modalities of visual art, from sculpture to architecture to literature to film. Merging high and low-brow references, Price reckons with the overstimulation of our contemporary mindset and delves into a rabbit hole of cultural-theory speculation in a book that is at once comical, revelatory, and completely confounding.

THE ARTIST PROJECT: WHAT ARTISTS SEE WHEN THEY LOOK AT ART

Phaidon's The Artist Project is an exciting compilation of commentaries from 120 of today's most influential artists on the works that inspire them. In this selection of interviews, featuring artists from Vito Acconci to Shahzia Sikander , artists discuss works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that spark their imagination and lend to their creative process, offering readers a unique look at art history through the artist's perspective.

RELATED ARTICLES

Paul Chan on the "Golden Age" of Art Publishing

"I Love Dick": Why Women Artists in the Post-Digital Age Idolize Chris Kraus

The Other Art History: The Overlooked Women of Surrealism [related-works-module]

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In Their Own Words: 10 Essential Reads Written by Artists

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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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Best Art Books of 2021

The art critics of The Times select their favorites from this year’s crop of art books.

By Holland Cotter Roberta Smith Jason Farago and Siddhartha Mitter

In a lockdown year, with travel reduced, there was no movable feast quite like an art book. Art is made by all sorts of people, everywhere, all the time, along many different paths, some of which are illuminated by these intriguing publications chosen by our critics.

Holland Cotter’s Favorites

‘ray johnson c/o’.

The maverick American artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995), who managed to be nowhere and everywhere in the art world through his invention of Mail Art, was lucky in his longtime friend William S. Wilson, to whom, over 60 years, he gave thousands of letters, collages, drawings and clippings. Wilson saved every last scrap, and a jampacked sampling of them makes up this gold mine of a book, edited and curated by Caitlin Haskell with Jordan Carter. Funny, biting, morbid, it’s a page-turner for sure, and accompanies a show at the Art Institute of Chicago through March 22). ( Art Institute of Chicago, distributed by Yale University Press )

‘The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse’

Edited by the curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, this catalog for one of the outstanding exhibitions of the season — originating at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, it’s now in Houston — proposes that the culture of the African American South, as defined by music and vernacular art, is the bedrock of American culture itself, with a strong influence on new art today. The book vividly illustrates and deepens the show’s powerful argument. ( Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, distributed by Duke University Press )

‘Yannis Tsarouchis: Dancing in Real Life’

This book lovingly excavates the career of a Greek modernist painter who designed sets for Maria Callas and kept a Greek Classical figurative tradition alive in paintings of homoerotic nudes. Tsarouchis (1910-1989) was both too radical and too conservative for the art world of his time and fell into oblivion outside of Greece. Edited by Niki Gripari and Adam Szymczyk (and including a selection of the artist’s writings), this tender tribute brings him back. ( Sternberg Press )

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The Best Art Books of 2023

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Amid the devastation, delight, and general sense of cognitive dissonance that suffused this year, the best way for many of us to digest and make sense of the present is to sink deeply into books probing art’s past and future. Catalogues on artists from Nan Goldin to Gwen John, feminist writings on artist-parents and the many meanings of the monstrous, modern art’s overlooked religious and spiritual influences, and a host of other excellent publications provided us moments of revelation, comfort, and rousing awakening. In no particular order, our editors and writers offer you the top 20 art books from the past year. — Lakshmi Rivera Amin, editorial coordinator

Ordinary Notes  by Christina Sharpe

We all know Christina Sharpe is one of those rare academics who tackles her subjects with true literary skill, so I was curious about her newest book that compiles short reflections, thoughts, and insights into a collection of 249 “notes.” Sometimes these passages read like social media posts, other times like very short stories. This is the kind of book that pokes and prods you into considering thoughts that are often floating in our minds and bodies and need to be given form — one of Sharpe’s talents. I do find the way the images are laid out a little awkward, but regardless, this is the type of book I’ll place by a reading chair, knowing it could inspire new thoughts by exploring the honest musings of someone who thinks deeply about the world around them. As she explains in note 242, “I write these ordinary things to detail the sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.” I had to pause for a few minutes after reading that. — Hrag Vartanian , “ 10 Art Books We’re Reading This November “

Buy on Bookshop  | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2023

Marina Abramović: A Visual Biography  by Marina Abramović and Katya Tylevich

The queen of contemporary performance art has produced an impressive visual biography harnessing that strange and galvanizing energy between the personal and systemic that her best art captures and distills. Archival images are accompanied by quotes, phrases, and diaristic entries to tell the story of an unapologetically individualistic artist.

Co-created with Katya Tylevich, this volume is probably one of the easiest-to-read coffee table books I’ve ever held, while the weight and size of the book itself echo the artist’s desire to take up space. Sure, there are parts of the tale that made me think, “maybe you should talk to someone about that,” but then again, she’s typical of many artists of her generation who used art as a way to figure out how to exist in a world that hadn’t yet figured out how to financialize the crap out of contemporary art. The one major downside? It’s  such  a visual biography that I suspect there won’t be an audiobook version coming out any time soon. — HV

Buy on Bookshop  | Laurence King, November 2023

Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island

Cuban-American artist, writer, and activist Coco Fusco is an inveterate truth-teller and a longtime fighter for the rights of the marginalized, persecuted, and dispossessed. She is the enemy of the dictatorial state and the morally rotten art establishment. This beautiful book, released in conjunction with the opening of Fusco’s namesake exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin earlier this year, looks back at her influential work, including many of her memorable performances, in the three decades since she emerged on the scene in the 1990s. It’s an unfinished story as Fusco is still making work and publishing words that bring deep discomfort to the powers to be. — Hakim Bishara , “ 10 Art Books to Add to Your Shelf This December “

Buy on Bookshop  | Thames & Hudson, October 2023

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well

In an art world full of feckless, two-faced opportunists, Nan Goldin stands out as an artist who doesn’t hesitate to put herself on the line for a just cause. Look at how she weaned major museums off the Sackler family’s dirty money with her opioid advocacy group PAIN. That’s just one of the struggles she waged throughout her life. She’s taken many hits along the way — her youth and early life marked by sexual and emotional cruelty — but she also gained myriad golden memories, many of which she captured with her camera and organized into slideshows and films. Accompanying a namesake traveling show organized by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, this book gives you a glimpse into the work and life of this once-in-a-generation artist. Here’s the best part of Goldin’s story: She survived. — HB , “ 10 Art Books We’re Reading This November “

Buy on Bookshop  | Steidl and Moderna Museet, February 2023

An Indigenous Present

A project conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, nearly 20 years in the making, An Indigenous Present celebrates the work of artists working across photography, weaving, fashion design, choreography, performance, writing, and more, each of whom has creatively impacted Gibson in one way or another. The book prioritizes artists’ works and voices, especially when compared to other publications that rely heavily on academic essays to establish credibility, and the nonlinear format highlights the fluid, enduring nature of creative practice. Especially compelling is its exploration of artists working with music and sound, including Laura Ortman and Raven Chacon, and those forging ahead in the realm of technology and digital tools including AI, such as Kite and Dylan McLaughlin. The book defied my expectations. It’s truly a gift, showing how these Indigenous artists are setting the standards for creative realms that are yet to be defined, while also carrying their traditions and communities forward. — Nancy Zastudil

Buy on Bookshop | DelMonico Books and Big NDN Press, August 2023

Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti

Artist Sophia Giovannitti’s perspicacious book wends its way through her personal experiences, art history, and legal frameworks to trace the parallels between art and sex work. Both, she writes, can be understood in the context of the market, yet must not be solely examined as such. Particularly against the backdrop of sex workers’ criminalization due to legislation such as SESTA and FOSTA , Giovannitti’s candid writing and limpid examination of the two fields challenge the way we think about them, inspiring new understandings in the process. — LA

Buy on Bookshop | Verso Books, May 2023

Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa

In a new tome titled after a word meaning “our side,” referring to how Apsáalooke people speak of themselves, artist Wendy Red Star highlights the links between her vast body of work and familial history. The book includes interviews she conducted with her parents, her sister, and Indigenous art curators Annika Johnson and Adriana Greci Green. The layered transcripts and full-page spreads of her artwork — from childhood drawings to works based on Apsáalooke cultural objects held in collections — bring each other to life, rendering her already personal work all the more powerful. — LA , “ 14 Art Books and Catalogues We’re Reading This Month “

Buy on Bookshop | Radius Books, April 2023

How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers by Hettie Judah

As some spheres of the art world catch up on the fact that motherhood and artmaking are not mutually exclusive, this slender but informative text on the failure of institutions, residencies, and galleries to provide proper support to artists who choose to become parents lays bare the progress we have yet to make. As Debra Brehmer writes , critic Hettie Judah “provides context on the history of sexism in the art world and examples of possible solutions to abide this dilemma.” Her interviews with artists and discussion of new programs creating sustainable ways for them to both make work and parent serve as a crucial record for the future that artist-parents are working to build. — LA

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Lund Humphries, January 2023

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting  is a must-read catalogue that accompanies the landmark, internationally touring exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town, South Africa. The sections of the book are arranged as powerful meditations on themes from the exhibition — the everyday, joy and revelry, repose, sensuality, spirituality, and triumph and emancipation. Each contribution from the curators and invited authors historicizes and poetically interprets the aesthetics and politics of Black figural paintings in Africa and its global diaspora. As opposed to solely offering a didactic overview of the exhibition, the book provides rich theoretical engagement with Blackness and figural representation from transnational and transhistorical perspectives. Such a text is necessary to unpack our current moment, a time when African and African diasporic portraiture is prolific and Black artists are consistently expanding the medium. — Alexandra M. Thomas , “ 11 Art Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer “

Buy on Bookshop  | Thames & Hudson, March 2023

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster

Gwen John is one of the most important British painters of the early 20th century. Yet, until recently, she was largely relegated to the margins of canonical art history. She was overshadowed by the men in her orbit — brother Augustus John and lover Auguste Rodin — and dismissed as an unambitious recluse during her lifetime, but since her death in 1939, her significance has slowly come to light. CuratorAlicia Foster’s illustrated biography of John (published alongside an exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery ) frames the artist as an intrepid, bohemian figure who defied the norms of her time, with a vibrant social sphere and complex interior life that both found their way into her work. After moving to Paris in 1904 with the goal of becoming a great artist, John found her signature focus: painting anonymous, solitary women in muted interiors. She went on to create dozens of indelible portraits, always of women (and occasionally of cats), many of them featured in this biography. Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris honors its subject’s life and secures her legacy — a truly remarkable book. — Sophia Stewart

Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, July 2023

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art  by Lauren Elkin

Associating monsters and women, thanks to myths aplenty and sexism in general, is as old as patriarchy itself. But when Jenny Offill released her 2014 novel  Dept. of Speculation , her use of the term “art monster,” specifically as it relates to women artists, struck a new chord, spawning a rich exploration and reclamation of its layered meanings. In  Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art , Elkin takes a poetic approach as she considers this concept in the context of feminist art and literature. She grounds her study in the symbolic duality of the forward-slash (/), which she uses to both link and distinguish her musings. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Virginia Woolf, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Sutapa Biswas, and a host of other artists with feminist perspectives on the monstrous and disobedient are threaded together and put under Elkin’s magnifying glass. Straddling poetry and creative nonfiction, she invites us as readers to grapple with, and even nurture, the monsters within. — LA , “ 10 Art Books We’re Reading This November “

Buy on Bookshop  | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2023

Sophie Calle (Photofile)

In art as in life, our true heroes are those who devote themselves entirely to an idea, risky as it might be. Sophie Calle belongs to that category of people. She will go wherever a project takes her, often forfeiting autonomy and control in the process. She famously shadowed a man from Paris and all the way to Venice, asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her, worked as a hotel maid to snoop through guests’ belongings, and opened her bed to strangers. She tells us the stories behind these works and others in this precious little book, combined with photographs, personal reflections, and anecdotes. However, I could’ve gone without art historian Clément Chéroux’s overly psychoanalytical introduction to the book, which imposes too much theory on an artist who has mastered the skill of letting go. — HB , “ 11 Art Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer “

Buy on Bookshop  | Thames & Hudson, February 2023

Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion by Erika Doss

What caused Jackson Pollock’s breakthrough moment that led to his iconic drip paintings? In her new book Spiritual Moderns , Erika Doss offers an answer that may come as a surprise. For Pollock, it wasn’t just putting down the bottle and picking up a stick dripping with paint, as Hollywood and mainstream narratives suggest. It was instead the close observation of queer mystical painter Mark Tobey’s “white writing” paintings that were inspired by Baháʼí calligraphy. The long-standing anti-religious bias in modern art glosses over how the frenetic calligraphy of the Baháʼí faith spread from Tobey to Pollock. Doss’s book demonstrates that religion and mysticism have influenced modern art far more than the presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City or college art history courses let on. With additional case studies on Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Agnes Pelton, Doss unearths the spiritual and religious influences that earlier generations buried. — Daniel Larkin

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | University of Chicago Press, May 2023

Pacita Abad

Born in 1946 in Basco, Filipina artist Pacita Abad charted an unusual course through life from the beginning. Raised in a political family that was threatened by the rise of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Abad began studying law but was diverted into the arts during a move to San Francisco in 1971, where she witnessed the predominant counter-culture movement of the times. Abad then hitchhiked with her life partner Jack Garrity across Asia in 1973, traveling overland from Turkey to the Philippines through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It was during this yearlong journey that Abad began to collect and wear traditional fabrics and jewelry and absorb the techniques and aesthetics that would ultimately shape her work for decades to come. Abad is perhaps best known for her trapunto technique, inspired by the Italian embroidery method, but this career-spanning publication , which accompanies the Pacita Abad exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, brings every aspect of the artist’s colorful and multifaceted life and art into view. Cataloguing more than 100 works and featuring oral histories from Abad’s closest interlocutors, the book extensively details the beautiful visual practice of an artist who was remarkably unbounded in lifestyle, medium, vision, and process. — Sarah Rose Sharp

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Walker Art Center, June 2023

This Is Not a Gun

Printed in conjunction with artist Cara Levine’s exhibition To Survive I Need You to Survive at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, This Is Not a Gun uses form and content to powerfully address police violence and gun control in the United States. Levine writes that the book, along with the eponymous long-term multidisciplinary project, “seeks to move beyond the realms of mere empathy or sympathy and into deeply embodied self-aware conversations and actions about how race, gender, ability, and class shape our relationships to our bodies and the objects we interface with.” What follows is over 50 entries from artists, writers, activists, and healers in creative response to 44 objects, each of which police officers say they misidentified as a gun when they shot an unarmed civilian, often fatally. Levine encouraged contributors to choose an object that resonated with them. As a reader, I approached the content in the same manner, beginning with tinfoil, cane, sub sandwich, underwear, and hands — each inherently harmless yet circumstantially interpreted as a threat. Designed as a narrow, elongated rectangular object, the book has done more to shape my awareness of policing and bias — whether toward race, gender, ability, class, or an intersection of these identities — than any statistical report or DEIA training. — NZ

Buy the Book | For the Birds Trapped in Airports and Sming Sming Books, February 2023

Trailblazing Women Printmakers: Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios and the Folly Cove Designers by Elena M. Sarni

Who would’ve guessed that one of America’s longest-running artist guilds was a group of women printmakers in a small cove along the Massachusetts shoreline? Working upstream against the growing, male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement, the Folly Cove Designers collective was encouraged to draw from the world around them — meaning that their designs reflect a distinct moment of their seaside hamlet in mid-century Gloucester. Scholar and curator Elena M. Sarni’s book is the masterful culmination of 13 years of archival work, during which she unearthed many Folly Cove designs that haven’t been seen for decades. This first-ever history of these brilliant women will be critical for lovers of ornament, printmaking, mid-century modern design, women’s art history, WPA-era craft, and art pedagogy alike. — Isabella Segalovich

Buy on Bookshop | Princeton Architectural Press, August 2023

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding

I hadn’t yet made it down to see Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding at the New Mexico State University Museum by the end of this year, but the publication that accompanies the traveling retrospective (originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) proved worth revisiting over and over. Part career survey and part visual examination of Álvarez Muñoz’s Enlightenment series, the publication’s design mirrors the artist’s conceptual and narrative practice of engaging text and images. Here, two books are connected by a shared cover, eschewing distinct borders and enabling a slippage of one form into the other, and a generous selection of images provides for an intimate reading. Co-curator Kate Green bookends, as it were, her essay “Un Puro Cuento” with recountings of Álvarez Muñoz’s 1981 and 1992 performative lectures titled Petrocuatl . The essay also traces the artist’s experiences in fashion illustration and advertising to her conceptual art and institutional critique, all the while foregrounding her interest in personal narrative. An exchange between Álvarez Muñoz and Roberto Tejada and essays by Josh T. Franco and Isabel Casso each delve further into the artist’s experiences, influences, and collaborations. — NZ

Buy on Bookshop or shopmcasd.com | Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, November 2023

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

How do you feel when you discover that an artist or author you love has done or said things you abhor? Does creative genius permit, even demand, a certain selfishness on the part of artists and audiences alike? What do we owe the people whom predators victimize in creating masterpieces that shape our lives, and do we partake in their monstrosity when we admire their work or embark on creative careers of our own? If you’ve wrestled with any of these questions, then Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is for you. While Dederer does not break new ethical ground or offer general prescriptions, she delivers a brutally honest, compulsively readable biographical account of her struggle with these questions as they’ve informed her life and career — of interest to any if not all of us invested in the arts. — Nandini Pandey

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Knopf, April 2023

The Tarot of Leonora Carrington

This second edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington , edited by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, comes courtesy of the Spanish publisher Editorial RM, with a gold cover of The Magician and The High Priestess, two cards from the surrealist artist’s gorgeous tarot deck. The authors’ scholarship gets more breadth in this new iteration, including a close review of each card and a deep look into how tarotic symbols and imagery appeared throughout Carrington’s oeuvre. We also learn more about the artist’s explorations of feminist spirituality and the alchemical possibilities of blending gender expressions — what we might today call nonbinary or genderqueer identity. It’s essential reading for surrealists and tarot practitioners alike. — AX Mina

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop  | Rm, December 2022

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Definitely in the running as the book of the year, Naomi Klein’s  Doppelganger  might not be a volume you were expecting to see on this list, but I think it is an important read for anyone into art and culture. The double, or doppelganger, is  a prevalent theme in contemporary art . Klein explores the theme beautifully and poignantly, while also grappling with the practical reality that she keeps getting mixed up with Naomi Wolf, whom she describes as another White Jewish “big idea books” author with long brown hair. While other, weaker authors may have shunned the case of mistaken identity, Klein leans into it and uses this real-life experience as a way to examine the use of doppelgangers in everything from tech to literature, notably Philip Roth’s  Operation Shylock  (1993) — a favorite section of the book.

Wolf’s own trajectory is part of the appeal of this story, notably because the former liberal intellectual darling who helped  Al Gore during his 2000 Presidential bid  quickly became a fixture of right-wing conspiracy podcasts in recent years, after a public fall from grace (she is a regular on a podcast hosted by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.) Klein takes a deep dive into this alternative mediascape into which Wolf has immersed herself, offering a clear perspective on this skewed world. The book truly shines when the author steps back to make unexpected connections: her section on the doubling related to Israel, Zionism, and Palestine is a timely must-read. What you walk away with is the sense that we’re all being doubled in many ways, and while we all may have our own personal experiences (I’ll never forget the time someone with my same name unfriended me on Facebook,) we may have to come to terms with the fact that our online lives already function as doubles. — HV

Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2023

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Book Reviews

'i just keep talking' is a refreshing and wide-ranging essay collection.

Martha Anne Toll

Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School . Painter’s latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon.

Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Author examines 'the history of white people'.

Painter’s The History of White People combines scholarship with readability to prove that “whiteness” is a relatively newly created sociological construct. Slavery has been around for millennia, as has war and conquering peoples, but whiteness, with its bizarre, insidious, and pervasive myths about racial superiority, dates from around the 15th century forward. The concept of whiteness is entangled with America’s mendacious justifications for its capture and trade in human beings, and the terrible, lasting consequences of chattel slavery.

Painter has been clear that she stands on the shoulders of others in naming whiteness as a construct. What makes The History of White People indispensable is that it collects the historical antecedents of whiteness in a compelling narrative, and calls out to readers, including myself, the need to unlearn whiteness as a norm, even — and especially — if it is an unconscious norm.

Author Interviews

'old in art school': an mfa inspires a memoir of age.

As Painter wound down from a full academic load at Princeton, she obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art. In Old in Art School, as well as this current volume, she recounts the putdowns and hazing she suffered from fellow art students and her art professors, just as The History of White People was hitting the bestseller lists. Painter acknowledges that book’s commercial success but does not hide her bitterness that it did not win any major prizes.

Painter’s tour through her life and interests makes for a fascinating journey. To introduce her essay collection, Painter writes, “My Blackness isn’t broken… Mine is a Blackness of solidarity, a community, a connectedness….” She grew up in an intellectual family in the Bay Area amidst the burgeoning Black power movement. Her studies took her to Ghana and Paris, before completing her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard.

Painter started making art at an early age. She threads that interest through the essays, wondering what would have happened if her professional life had started with art, instead of as a scholar.

Code Switch

Is beauty in the eyes of the colonizer.

Painter’s captivating mixed media illustrations in I Just Keep Talking speak to injustice. She combines words that blister — “same frustrations for 25 years” (a work from 2022), with blocks of color and figurative representations. I felt drawn in by these visual pieces with their trenchant messages. “This text + art is the way I work, the way I think,” she writes. In Painter’s hands, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Painter’s essays pose critical questions. She will not accept received wisdom at face value, refuses the status quo, and freely offers her expert opinions. The pieces in this book address such wide topics as the meaning of history and historiography; America’s false, rose-colored-glasses-interpretation of slavery; the appalling absence of Black people from America’s story about itself; how and where feminism fits in; southern American history; the white gaze; and visual culture.

She takes a hard look at Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy concerning Black people and slavery, and compares his viewpoint to that of Charles Dickens, who toured the U.S. 15 years after Jefferson died. Audiences cooled to Dickens after he “excoriate[d] Americans for…tolerating the continued existence of enslavement by shrugging their shoulders, saying nothing can be done on account of ‘public opinion.’”

Here are the new books we're looking forward to this fall

Painter was onto Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas well before Professor Hill delivered her explosive testimony at his confirmation hearing. In a chapter called “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” Painter delivers a withering takedown of Thomas’ manipulation of gender stereotypes to advantage himself.

Painter dates her essays and provides extensive endnotes, but I wanted more information about which essays had been previously published and which, if any, derived from unpublished journal entries. I wondered particularly about the shorter, less annotated pieces, which I could imagine her writing to develop analyses for longer efforts (though only speculation on my part).

The variety in length and scholarly sophistication is refreshing in this collection. Each entry deals with topics that are sadly as relevant today as they have been throughout America’s history.

Please keep talking Nell Painter, and we’ll keep listening.

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Martha Anne Toll is a D.C.-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses , won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One , is due out May 2025.

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The Must-Read Art Books to Pick Up This Fall

These titles, like all the best art books, transcend the visual..

Most of us don’t read books the way we used to—attention spans are short, BookTok recommendations populate our shelves and audiobooks are the new books. But there’s one type of book that will never go out of style, and that is the classic art book . By which we mean those sometimes hefty coffee table books filled with beautiful pictures.

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When it comes to the best art books, however, the appeal transcends the visual. These aren’t auction catalogs, after all. Great art books are creatively curated and offer readers a deep dive into the movements, niche cultures and personal stories behind the works showcased on each page. There are fascinating career retrospectives and anthologies of major biennials, museum and gallery surveys and re-editions of obscure photo books—in other words, something for everyone,

Our autumn art book recommendations, all slated for release in the coming months, promise to be equal parts rich in detail, lovely to look at and insightful.

The German model-turned-photographer Ellen von Unwerth , well-versed in the fashion world, has a new photo book with TASCHEN called Heimat , which is the word for the feeling of belonging in German. This art book features high gloss, glamorous and sexualized photos of women romping around the south of Germany—riddled with Bavarian clichés from beer to dirndls. Considering that the south of Germany leans traditional, and not particularly adventurous, it offers a refreshing take on her home region.

Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939

For a throwback to pre-war Paris, check out Brilliant Exiles , which looks at the influential American women who lived, worked and participated in the culture of Paris in the early 20th Century. They each had their own way of expressing the freedom Paris afforded women, from singer Josephine Baker to muse Zelda Fitzgerald to writer Gertrude Stein or gallerist Peggy Guggenheim. All were trailblazers who ultimately changed culture, locally and abroad. The book coincides with the touring exhibition of the same name that’s on view at the National Portrait Gallery until February 23, 2025.

Balenciaga – Kublin: A Fashion Record

Balenciaga has seen better days. Their recent controversy with teddy bears in bondage has left many fashion aficionados dreaming of the days when the brand represented truth and authenticity. Balenciaga – Kublin: A Fashion Record by Ana Balda and Maria Kublin , set to release on October 22, is the first book to document the work of fashion photographer and filmmaker Tom Kublin and his collaboration with brand founder Cristóbal Balenciaga. This art book features over 140 photos from Balenciaga’s postwar heyday in Paris showing how Kublin captured Balenciaga couture in the 1950s and 1960s—there are behind-the-scenes shots of Balenciaga at work, as well as fashion editorials and street style shots.

The World According to David Hockney

Out this September, this anthology of art images and quotations compiled by Martin Gayford offers insight into the philosophy and life of British artist David Hockney . The book is part of publisher Thames & Hudson’s “The World According To” series and looks into Hockney’s artistic process. With quotable quotes like, “The eye is always moving; if it isn’t moving you are dead” and artistic insights such as “Painted color always will be better than printed color because it is the pigment itself,” Hockney shares his thoughts and discusses how he was inspired by icons like Paul Cezanne, Walt Disney and his fellow artists.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment , co-produced by Cartier-Bresson and Clément Chéroux, is a new edition of an already groundbreaking photo book. The Decisive Moment ( Images à la Sauvette in French) features over 200 photos from the first twenty years of Cartier-Bresson’s career as a photojournalist. It was first published in 1952, with depictions of postwar Paris, and is referred to as a “bible for photographers.” It comes out on September 10.

Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums

Fans of magic, look no further. Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums by Peabody Essex Museum curator at large George H. Schwartz , neuroscience researcher Tedi Asher and others explore the art and objects related to magicians and their practice. From posters to “spirit photography,” this book looks back on an era when magic was beyond convincing. There are photos and paraphernalia belonging to Harry Houdini, Margery the Medium, Howard Thurston and the Fox Sisters, among others, in chapters that peel back the illusions and the artistry of their stages that made them prime performers of their day. It will be released by Rizzoli on September 17.

101 Surrealists

101 Surrealists by Desmond Morris looks at the lives and the works of some of the most compelling artists from the now century old Surrealist movement. It all starts with Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto from 1924 and follows the works of Salvador Dali , Frida Kahlo , Max Ernst , Joan Miro and Francis Pacabia , as well as the overlooked artists who were part of the movement, like Kay Sage . Morris is one of the last surviving Surrealist artists and knew many of the artists whose work is featured in this art book. It’s out with Thames & Hudson on October 29.

Biennale Arte 2024: Foreigners Everywhere

While the title of this year’s Venice Biennale was nothing short of controversial (just look at what Anish Kapoor had to say about it ), this world-renowned festival of the arts is always a must-see affair. For those who couldn’t make it to Venice in person, there is the multi-book survey of the Biennale coming out on October 15. The set features over 1,000 artworks and illustrations in what curator Adriano Pedrosa explains is “a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer as well as the Indigenous.”

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Essay Papers Writing Online

The best books to improve your essay writing skills.

Are you looking to enhance your essay writing abilities? Whether you are a student, professional writer, or simply striving to improve your writing skills, investing in the best books on essay writing can make a significant difference.

Discover expert tips, strategies, and techniques to craft compelling and impactful essays in various genres and styles. From mastering the art of brainstorming to refining your thesis statements, these recommended books will inspire and guide you on your writing journey.

Unlock your full potential as a writer with the help of these invaluable resources.

Explore the Best Books

Ready to take your essay writing skills to the next level? Dive into our curated selection of the best books for essay writing. These invaluable resources cover a wide range of topics and techniques to help you become a masterful essay writer.

• The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White : A timeless classic that provides practical guidance on grammar, style, and composition.
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser : Learn how to craft compelling essays with clarity and precision.
• They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein : Master the art of engaging with academic sources and constructing persuasive arguments.
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott : Gain insights on the creative process and overcome writer’s block.
• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg : Unleash your creativity and develop a daily writing practice to refine your skills.

Explore these essential books to enhance your essay writing abilities and stand out as a confident and articulate writer. Happy reading and happy writing!

Discover Top Writers

Looking to be inspired by some of the best writers in the world? Our collection of top writers includes renowned authors like J.K. Rowling, George Orwell, Jane Austen, and more. Dive into their works to explore different writing styles, techniques, and storytelling methods.

Find your favorite authors and study their essays to learn how they captivate readers with their words. Whether you’re a novice writer or seasoned professional, exploring the works of top writers can help enhance your own writing skills and ignite your creativity.

Discover the magic of storytelling through the eyes of these esteemed writers and unlock the secrets to crafting compelling essays. With the guidance of top writers, you’ll be able to elevate your writing to new heights and create essays that leave a lasting impact on your readers.

Enhance Your Skills

Are you looking to take your essay writing skills to the next level? Our selection of the best books for essay writing will help you enhance your writing techniques and improve your overall writing proficiency. Whether you are a student looking to boost your academic performance or a professional seeking to refine your communication skills, these books offer valuable insights and practical tips to help you become a more effective writer.

Develop Your Style: Discover how to develop a unique writing style that reflects your personality and engages your readers. Learn how to effectively use language, tone, and structure to make your writing stand out.

Master Essay Structures: Explore different essay structures and formats to enhance the organization and clarity of your writing. From persuasive essays to analytical pieces, these books provide guidelines to help you structure your arguments effectively.

Refine Your Research Skills: Improve your research skills and learn how to gather, analyze, and incorporate evidence into your essays. Enhance the credibility and depth of your writing by conducting thorough research and citing reputable sources.

Invest in your writing skills today with the best books for essay writing and see a significant improvement in your writing proficiency!

Master Your Techniques

Deep Dive into Essay Writing

Essay writing is an essential skill that can greatly enhance your academic and professional success. By mastering the art of essay writing, you can effectively communicate your ideas, opinions, and arguments in a clear and concise manner.

Here are some key tips to help you excel in essay writing:

By implementing these strategies and practicing regularly, you can enhance your essay writing skills and become a more effective communicator. Explore the best books for essay writing to further refine your techniques and unlock your full potential.

Unlock Your Creativity

Unleash your imagination and expand your creative horizons with the best books for essay writing. Dive into a world of inspiration and learn how to express your thoughts and ideas in new and innovative ways.

Discover the power of storytelling and the art of persuasion as you explore the depths of your creativity. With the guidance of expert writers and teachers, you will develop your unique voice and style that will set you apart from the rest.

• Explore different writing techniques to enhance your essays
• Learn how to structure your ideas effectively
• Find inspiration in classic and contemporary works
• Master the art of critical thinking and analysis

Whether you are a student looking to improve your academic writing or a professional seeking to enhance your communication skills, these books will help you unlock your creativity and become a more confident and persuasive writer.

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Here’s the Definitive Volume on Donald Judd’s Minimalist Furniture Designs

The Judd Foundation's first book on the artist's furniture features his greatest hits and deep cuts alike.

Donald Judd’s furniture has become such a hot commodity that even Kim Kardashian fudged the truth to get in on the excitement. As such, the Judd Foundation has partnered with Mack Books on Donald Judd Furniture , their first publication dedicated to the acclaimed minimalist’s design practice—which Judd considered wholly distinct from his prints , paintings, and sculptures . Judd’s daughter Rainer edited the 448-page tome, which spans archival photographs and newly commissioned elevation and perspective sketches, as well as the artist’s own words on his furniture.

All 104 chairs, shelves, benches, and beds presented throughout these pages are still in production, and hail from 1970 through 1991, thus illustrating the evolution of Judd’s furniture practice, which grew beyond fulfilling his own needs to meeting those of the market’s.

Judd fashioned his first piece, Fifth Floor Bed 3 (1970), for the top level of his Spring Street home in SoHo, New York, which he’d purchased two years before. By then, Judd had established himself as a leading creative voice—both through his iconic minimalist “stacks” and “boxes” series, and through his eloquent art criticism. His elegant and utilitarian first bed frame even offered built-in light switches and electrical sockets.

Donald Judd Furniture (Judd Foundation and Mack, 2024). Photo Charlie Rubin © Judd Foundation. Courtesy Judd Foundation.

In 1971, Judd and his family, including young Rainer and her brother Flavin, moved to their Marfa home, La Mansana de Chinati, where the artist’s furniture practice exploded out of necessity. As Judd recounted in a 1992 interview and his 1993 essay, “It’s Hard To Find A Good Lamp”—both featured in Donald Judd Furniture —he had to build the furniture for their new home on the outskirts of town, since sleepy little Marfa didn’t have any good shops.

Although Judd’s designs from this era are available at high prices today, he didn’t design furniture explicitly for the purpose of selling until his collaboration with the Swiss firm Lehni AG in 1984.

Narrow Frame Stool, La Mansana de Chinati, Marfa, Texas, from Donald Judd Furniture (2024) published by Judd Foundation and Mack. William Jess Laird © Judd Foundation. Courtesy of Judd Foundation and Mack.

What’s more, the extensive furniture creations across Donald Judd Furniture aren’t presented in a strictly chronological order. Instead, they’re grouped by what they’re made of—an appropriate choice for the material-driven artist—starting with one-by-twelve boards of eight different woods from black walnut to cedar, then progressing through Judd’s designs in two-by-twelves, wood frame, plywood, sheet metal, and steel frames. Highlights include Fifth Floor Bed 3 , of course, alongside La Mansana Table 22 (1982), which Judd designed for al fresco enjoyment at his family’s Marfa home.

Only three editions of Judd’s $90,000 made-to-order table have been commissioned over the past 15 years, but its accompanying Chair 84 (1983), which comes in 10 varieties and goes for $9,000 a pop, has become a bestseller.

Two-by-Twelves furniture (including Library Bed) at Casa Perez, Presidio Country, Texas, from Donald Judd Furniture (2024) published by Judd Foundation and Mack. Matthew Millman © Judd Foundation. Courtesy of Judd Foundation and Mack.

Additional standouts in the book include the ultra-inviting Library Bed 15 (1979), originally rendered in pine for Judd’s library in Marfa, and the La Mansana Bench 39 (1984), a generous outdoor seating nook with three sides to lean against, which also offers an ample, movable table within its bounds.

Two essays by the artist and an interview follow, as well as a helpful timeline, a guide to locations pictured throughout the book, and three specialized indexes.

Donald Judd Furniture is now available from the Judd Foundation and Mack Books .

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The 60 Must-Read Books of Fall 2024

Buzzy novels, compulsively readable non-fiction, and a few deliciously guilty pleasures.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

This season, you have no excuse for being without something good to read. Offerings include explosive novels, revealing memoirs, brilliant biographies, and everything in between. No matter what kinds of books you like, there's a title coming out this fall that's sure to be just what you're looking for.

Becoming Elizabeth Arden

You may know Elizabeth Arden as the beauty empress who took makeup from being a faux-pas to a must-have, but do you know how she got there? Author Stacy A. Cordery details the rags-to-riches story of the Canadian-born entrepreneur whose revolutionary impact on the make-up industry continues today. Expect tales of intense business rivalries, family woes, and two warring American First Ladies.

Creation Lake

This latest from Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers, follows Sadie, a secret agent working undercover to infiltrate a group of French anarchists. All the hallmarks of an excellent thriller are here, as are Kushner's gifts for dark humor and stunning prose, to make for an exciting, exhilarating tear through the shadowy underbelly of international espionage—and the very human emotions that can complicate it.

The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973

Sometimes it takes a good fight to mark your place in an industry, and that's exactly how it happened for American fashion designers in 1973. In The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973, author Mark Bozek recalls the legendary fashion competition that propelled American fashion designers onto the global scene. The best part? It's the first illustrated book to chronicle the event, with archive images by Bill Cunningham and Jean-Luce Huré.

Blenheim: 300 Years of Life in a Palace

Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill peels back the curtain on what it's like to maintain a palace in 2024, bringing readers through the historic Blenheim Palace, which has been home to the Churchill family for over three centuries. Blenheim features gorgeous photographs which accompany Lady Henrietta's fascinating insight into the estate, its history, and its famous guests throughout the centuries.

Read an interview with Henrietta Spencer-Churchill

Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2022 and quickly made her mark, issuing three solo dissents in her first term. Anyone who wants to know how the new justice found her footing so quickly would do well to read her memoir, which describes her life growing up the daughter of two educators in Miami, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, and charting an admirable rise through the legal profession.

Fashion First

The legendary Annie Hall look. Her plaid suits. Pants on the red carpet. Diane Keaton has been a style icon since the 1970s, but her love of fashion goes back much farther than that, to when she was a little girl who would pick out patterns and ask her mother to create bespoke outfits. In her own characteristically self-deprecating words, the Oscar-winning actress looks back on her sartorial history, charting both her favorite moments and some cringeworthy fashion fails. Expect lots of photos, from vintage snapshots to stunning editorials by the likes of Annie Leibovitz and Ruven Afanador, along with anecdotes from Ralph Lauren, who wrote the foreword, Nancy Meyers, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Giorgio Armani

The Life Impossible

When Grace, a retired teacher, is unexpectedly left a house on Ibiza by a friend with whom she'd lost touch, there's only one thing to do: Get on a plane. But when she lands in paradise, the real story of what happened to her friend and why—as well as secrets from Grace's own past—comes bubbling up from where it was buried. If you're itching to extend your own summer vacation just a bit, we can't think of a better book to join you.

Lady Pamela

Lady Pamela Hicks—the daughter of Lord Mountbatten and first cousin of Prince Philip —has lived a fascinating life. Now 95, Lady Pamela was a bridesmaid at Queen Elizabeth's royal wedding , a lady-in-waiting for the Queen, and joined the Queen and Prince Philip on numerous royal tours. In Lady Pamela , a new visual biography, her daughter India Hicks tells her mother's remarkable life story. A must-read for royal lovers.

Read an interview with India Hicks

Scaffolding

In her much-anticipated first novel, Lauren Elkin describes two women, separated by 50 years, who occupy the same apartment in Paris and navigate seemingly similar challenges: a renovation, infidelity, and hard-won self discovery. Elkin, whose Flâneuse: Women Walk the City was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award and a New York Times Notable Book, is a wonderfully precise writer who combines her subjects' stories with humor and insight.

The Play's the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre

Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, and Francis McDormand are just a few of the actors who cut their teeth at the Yale Repertory Theatre. In this book by James Magruder, the history of the institution's first half century is told through the artistic directors who've run it, as well as the departments that make its productions possible, and the actors who've worked there. It's a fascinating, charming look at one of America's most innovative cultural centers and how it became legendary.

Tell Me Everything

Pulitzer Prize–winner Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridg e, Anything is Possible , and numerous other critically acclaimed novels, revisits familiar characters in her new book Tell Me Everything , including Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and Bob Burgess. There’s been a murder in the town of Crosby, Maine, and Burgess, a lawyer, must defend the suspect. Meanwhile, Kitteridge has struck up a new friendship. In other words, life, thank goodness, goes on in Strout’s remarkably-crafted world.

Dear Dickhead

Any book being touted as an "ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons" will get our attention. But what will keep it is sharp, observant, and thought-provoking writing like Virginie Despentes offers here, in her story about a second-string writer who begins a correspondence with a movie star (he insulted her online, the modern meet-cute) just as his world—and reputation—are about to explode.

Great Bars of New York City

From the classiest joints in town to some of our most beloved dives, New York City's favorite watering holes are celebrated in this new book, which features gorgeous photos of spots like the King Cole Bar and the Campbell by James T. Murray and Karla L. Murray, as well as odes to the spots by Dan Q. Dao. Should you use the book to inform a crawl through some of NYC's most storied establishments? Only you can answer that, but if you decide to do so, give us a call?

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

Vision & Justice initiative founder and T&C contributor Sarah Lewis explores how American thoughts on race were influenced by lies and deliberate indifference from the Civil War through the late 20th century. Lewis dives deep into global history to explain how a 47-year war halfway around the world lent ideas language to the West that would plague the U.S. for generations to come. It's a searing, important read that helps unpack the current moment and future of our country, and also a feat of detective work that uncovers historical events that profoundly changed the course of the world.

Entitlement

Four years after the release of his Leave the World Behind , Rumaan Alam is back with another novel that examines ways in which the comfortable are afflicted. Here, a former teacher takes a job at a billionaire's foundation, rises quickly in the ranks, and becomes his protégé, only to discover that the power his money has to change lives isn't always limited to the beneficiaries of his philanthropy—and that the change it can make isn't always for the better.

The Third Gilmore Girl

What are some of Kelly Bishop's favorite moments throughout her career? Was it winning the Tony Award for A Chorus Line? Or her performance in Dirty Dancing? What about her role in Gilmore Girls ? Find out in a new memoir, where Bishop candidly shares her triumphs and tribulations that made her into the celebrated figure she is today.

Audible Into the Uncut Grass

It's no secret that Trevor Noah's just as smart, charming, and poignant on the page as he is on air, and this latest release from the bestselling author of Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood is no exception. The illustrated fable, with art by Sabina Hahn, tells the story of a young boy's adventure beyond a world he already knows—one where he finds all kinds of lessons that are good for both people who read out loud and people to whom books are read out loud to hear.

We Solve Murders

Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club cozy mystery series has been a very successful—so much so the first one is currently being adapted into a film starring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan. Osman leaves his septuagenarian crime solvers behind in a new mystery, We Solve Murders , which is a similarly delightful and twisty read. The two protagonists are Amy Wheeler, a private security assigned to be a bodyguard for a bestselling author, and her father-in-law, Steve, who is enjoying quiet, retired life after a career as a detective. But once Amy is accused of murder, the two team up in a race around the world to prove her innocence.

Does This Taste Funny?

Stephen Colbert—cookbook author? Along with Evie McGee, his wife of more than 30 years, the late night host and comedian has compiled their most treasured family recipes. Most dishes, like spicy chicken thighs and what they call Stephen’s Kindergarten Soup, are an ode to the couple’s Southern roots (they both grew up in Charleston). This just may be the only cookbook on your shelf that will make you laugh out loud.

She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street

When it comes to trading on Wall Street, it isn't just stocks and bonds that are at the center of the action. In this fascinating, frustrating history of women in high finance, Paulina Bren tells the stories of the mavericks who stormed a boys-club castle and, with grit, determination, and no small amount of talent, dragged seats to the table for themselves.

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

Leena Kim is an editor at Town & Country , where she covers travel, jewelry, education, weddings, and culture.

Style News Editor at Town and Country covering society, style, art, and design.  

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'i just keep talking' is a refreshing and wide-ranging essay collection.

Scholar, historian, artist and raconteur Nell Irvin Painter is the author of The History of White People and Old in Art School. Her latest book is...

Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School . Painter’s latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon.

Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.

Painter’s The History of White People combines scholarship with readability to prove that “whiteness” is a relatively newly created sociological construct. Slavery has been around for millennia, as has war and conquering peoples, but whiteness, with its bizarre, insidious, and pervasive myths about racial superiority, dates from around the 15th century forward. The concept of whiteness is entangled with America’s mendacious justifications for its capture and trade in human beings, and the terrible, lasting consequences of chattel slavery.

Painter has been clear that she stands on the shoulders of others in naming whiteness as a construct. What makes The History of White People indispensable is that it collects the historical antecedents of whiteness in a compelling narrative, and calls out to readers, including myself, the need to unlearn whiteness as a norm, even — and especially — if it is an unconscious norm.

As Painter wound down from a full academic load at Princeton, she obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art. In Old in Art School, as well as this current volume, she recounts the putdowns and hazing she suffered from fellow art students and her art professors, just as The History of White People was hitting the bestseller lists. Painter acknowledges that book’s commercial success but does not hide her bitterness that it did not win any major prizes.

Painter’s tour through her life and interests makes for a fascinating journey. To introduce her essay collection, Painter writes, “My Blackness isn’t broken… Mine is a Blackness of solidarity, a community, a connectedness….” She grew up in an intellectual family in the Bay Area amidst the burgeoning Black power movement. Her studies took her to Ghana and Paris, before completing her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard.

Painter started making art at an early age. She threads that interest through the essays, wondering what would have happened if her professional life had started with art, instead of as a scholar.

Painter’s captivating mixed media illustrations in I Just Keep Talking speak to injustice. She combines words that blister — “same frustrations for 25 years” (a work from 2022), with blocks of color and figurative representations. I felt drawn in by these visual pieces with their trenchant messages. “This text + art is the way I work, the way I think,” she writes. In Painter’s hands, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

Painter’s essays pose critical questions. She will not accept received wisdom at face value, refuses the status quo, and freely offers her expert opinions. The pieces in this book address such wide topics as the meaning of history and historiography; America’s false, rose-colored-glasses-interpretation of slavery; the appalling absence of Black people from America’s story about itself; how and where feminism fits in; southern American history; the white gaze; and visual culture.

She takes a hard look at Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy concerning Black people and slavery, and compares his viewpoint to that of Charles Dickens, who toured the U.S. 15 years after Jefferson died. Audiences cooled to Dickens after he “excoriate[d] Americans for…tolerating the continued existence of enslavement by shrugging their shoulders, saying nothing can be done on account of ‘public opinion.’”

Painter was onto Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas well before Professor Hill delivered her explosive testimony at his confirmation hearing. In a chapter called “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” Painter delivers a withering takedown of Thomas’ manipulation of gender stereotypes to advantage himself.

Painter dates her essays and provides extensive endnotes, but I wanted more information about which essays had been previously published and which, if any, derived from unpublished journal entries. I wondered particularly about the shorter, less annotated pieces, which I could imagine her writing to develop analyses for longer efforts (though only speculation on my part).

The variety in length and scholarly sophistication is refreshing in this collection. Each entry deals with topics that are sadly as relevant today as they have been throughout America’s history.

Please keep talking Nell Painter, and we’ll keep listening.

Martha Anne Toll is a D.C.-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses , won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One , is due out May 2025.

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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From the Smithsonian Museums

SMITHSONIAN BOOKS

How Art Shapes Our Perception of American Workers

Explore the fascinating intersection of portraiture and labor

David C. Ward

The American worker and the American art museum have a storied history. Viewing portrayals of workers through the lens of artist as worker reveals a relationship between the artist and subject often lacking in formal, commissioned portraits, where business and social dynamics may create a distance. In viewing portraits of workers as visualizations of shared experience and understanding, the questions that emerge are twofold: To what extent has the cultural status of workers and artists aligned over time? And how has the role of the art museum factored into broader perceptions of the cultural value of the American worker?

Exploring the relationships among the American art museum, the artist, and the worker reveals a depth of connections. An important thread that runs through artists’ examinations of work and identity in portraiture is the use of appropriation, or quoting earlier artists’ portrayals of laborers, to assert the artist’s own identity as a cultural worker. Gordon Parks, Hung Liu, and Ramiro Gomez have used this method to address the invisibility of those workers and artists whose labor goes unappreciated or unrecognized. In the process, their portrayals acknowledge a history of workers’ lack of agency and reclaim workers’ humanity. By quoting source material created by mainstream artists—mainly white males—and reinventing and reimagining iconic images while metaphorically inserting their own stories into those images, they have recognized the shift in the relationship between the artist and the worker over time, both in the context of the work’s institutional presentation and in terms of race, gender, and cultural affiliation.

In late-nineteenth-century America, when museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art were still new and administrators and board members were defining their missions, workers were not always welcomed in these “sacred” cultural spaces. An incident at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1897, involving a plumber who entered the museum, incited “flaming headlines and startling pictorial protests.”   The New York Times reported that the plumber , who was on a break from a job on Fifth Avenue, was asked to leave the building on the grounds that he was wearing overalls, which were considered offensive in the context of the museum. The news of this episode spread across the country. One critic questioned whether the plumber had been asked to leave because he violated a clothing policy or because of his status as a laborer. According to the Milwaukee Journal , museum director Louis Palma di Cesnola claimed that in his seventeen years at the institution “not a single individual in overalls has been allowed to look at the pictures” and that “the rules forbid drunken or disorderly persons from being allowed in the museum, and that a man in working clothes is as bad as either.” In a biting call to action in the Butte (MT) Weekly Miner , an outraged writer commented: “The workman who desired to visit the museum is not charged with being dirty. There was not a word to the effect that he was not gentlemanly in his demeanor. The only crime which he committed was to wear overalls and to attempt to look upon the works of art, most of which were produced by men who wore homespun.” The writer continued , “The laboring men of the city of New York should make an example of General [di] Cesnola and his hair-brained subordinates. Any man so guilty of so gross a violation of the spirit of American institutions should be considered a political issue until his complete obliteration from official life is effected.”

The Sweat of Their Face by David C. Ward, Dorothy Moss, John Fagg: 9781588346056 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

This richly illustrated book charts the rise and fall of labor from the empowered artisan of the eighteenth century through industrialization and the current American business climate, in which industrial jobs have all but disappeared. It also traces the history of work itself through its impact on the men and women whose laboring bodies are depicted.

This occurrence provides a picture of the uneasy relationship between the worker and the art museum at the end of the nineteenth century. It was an era in which mass reproduction raised new questions among the American public about the role of art in education and in the domestic and public spheres. It was also an important period in the development of American art, one that art historian and Smithsonian curator of prints Sylvester Rosa Koehler described in his 1886 publication American Art as “a period of awakening, of high hope, and of honest endeavor.”

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, discussions about the role of the artist, the art museum, and the worker would concern museum officials and board members, who sought to achieve cultural and social improvement through education in museums. In the process of coming up with an effective strategy and in determining who would benefit from such an education, museum administrators contended with what historian Paul DiMaggio describes as the “ tension between monopolization and hegemony; between exclusivity and legitimation .” In other words, they wanted to maintain cultural control while influencing broad audiences. As officials grew more comfortable with the use of museums as educational laboratories through the exhibition of “true” art, they began to place increasing emphasis on codes of behavior in the museum and on the importance of original artworks .

The cultural distinction of the artist as worker in American industrial and postindustrial society is seen in art created in response to the changes in attitudes toward authorship. As Julia Bryan-Wilson has pointed out, following Michael Baxandall’s seminal work Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy  (1972), there has been a history of separation between craft and “true” labor in Western art since the Renaissance. At that time, the notion of the “author” of a work of art emerged , and objects that were created by hand were no longer attributed to anonymous workers but to the people who made them.

American artists have identified with workers and at times organized labor since the late nineteenth century. The many groups and organizations that have formed over the years aligning artists with workers attest to this commitment. As Bryan-Wilson has described, examples persist of individual artists or organized groups of artists, often drawing on Marx, who have insisted that their work was a form of labor —whether following the craftsmanship model of William Morris and the Art Workers Guild that grew from it in 1884 or the later example of the Mexican muralists of the 1920s, who founded the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors. In reaction to the Great Depression, the numerous artists who were influenced by socialist ideology and the labor movement organized themselves as cultural workers, following the strategic tactics of the trade unions. By the summer of 1933, a small group of artists had formed the John Reed Club . During that summer, the artists associated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) identified with the laborers they depicted and created images that were not only about labor but also were easily relatable to laborers in narrative and form. The founding of the Artists’ Union in the 1930s was key to artists’ perception of themselves as workers. As Andrew Hemingway suggests , “It was this collective enthusiasm and the identification with other workers that made union members such an active presence in demonstrations and on picket lines.”

Aside from membership in organizations, artists also took typically blue-collar jobs to support themselves. For example, Honoré Sharrer’s experience as a welder in shipyards in California and New Jersey during World War II deeply informed her art, which reflects her commitment to the working class, especially her Tribute to the American Working People (1943). While artists drew on lived experiences of working in their choice of process, form, and subject matter, they also used their materials and processes to critique work and working. As Helen Molesworth has argued , in the period following World War II, “the concern with artistic labor manifested itself in implicit and explicit ways as much of the advanced art of the period managed, staged, mimicked, ridiculed, and challenged the cultural and societal anxieties around the shifting terrain and definitions of work.” An example of this is Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making , a minimal sculpture that is essentially a portrait of work—or a portrait of the artist working—consisting of a wooden box with a tape recording of the sounds of sawing and hammering. As Morris and other artists of his generation experienced the change from a manufacturing to a service economy in the 1960s and 1970s, artists and critics took on the role of “art workers” and understood the practice of making art in a variety of mediums, including performance, as a form of social critique and commentary about the relationship between art and work.

Women artists particularly focused on performance art as a strategy to comment on the gendered division of labor from a feminist point of view and to ask audiences to consider the cultural value of domestic work. Among those who have been pioneers in addressing work from the feminist perspective through performance is Martha Rosler, who throughout the 1970s took as her subject matter traditional forms of women’s labor and domesticity. For example, her Super 8 film Backyard Economy I and II (1974) shows her performing the domestic labor of watering plants, mowing the lawn, and hanging laundry to dry on a clothesline. She enacts these monotonous duties in the safe, comfortable context of her own sunny backyard, which projects a seemingly ideal environment. Through the peaceful beauty of the setting, she turns these chores into works of art. As Molesworth asserts , “Like many feminist artists of her generation, Rosler insists that these everyday jobs perform double duty inasmuch as they stand as both housework and artwork.” Cindy Sherman is another woman artist who has explored her persona and identity as an artist. In Scale Relationship Series—The Giant , made during what Eva Respini has described as Sherman’s “ early days of experimenting with the plasticity of identity ,” Sherman presents herself as the folklore hero Paul Bunyan, the lumberjack with superhuman strength. While the project was meant to explore scale and satirize “ the myth of the proud American ‘big Man ,’” there is a sense of identification through transformation of the self into an alter ego.

Male artists during the 1960s and 1970s also employed the strategy of performance to address their identity in terms of work. For example, Frank Stella—who, like many artists, at times adopted an executive model and employed assistants— presented himself as a working-class person both in his outward appearance and in the tools and materials he chose to use, such as house paints. He famously said , “It sounds a little dramatic, being an ‘art worker.’ I just wanted to do it and get it over with so I could go home and watch TV.” This comment points to the notion of the artist as existing to create a commodity, as described by Marx : “The worker works in order to live. He does not even reckon labor as part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another. . . . What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws from the mine, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages.”

Throughout the 1960s, many of the most prominent artists in New York presented themselves as workers in their appearance as well as in their personal lives, doing “odd jobs” that sometimes inspired their conceptual artwork. Dan Flavin worked as a mailroom clerk at the Guggenheim Museum and as an elevator operator and a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. His 1960 portrait Gus Schultze’s Screwdriver (to Dick Bellamy) was inspired by his friendship with a fellow MoMA staff member and dedicated to an art dealer. It features Schultze’s actual screwdriver attached to the surface of the painting. As a conceptual portrait, it pays homage to those who exist behind the scenes of a museum, the wall painters, maintenance workers, and dealers. In a letter housed in the Archives of American Art , Flavin writes of another experience as a museum guard, this time at the American Museum of Natural History: “Day by day, I filled my notebook with diagrams for that fall. My first black icon with electric light emerged that December.” Reflecting on that experience, Flavin writes , “I crammed my uniform pockets with notes for an electric Light art. ‘Flavin, we don’t pay you to be an artist,’ warned the custodian in charge. I agreed and quit him.”

It is that sense of straddling identities that characterizes the identification of artist and worker in the quotations or appropriations of Gordon Parks, Hung Liu, and Ramiro Gomez, artists who have worked as laborers and discussed their art in terms of their autobiographical connections with the working subjects of their portraits. In On Longing , cultural theorist Susan Stewart describes the significance of the act of “quotation” as a form of “interpretation” of the “original.” She explains that while granting the initial source a sense of “authenticity,” quotation also creates opportunities for new interpretations of the original material. By studying themes of work in historic or iconic images by other artists and creating new images that reference the past, Parks, Liu, and Gomez extend earlier discussions about the role of the artist, the status of work, and the museum’s role in shaping perceptions about work and workers.

Read more in The Sweat of Their Face , which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit  Smithsonian Books’ website  to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from  The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers  © 2017 Smithsonian Institution