It’s probably for the best that this month’s most exciting art books favor the past, with the present as abysmal as it is.
Curl up with a copy and escape to another century; if yesterday’s groundhog was correct, we have 6 more weeks of a winter marked by record-breaking weird weather across the globes
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Michelangelo and Titian: A Tale of Rivalry and Genius
by William E. Wallace
Michelangelo and Titian both had rivals aplenty. Though their relationship with one another was perhaps under-documented, art historian William E. Wallace wagers it was no less interesting. Drawing largely from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, this braided biography is a work of “informed imagination,” in the words of Wallace, an art historian who has authored/edited nine books on Michelangelo. The book attempts to fill in the gaps in the archive and meld art historical facts with a broader immersion in the textures of the times. —Emily Watlington
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Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver
by Peter Gordon
This new biography tackles, arguably, the most important cultural critic of the 20th century. The titular term “pearl diver” was bestowed upon him by his friend Hannah Arendt, who described Benjamin as seeking out fragments of beauty and redemption amid the ruins of bourgeois society. And ruined it was: the tragic aspects of his life as a German Jew are chilling and well-known. But Gordon takes care to paint a picture of a complex character, spanning his utopian youth to his devastating final days. —Emily Watlington
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Alice Baber: An Artist’s Triumph Over Tragedy
by Gail Levin
Having garnered acclaim for biographies of Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, and Judy Chicago, art historian Gail Levin takes on a lesser-known artist: Alice Baber, a painter who moved in the same circles as Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists. Today, she is largely “forgotten,” to use Levin’s word; this book is an attempt to change that. Baber’s paintings feature semi-translucent discs of vibrant color laid one on top of the other, and Levin argues that these works, which were praised by noted writers such as John Ashbery and Peter Schjeldahl, did not deserve to be relegated to obscurity. Provocatively, Levin also makes the case that systemic sexism is not the only reason we forgot Baber, whose failed romantic relationship with the painter Paul Jenkins may have reshaped her life in ways untold until now. —Alex Greenberger
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Gay Print Culture: A Transnational History of North America
by Juan Carlos Mezo González
Zines and images helped normalize and politicize queerness while also forming communities. At first, this happened covertly through underground networks, but slowly, gay print culture influenced the mainstream. This book spans the 1970s–90s, sandwiched between the dawn of the gay liberation movement and that of the internet. The result is a powerful story of how aesthetics and politics can co-conspire. —Emily Watlington
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In Her Defense
by Philippa Malicka
In this courtroom drama novel, our narrator is an aspiring ceramicist named Augusta who gets a job as an assistant to a renowned one, Anna, known for her cookware. Anna is also a TV star with her own cooking show, and now, the whole country is tuning in to watch her trial on TV. Anna’s daughter’s therapist has sued Anna for libel: she spoke out after the therapist—unlicensed—attributed her client’s trauma to her upbringing and her time at a prestigious art school in Rome. Soon, the daughter and therapist begin a romance, and Anna is cut out from their lives. The court case and the novel center around this question: what really happened at art school? —Emily Watlington
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Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age
by Robert Tomlinson
As the 1920s roared, so many of America’s best artists absconded to Paris. The version of the milieu as popularized by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris favors Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemmingway, following these figures as they craft an American-ish avant-garde. But at the same time, Black American expatriates—like Josephine Baker and Ada “Bricktop” Smith—were busy lighting up Monmartre. Tomlinson describes how Paris was relatively tolerant compared to the US, allowing Black artists access to social and economics achievement denied to them back home. Their clubs, their music, and their dance earned the neighborhood the title “the Harlem of Paris” and made jazz a global sensation. —Emily Watlington
