Get excited: March promises to be an especially good month in the land of arts publishing. Behind-the-scenes looks tackle everything from the steamy (the love affair that inspired Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés) to the nitty gritty (a history of the many ways artists have scraped together a living, from the Renaissance to to the present). Curl up with memorable monographs and memoirs as March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.
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Impossible: The Love Affair Between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired
by Francis Naumann
Ahead of a much-anticipated Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Francis Naumann—a Duchamp scholar and the curator of the show’s chess section—offers a tantalizing glimpse into the love affair that inspired Étant Donnés (1946–66), which Duchamp worked on in secrecy for two decades. Duchamp and Maria Martins, an accomplished and remarkable Brazilian sculptor in her own right, embarked on a memorable, creative-erotic relationship while living in New York. This is by no means an overtly feminist telling of the tale. That said, Martins could never be reduced to your typical muse. She met Duchamp while in her 40s and as a married woman; by then, she was by many measures his equal. Her stunning sculptures bridged indigenous iconography and European Surrealism. Before Duchamp, she had a boyfriend in politics: Benito Mussolini.
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Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life
by Mason Currey
Plenty of artists have managed not to starve, and yet art history is hardly a history of rich kids. How, then, do artists make it work? The answer, of course, is hardly one-size-fits all. Currey offers a menagerie of fascinating anecotes that span the Renaissance to today—showing us that artists can be as creative and resourceful in their lives as in their art. The eminently readable book turns banalities into a page-turner.
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No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene
By Adele Bertei
The underground No Wave scene of the 1970s gave rise to so many beloved women of downtown New York: Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Barbara Kruger, Kathryn Bigelow, Kathy Acker, Lizzie Borden, and many more. The author of this memoir, Adele Bertei, saw it all—she was the acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno’s assistant. Her new memoir offers a front row seat and a feminist perspective.
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On Censorship
By Ai Weiwei
I imagine you learn a lot about how censorship works when you are regularly its target. Such is the case for Ai Weiwei, whose new book is part memoir, part report. Ai takes on the topic from many different angles, showing how censorship takes different forms in the West than it does in China, and what it might look like in the age of AI. Read an excerpt here.
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Joseph Beuys and History
By Daniel Spaulding
Joseph Beuys was a tangle of contradictions: a Nazi who refashioned himself as a healer and was prone to serious self-mythologizing. He was also one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, and not in spite his complications but because of them. So argues Daniel Spaulding, an art historian to watch. His new book frames Beuys’s art and life as synecdoches for the failures of modernism and the grappling that ensued. Spaulding leads readers unflinchingly through the mess Beuys left us with, ultimately arguing that social practice and relational aesthetics offer sanitized versions of his legacy. But to get at what Beuys did best, the author demonstrates convincingly, we’ll have to take the artist in bad faith.
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Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture
by Fab 5 Freddy
Everybody’s Fly is a thrilling memoir by one of New York’s essential cultural connectors and bridger of worlds, uniting punk and rap, Basquiat and Blondie, downtown art scenes and global MTV audiences. The book is at once deeply personal and a panoramic view of creative revolutions.
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Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings
by Larry Sultan
Admittedly, I didn’t know Larry Sultan—the photographer most famous for making photographs of his parents in their Palm Springs home with ’70s decor—was a writer exactly. But he has a reputation as a beloved teacher, having worked for decades at art schools in San Francisco, where he passed along wisdom to generations of photographers. This book—both visual and textual—offers new insight into his thinking.
