June’s most exciting art books enlist art—and history—as a portal to another time and place, which sounds pretty nice right about now. Transport yourself to the culture wars of the 1980s, the salons of modernist Paris, or the artistic heyday of the Weimar Republic.
-
The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars
By Isaac Butler
This timely reassessment of the culture wars is brought to you by someone raised on its front lines. Isaac Butler was a child actor who held roles in a couple of plays concerning the AIDS crisis in 1980s—which were major targets of the right at the time. But he was inspired to write this book while watching the tines turn again in the 2020s: Where the left had once been the bastion of free expression, soon it was the right championing—and rebranding—“free speech.” Familiar stories, like the controversies surrounding Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, are helpfully contextualized among fiscal budgets, new interviews, and searing zingers. Here history emerges a playbook for the new wave of culture wars ahead.
-
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
By Deborah Levy
A writer, living in Paris, is stumped by an assignment—an essay on Gertrude Stein. Soon she finds herself imagining, as she goes about her daily life, what Stein would think about this or that—about her friend’s missing cat, or another friend’s three lovers. It’s as if they are conversing in the narrator’s head. Then, as she reflects on how the lesbian icon of modernism broke down language, Deborah Levy’s own prose takes on memorable experimental form. In the hands of a master of her craft—a true successor to Stein—the voices of the narrator and her subject merge into one. You are what you read.
-
Vermeer’s Afterlives
By Ruth Bernard Yeazell
On the heels of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s new Vermeer biography comes this reassessment of the Dutch painter’s legacy by literary scholar Ruth Bernard Yeazell. The enigmatic quality of Vermeer’s work—the way his mysterious scenes beg for interpretation—has inspired countless works of art and literature, most famously Tracy Chevalier’s blockbuster novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999). Yet Vermeer was far from a household name until two centuries after his death. As art historian Kelly Presutti writes in a review of both Vermeer books, he has since been “employed to respond to the needs of the present.”
-
Rem Before Koolhaas: Journalism by an Architect
By Rem Koolhaas
Before becoming the starchitect behind OMA and publishing his iconic book Delirious New York (1978), Rem Koolhaas worked as a journalist for Haagse Post from 1963 to 1968. This book collects that work—interviews were his specialty—and offers a view into the formative years of this ur-urbanist as we watch him learn on the job.
-
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe
By Katja Hoyer
The Weimar Republic (1919–39) marked Germany’s artistic golden age. It was the milieu that gave rise to such household names as Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, and Otto Dix, as well as cabaret, the Bauhaus, and Neue Sachlichkeit. For this book, Katja Hoyer zooms in on city of Weimar itself, a town defined by tensions: It was home to the Bauhaus, but also an early stronghold of the Nazi Party. Focusing on the lives of ordinary people, artists among them, she charts how hyperinflation gave way to Hitler, turning original archival research into a gripping narrative.
