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’Tis the season, which means it’s time to start racking your brain for gift ideas. But if your list happens to include artists or art lovers, the choice is a no-brainer: Give them a book on art. Whether it’s an artist bio, a novel, or a sumptuously illustrated catalog, it’s bound to be appreciated (unless you’ve seriously misjudged the recipient’s preferences in art—in which case, it’s the thought that counts). Needless to say, there are thousands of titles out there. To help you make the right choice, we offer our recommendations for the best 2024 art books for giving. (Prices and availability current at time of publication.
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Adrienne Edwards (ed.), Edges of Ailey, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon A giant of 20th-century modern dance, Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) established a company and a school that are among the premier institutions devoted to the discipline. But these are just part of a legacy fleshed out in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s tribute, Edges of Ailey (through February 9, 2025), a multimedia extravaganza encompassing visual art, live performance, music, and archival materials, along with a multiscreen video installation drawn from recordings of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The Whitney also presents paintings, sculptures, collages, and prints by scores of artists that are meant to evoke Ailey’s work and its roots in Black culture. This handsome volume accompanying the exhibition delves deeper into the forces that shaped his sensibility with essays on the Black church, the South, the Great Migration, and queerness, among other topics. The catalog is illustrated with photos that include never-before-published images of Ailey’s life in art.
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Vivien Greene (ed.), Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon Among the plethora of “isms” defining 20th-century modernism, Orphism is perhaps the least remembered, but it served as an important link between Cubism and the pure abstraction that would come to define art by mid century. Involving just a handful of artists, Orphism was obscured by the shadows of Picasso and the Surrealists who followed him, yet this catalog, which accompanied a 2024 Guggenheim exhibition of the same name, makes a strong case for its importance. Inspired by the Greek mythological figure of Orpheus, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphism in 1910 to describe a multisensory aesthetic expressed through bright colors and geometric forms. Its adherents included Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, and Francis Picabia, and while their work included elements of Cubistic figuration, it more often featured all-over compositions exploding in kaleidoscopic hues. Featuring rich illustrations and thoughtful essays, this book brings an underappreciated movement back to life.
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Hervé Guibert, Suzanne and Louise, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon Hervé Guibert’s study of his great-aunts Suzanne and Louise has been described as a “gothic novella in pictures,” and indeed, there’s something disturbing about his tale of eccentric sisters sharing a shabby, somewhat isolated existence in a grand Parisian townhouse. Redolent of faded memories and thwarted dreams, Guibert’s story presents the pair in a series of photo-and-text vignettes evoking their claustrophobic relationship. Suzanne, the elder, is the infirm widow of a well-to-do shopkeeper; Louise, 10 years her junior, is a former nun. Suzanne has all the money, while Louise does all the chores and serves as Suzanne’s often abusive caregiver. Suzanne consoles herself with Proust and classical music, while Louise has a fondness for sparkling wines, women’s-interest magazines, and operettas. They cohabitate in a pas de deux of acquiescence and microaggressions, stuck in a daily routine “ordered by a terrible, calculated precision.” Originally published in 1980, the book now appears in its first English translation.
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Nancy MacDonell, Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon Although the migration of the world’s art capital from Paris to New York after World War II is well documented, another, simultaneous shift in the cultural balance of power is less well known: the emergence of New York as a bastion of fashion. While it never quite attained the same dominance that postwar American art achieved, the new American fashion represented a liberation from the influence of French haute couture, offering a casual yet elegant alternative to Paris’s fussier and more formal aesthetic. Nancy MacDonell follows this story in Empresses of Seventh Avenue, which focuses on a group of women designers that included Elizabeth Hawes and Claire McCardell. Using the support of the fashion press and the production capabilities of NYC’s garment industry, they pushed a newly informal, adaptable style of dress known as “sportswear” to the forefront of fashion.
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Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon This biography of Claude Monet (1840–1926) is the first ever written in English, which is somewhat surprising given the Impressionist master’s momentous place in art history and his career afterlife as a source for countless tote bags, posters, coasters, and other museum-shop paraphernalia. Wullschläger delves into the story that goes beyond Monet’s reputation as a limner of haystacks to reveal a man who was a serial self-reinventor given to frequently moving from place to place. He was also unkind in certain circumstances, as in the case of refusing to lend money to fellow artists when he was flush and they were starving. He also filled his famous pond at Giverny by diverting water from nearby farms over the owners’ objections. These sins are perhaps on a lesser scale than those of numerous other artists, but they speak to the rich details with which the author grounds the life of an extraordinary artist.
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Henriette Huldische (ed.), Sophie Calle: Overshare, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon This catalog for the first American survey of French artist Sophie Calle, organized by Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, is, like the show, titled Overshare for good reason: Calle is something like a Conceptualist high priestess of TMI, voyeurism, and stalking. Since the early 1980s, her photo and text-based works, videos, and installations have exposed intimate experiences—her own and those of others—to transgress the barrier between public and private selves. In this respect, some have credited Calle for anticipating the transparent bubble that is life in the age of social media. Her efforts have included a piece about her grandparents convincing her to get nose job at age 14, only to have it forestalled by the suicide of the doctor involved, and a photo series for which she went undercover as a hotel maid to photograph the personal items of guests. These and other highlights of Calle 45-year career are revisited here in 200 handsomely illustrated pages.
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Miranda July, All Fours, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon Perimenopause, the period before the onset of full-on menopause—a liminal zone, emotionally and biologically—is one that’s rarely discussed. Writer, filmmaker, and artist Miranda July tackles it head-on in this tale of a 45-year-old “semi famous” artist not unlike July herself, though the latter insists the book isn’t a roman á clef. Her character settles in at a seedy motel while struggling to come to terms with “the change”: She lavishly redecorates her room and takes up with a younger, married man. She researches the order of hormonal shifts online, masturbates frequently, and of course has lots of sex with her new paramour as if it were her last opportunity for pleasure. All Fours is about the mental gymnastics of confronting unwanted change, and how we plot to escape its absolute inevitability.
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Pauline Vermere and Lesley A. Martin (eds.), I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon Since the Museum of Modern Art mounted its 1974 exhibition “New Japanese Photography,” interest in the subject has only grown, though discussions have focused mainly on male photographers in Japan at the exclusion of the country’s many females working in the field. That half-century omission is addressed in this survey of Japanese women photographers published by Aperture, which covers 70 years of their contributions to the medium and their considerable impact on same. The volume covers the work of 25 practitioners, revealing a wide, eclectic range of styles and innovations. Among them, Rinko Kawauchi offers sublime, luminous images, including a closeup of a woman’s eye that graces the book’s cover. Mari Katayama presents fairytale-like self-portraits made uncanny by the prosthetic legs she’s worn since losing her lower limbs in childhood. Equally surreal is Michiko Kon’s black-and-white shot of a hat made of yellowtail tuna skin. With images like these, the book fills the gaps in our knowledge about Japanese photography.
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Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale (eds.), Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
Image Credit: Amazon In the late 1960s, a group of artists emerged out of the Windy Cindy presenting an alternative to the austere aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptualism in New York. All graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they shared in their work a transgressive approach and a propensity for surreal and cartoonish imagery. However, each of these Chicago Imagists, as they were called, was unique, and that was certainly true of Christina Ramberg (1946–1995), the subject of this monograph published for her first retrospective in 30 years, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Usually painted in a palette of browns, blacks, tans, and darkened colors, Ramberg’s best-known compositions were equal parts feminist and sadomasochist. They featured truncated female torsos limned as flat forms that included elements representing torn fishnet fabric, bandages, and intrusive clumps of hair. This book offers a comprehensive look at Ramberg and her career as a singular figure in 20th century art.
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Brad Gooch, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon A shooting star who blazed across the art world firmament at age 22, Keith Haring (1958–1990) first gained notoriety as a graffiti artist before crossing over to become a defining figure in NYC’s downtown art scene of the 1980s. Haring’s dashed-off combinations of hieroglyphics and coloring-book outlines went from street to gallery and finally to auction house, where they now fetch millions of dollars. Cut down by AIDS at age 31, he left behind a legend that rivaled Warhol’s and that of his coeval, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Haring’s lighting-in-a-bottle life and career are recounted in this authorized biography by Brad Gooch, who has previously written books on Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Hara. Relying on extensive interviews with those who knew Haring best, as well as unparalleled access to Haring’s archives, Gooch creates a definitive portrait of an artist who broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture.
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Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn (eds.), Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon The Museum of Modern Art ranks alongside the Metropolitan Museum as New York’s premier museum, but according to this book—a compendium of short biographies complied by MoMA curator Ann Temkin and researcher Romy Silver-Kohn—it might not have existed at all without the help of the women chronicled herein. Alfred H. Barr Jr. is generally credited with founding the Modern in 1929, but the heavy lifting to get it off the ground was done by figures such as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and MoMA’s first treasurer, and Bliss, a textile fortune heiress and MoMA’s first vice president, used their respective wealth to amass MoMA’s initial collection; Miller, MoMA’s curator from 1934 to 1969, used her considerable eye to add to it. The book is a testament to how institutions are built through social clout and professional talent regardless of who wields them.
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Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Poor Artists: A Quest Into the Art World, 2024
Image Credit: Amazon Everybody involved in the art world knows it’s a messed-up place where the chances of success are small. Unlike Hollywood, say, where average ticket buyers determine the industry’s winners and losers, the paying customers for art are a tiny pool of the world’s richest and most powerful people. Needless say, the system is rigged, and it’s given a much-deserved roasting in this art world satire by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, who go collectively by the name White Pube. The suitably named protagonist, Quest Talukdar, is a young artist without a trust fund to fall back on who forays into the art world and finds herself struggling between doing what it takes to make it and staying true to herself. Adding to this lampoon’s sting, much of its dialog is based on interviews with real art-world figures, including a Turner Prize winner.
