Spooky season may be upon us, but our editorial team has a cornucopia of art books to widen your world and help keep the autumnal scaries at bay. For the artist who loves to sketch, a Getty catalog traces the depiction of light through centuries of Western European works on paper. For the reader who’s been wearily following the censorship of artists over the past year, Elizabeth Catlett’s unflappable commitment to her politics and a compilation of murals created in Minneapolis during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising. Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian recommends a landmark publication on 19th-century Canadian artist Paul Kane, while Senior Editor Hakim Bishara suggests two titles for photography and film devotees, among other offerings below. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
Recently Reviewed
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, edited by Dalia Scruggs
Long before mainstream art institutions adopted terms like “intersectionality” and “socially engaged art,” Elizabeth Catlett proudly self-identified as a Black revolutionary artist. She stayed true to that title throughout her life (much of which was spent in Mexico), particularly after the United States government exiled her on the grounds that her art was too political. Committed to anti-capitalist ideals and art that posed tangible threats to the status quo, Catlett’s many endeavors are finally gathered in one place in the catalog for her show at the Brooklyn Museum. Critic Alexandra M. Thomas calls the publication “a necessary contribution to the rich, global genealogy of radical Black art histories.” You’ll have to read the book to find out why. —LA
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | University of Chicago Press, October 2024
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The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property by Eunsong Kim
Eunsong Kim’s new book may very well upend many of the art historical orthodoxies of the last 40 years; Duchampian strategies have metastasized in the field, while a lazy theoretical haze has settled around scholars who do little to scratch through the intersections of race, capitalism, and aesthetics. Kim uses ideas around “scientific management” and “whiteness as property” to explain how private museum collections, now behemoths in the field of art, were amassed and how art historians, artists, and critics alike instrumentalize modernist arguments, particularly the readymade, as alibis rather than asking if the ideas themselves perpetuate problems. This is a very stimulating read, sure to ignite much debate and perhaps even shift the field in interesting new ways. —Hrag Vartanian
Buy the Book | Duke University Press, August 2024
Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks
It’s surprising that the idea of birth hasn’t been given this type of readable intellectual investigation before, given its centrality to every human experience. In Natality, Banks, who is a senior executive editor at Yale University Press, explores the artistic and philosophical undergirding of what it means to be born and how the experience manifests in art.
One of the most riveting sections of the book addresses the fact that Mary Wollstonecraft’s birthing of her daughter led to her own death. That baby was, of course, Mary Shelley, who would go on to write one of the great modern myths, Frankenstein. In its pages, the Romantic author ruminates on the idea of birth consumed by a darkness that, Banks points out, is rooted in the author’s own troubled entry into the world. Banks includes a discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche, not someone I expected to encounter in this book, and Toni Morrison, whose experiences with birthing spurred her creativity. Sensitively written, Natality suggests a central thread through art and life that is far too often overlooked. —HV
Buy on Bookshop | W. W. Norton & Company, May 2024
Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Life, Art, and Times by I.S. MacLaren
Few things are as curious in the history of Canadian art as Paul Kane, the self-educated Irish-Canadian painter whose images of First Nations life have come to define how many Canadians perceived Indigenous peoples, even if they were images clearly salted by his fantastical additions. He was a curious character who traveled Europe, sketching what he saw, before working to make a living as a portrait painter in the central US, including Detroit; St. Louis; antebellum Mobile, Alabama; and even New Orleans — though today only one painting from this period is signed and firmly attributed to him.
In this hefty and beautifully illustrated four-volume set, Kane is put into perspective; the author, I.S. MacLaren, isn’t one to gush over the artist’s work. He writes in his introduction, “His studio paintings are disappointing: they have come not only to be regarded as ethnographically undependable but also to evince the ‘bad habits’ he had learned in Italy: a fondness for leaden skies, dull colors, and stiff, formal groupings.” Ouch.
So, with a level head, MacLaren, who is a professor emeritus of history and English at the University of Alberta, admits that among his goals for the collection is “to prepare the ground not only to encourage Indigenous scholars to make more use of Kane’s own writings and sketches … but also to prompt Indigenous artists to interrogate and deconstruct the pervasive and persistent ‘truth effect’ in innate ‘Indian-ness’ that has become part of the underlying visual sediment upon which more extreme forms of racial stereotyping are built” — in short, “to ‘unvanish’ the peoples of Turtle Island as they were in the mid-nineteenth century.”
I found myself poring over the pages of these volumes a number of times, and the careful transcription of writings by Kane — including passages he originally crossed out — makes this a treasure trove for anyone interested in the formative period of the creation of Canada and the myths around colonization and race. —HV
Buy on Bookshop | McGill-Queen’s University Press, May 2024
Le Dépays by Chris Marker
This book is a roving photo essay by Chris Marker, one of the forefathers of the film essay genre. It features never-before-translated snapshots from the French filmmaker’s journeys throughout his imaginary Japan. “Inventing Japan is just another way of getting to know it,” he writes in the book, giving himself license to hallucinate the country of his obsession, and take us along for the ride. His black and white photos — rife with cats, gods, and everyday people captured in cinematic poses — are standalone gems. A graceful introduction by longtime Marker devotee Sadie Rebecca Starnes does justice to the monumental artist, whose consummate masterpiece Sans Soleil (1983) changed the lives of many cinephiles, myself included. —Hakim Bishara
Buy the Book | Film Desk Books, 2024
Debi Cornwall: Model Citizens
Debi Cornwall’s bold photography interrogates the performative aspects of power with a special interest in America’s military might and imperial grip on the world. In previous books, she followed prisoners and guards at the US Naval Base on Guantanamo Bay and chronicled war games in mock villages constructed by the US Army. In this latest project, the self-described conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer turns her gaze from the state apparatus to the public, following citizens at Trump rallies and other locations to capture the various ways in which nationality is imagined, staged, and cosplayed in these divided states of America. —HB
Buy on Bookshop | Radius Books, September 2024
Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising, edited by Leesa Kelly and Howard Oransky
On a wooden panel along Minneapolis’s University Avenue West, a portrait of George Floyd rendered in three shades of blue sits beside the words “SAY HIS NAME.” “Blues for George” is one of a sea of artworks that popped up across the city and nearby St. Paul after artist and activist çshared the stencil following Floyd’s murder in May 2020. Gathering documentation of murals and community art forged in the crucible of the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Minneapolis, Art and Artifact — which coincides with an exhibition at the University of Minnesota — presents local artworks that funneled the antiracist values of the movement into public space and consciousness. Short texts contextualize and unsheathe the significance of these works, including one by critic and former Hyperallergic Senior Editor Seph Rodney, who describes them as “previously submerged seacraft thrust to the surface of our collective awareness.” —LA
Buy on Bookshop | Katherine E. Nash Gallery, September 2024
Paper and Light: Luminous Drawings by Julian Brooks and Michelle Sullivan
This glowing book will scratch an itch for any drawing enthusiast, presenting a deep dive into masterpieces on paper that set scenes aflame. Light’s ephemeral nature lives on forever in the form of negative space in a Rembrandt study, Albert Lebourg’s use of pigment lifting to capture his mother and wife sewing in the dim gleam of an oil lamp, a gouache painting of a howling storm by J.M.W. Turner. Tied to a show opening next week, insightful essays by Getty Senior Curator Julian Brooks and Associate Conservator of Drawings Michelle Sullivan trace light and paper in European art from the Renaissance through the 1900s. Their expertise traces a compelling throughline that will call to mind the many artworks left out of its pages; I was reminded of the ethereal works of New York-based artist Terra Keck and Mughal court painter Miskin. This book is a lit candle to accompany you through the fall as the days get darker and longer, and light becomes harder to find. —LA
Buy on Bookshop | J. Paul Getty Museum, October 2024
