art

Pre-Holiday New Art Book Shopping List

Photo: Vulture

Here’s our curated roundup of some of the most gift-able art books from the fall.

An enormous, lavish, and definitive year-by-year monograph of Basquiat’s work, from his graffiti to his paintings and sculptures.

A collection of color photos by the pioneering photographer whose life was long shrouded in mystery.

Scholar Joshua Rivkin takes a deep dive into the life and mythmaking of Cy Twombly, creator of massive, classically influenced yet visually challenging pieces, and his influence on artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and others.

Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance connects the dots of aesthetic tactics of protest throughout the 20th century, from the slogans of the suffragettes to the psychedelic political art of 1968 to the spread of protest art originating in the global south. Readers can admire these images and learn from them, tracing the roots of the protest and radical imagery visible today.

Builder Levy’s pictures of New York in action from the 1960s through ’80s combine big moments of social upheaval with the quieter and lesser-seen images of poverty and changing lives in the outer boroughs of the city.

$41

This collection of photographs and paintings inspired by the introduction of neon to Times Square, as well as by the residents and hangers-around of 42nd Street in the 1970s, brings a lost time and place vividly back to life. Painter Jane Dickson brings together the sexuality, forgottenness, and the routineness of life in Times Square in this new anthology edition.

$53

A conceptual diary inspired by the ever-changing interplay between the public and private spheres of life, and playfully commenting on the commodification of the intimate, Sherrie Levine compiles a diary with the word “Me.” printed on each day of the calendar year.

Follow the artists and explore the designs, moments, and relationships that created and defined the Bauhaus movement.

Released alongside the Met’s exhibition on aesthetic expressions of conspiracy in art from the 1960s through the present, Everything Is Connected explores how distrust of institutions, real government and corporate collusion in secret, and random, tragic events overlap to create a visual vocabulary for conspiratorial belief.

$44

Photographer Walter Pfeiffer started out as a draftsman, and this is the first book of his drawings and photographic models. Expressing sensuality, intimacy, and vibrant coloring, fans of Pfeiffer will find the connections between his drawing and photography exciting and illuminating.

Accompanying the Hauser & Wirth Zurich exhibition of the same name, Dubuffet and the City examines the artist’s work featuring the people, landscapes, architecture, and structure of the modern metropole, looking particularly at the city as a source for inspiration and object of study by the artist.

Photographer Pieter Henket’s project documents the children of the Congo Basin rainforest, paired with them telling and acting out out their people’s oral history.

David Casavant Archive
$38

Stylist David Casavant was born in 1990 and knows a bunch of celebrities and artists, and you can own this cool book — so that’s sort of like knowing them too!

It’s the middle of the winter, so put on that bikini and take a dip.

Boy, they sure had a good time before … well, you know.

This book documents Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition at David Zwirner in Chelsea in 2017, in case you didn’t have the patience to stand in line for that Infinity Room.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the moon by looking at art about the moon.

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New Art Books to Gift, from Kusama to Bruegel