The ArtCurious Guide: Our Favorite Books
One of the benefits of doing this podcast (and writing ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History) is that I get to read a lot of art books—far more than I could ever relay! And this year, the ante was upped even further, because of all the awesome interviews that I shared with authors and art historians. Here are some of my favorites from 2022.
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Picasso’s War
Hugh Eakin
Today we think of New York as the center of the twentieth century art world, but it took three determined men, two world wars, and one singular artist to secure the city’s cultural prominence. Pablo Picasso was the most influential and perplexing artist of his age, and the turning points of his career and salient facets of his private life have intrigued the world for decades. However, the tremendous feat of winning support for his art in the U.S. has long been overlooked—until now.
In PICASSO’S WAR: How Modern Art Came to America, Eakin details the never-before-told story of how a single exhibition, years in the making, finally brought the 20th century’s most notorious artist U.S. acclaim, irrevocably changed American culture, and in doing so saved dozens of the twentieth century’s most enduring artworks from the Nazis.
Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis
Gabrielle Selz
Light on Fire is the first comprehensive biography of the life and work of the abstract artist Sam Francis by award-winning author Gabrielle Selz. Drawing from exclusive interviews and private correspondence, including Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Selz traces Francis’s extraordinary and complex life.
Francis first learned to paint as a former air-corps pilot while he was encased, for three years, in a full-body cast. His insatiable desires spanned women, places, experiences, art movements, and business deals for Francis to reach equilibrium. He courted change and drama, even encouraging conflict because it forced him to retreat into his art. It paid off. As a young man, Sam saw his color-drenched abstractions fetch the highest prices of any living artist.
With an international scope, from World War II San Francisco to postwar Paris, to New York, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, Light on Fire reveals the intimate story of a man who sought to resolve in art the contradictions he couldn’t resolve in life.
What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s Most Mysterious Portrait
Eden Collinsworth
This extraordinary work of narrative non-fiction traces the remarkable history of Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait: The Woman with an Ermine, from its original creation, including the fascinating story of its subject, Cecilia Gallerani, and on to its mysterious disappearance for 250 years after which it emerged in the hands of an aristocratic Polish family. Now on display in Krakow, the painting was exiled in Paris, and kept hidden from the Nazis by a brave housekeeper. These defining moments in history comprise a portrait of Europe’s past as vivid and complex as the painting itself.
The magic of Collinsworth’s book is the powerful combination of research-based non-fiction— reminiscent of Walter Isaacson (Leonardo da Vinci) and Mary Gabriel (Ninth Street Women)— with a character-driven narrative that will keep readers glued to the page until the very end. Perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch or Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, What the Ermine Saw pulls back the curtain on the fascinating history behind the astonishing portrait.
Muse: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpieces
Ruth Millington
We instantly recognize many of their faces from art history’s most well-known masterpieces––but just who was Picasso’s “Weeping Woman”? Or the burglar in Francis Bacon’s oeuvre? Why was Grace Jones covered in graffiti? Far from posing silently, many muses bring emotional support, intellectual energy, career-changing creativity, and practical assistance to artists. However, the long-standing image of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model (usually young, attractive, and female) at the mercy of an influential and older male artist.
Could this impression be incorrect and unfair? Is this trope a romanticized myth? Have people embraced, or even sought, the status of muse? And most importantly, where would artists be without them? By delving into the real-life relationships between these models and the artists who immortalized them, Muse reveals muses’ active, creative participation in the works they inspire. Muse will surprise you, as it did me, with the answers to all of these questions and conundrums, and it’s well worth your time.
Look, Look, Look, Look, Look Again: Buddhist Wisdom Reflected in 26 Artists
Kevin Townley
Want a cool, fun, and funny book about art? How about one about Buddhism? Just want a great read? You’ve got all of it covered with Look, Look, Look, Look, Look Again: Buddhist Wisdom Reflected in 26 Artists. In this book, Kevin Townley leads you to, invites you in, and sometimes springs upon you, the perennial wisdom in the worlds of artists from Artemisia to Hilma af Klint to Marilyn Minter. (All 26 artists are women.) This book is a mad riot of interconnections: art, Buddhism, mandala principle, spiritual pursuits, growing up goth in the 90s, the theories of Marshall McLuhan, and a mongoose–to name but a few.
Meditation teacher, filmmaker, writer and art savant Kevin Townley turns his unique gaze upon 26 artists and magnifies the power and meaning of the five Buddhist wisdom energies through explorations of their work. Rather than trying to “explain” these energies, he reveals them to you in familiar visual language while, of course, pushing the boundaries of what you might have thought you saw at first glance.
William Blake vs. The World
John Higgs
Poet, artist, and visionary, William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition, and he worked without reward, often mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted. Yet from his ignoble end in a pauper’s grave, Blake now occupies a unique position as an artist who unites and attracts people from all corners of society—a rare inclusive symbol of human identity.
Blake famously experienced visions, and it is these that shaped his attitude toward politics, sex, religion, society, and art. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, we are now in a better position to understand what was happening inside that remarkable mind and gain a deeper appreciation of his brilliance. His timeless work, we will find, has never been more relevant.
Florine Stettheimer: A Biography
Barbara Bloemick
Florine Stettheimer was a feminist, multi-media artist who documented New York City’s growth as the center of cultural life, finance, and entertainment between the World Wars. During her first forty years, spent mostly in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of the earliest modernist styles prior to most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Marcel Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, and numerous poets, dancers, and writers. During her life, Stettheimer showed her innovative paintings in more than forty of the most important museum exhibits and salons. She also wrote poetry, designed unique furniture, and gained international fame for the sets and costumes she created for the avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Stettheimer’s work was also socially progressive: she painted several identity-issue paintings, addressing African American segregation, Jewish bigotry, fluid sexuality, and women’s new independence.
Trusted Eye: Post-World War II Adventures of a Fearless Art Advocate
Claudia Chidester
rusted Eye is a compelling narrative of an American wife and mother finding her place amid the rubble of war-torn Germany. Virginia Fontaine fought continually for recognition—as a woman, a photographer, an art curator, and, perhaps most importantly, a liaison between beleaguered German artists and the outside world. Through journals, letters, and photographs, she recorded her uniquely intimate perspective on this period, amid an ever-changing constellation of artists and friends. Fontaine documented her life from a young age: her struggles at Yale Art School, her year as a newlywed in the British Virgin Islands, and her employment in a munitions factory. Later, she helped the Jewish underground in Europe; traveled with gallerists throughout Germany, Switzerland, and France; tangled with the Monuments Men; and experienced the international reach of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist pursuits. Essays by art experts Graeme Reid and Dorothea Schöne illuminate Fontaine's early years in Milwaukee and her impact on German art culture in the early postwar years. Trusted Eye is both a biography and a visual almanac for an intricate slice of the twentieth century.
L’Origine: The Secret Life of the World’s Most Erotic Masterpiece
Lilianne Milgrom
In 2011, Lilianne Milgrom became the first authorized copyist of Gustave Courbet’s controversial painting L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World) which hangs in the Orsay Museum in Paris. Milgrom spent a decade researching and writing L’Origine, her debut novel, all about Courbet’s incredible painting—as well as Milgrom’s own personal experience of copying the work. L’Origine has snagged no less than six literary honors, including the Publishers Weekly 2021 US book award for Best Adult Fiction.
Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis
Jeffrey H. Jackson
Paper Bullets is the first book to tell the history of an audacious anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets”—wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines.
Hunted by the secret field police, Lucy and Suzanne were finally betrayed in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them, and tried them in a court martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope.
Better remembered today by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the couple’s actions were even more courageous because of who they were: lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating the kind of gender-bending work that the Nazis would come to call “degenerate art.” In addition, Lucy was half Jewish, and they had communist affiliations in Paris, where they attended political rallies with Surrealists and socialized with artists like Gertrude Stein.
Paper Bullets is a compelling World War II story that has not been told before, about the galvanizing power of art, and of resistance.
ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History
Jennifer Dasal
I know, I know. But please forgive me this inclusion— because it’s a great book for anyone on your gift list. Art newbie? Art fan? Trying to convince someone to get into art? Let me help you, via 12 funny, funky tales from the great world of art.
We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered. Or how about the fact that one of Andy Warhol's most enduring legacies involves Caroline Kennedy's moldy birthday cake and a collection of toenail clippings?
ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world's great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird, and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore.
