The 4 Best New Art Books to Add to Your Collection

Browsing art books on a chilly day can be as satisfying as hitting a string of gallery shows. Done right, their unique blend of images, text, and graphic design opens new windows into creative minds. 

This season offers plentiful options, with in-depth biographies, thematic histories, and exhaustive anthologies among the choices. And don’t be afraid to stray from the establishment publishers for titles that will never so much as flirt with bestseller lists. In case you’re looking for inspiration, we’ve included one such gem found off the beaten path in our roundup below. 

Above: Lauren Halsey, My Hope, 2022, mixed media, as installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and published in Great Women Sculptors

This new, deeply researched biography from a respected art historian traces the iconoclastic painter Piet Mondrian from his strict Calvinist upbringing in the rural Netherlands of the late 1800s to his young adulthood in Amsterdam and on to his breakthrough years in Paris and beyond. 

A prodigy, Mondrian showed a deft hand with landscapes under the tutelage of his schoolmaster father—a skilled, if unimaginative, draftsman himself—and his uncle, who earned a lucrative living churning out mediocre impressionist canvases for the Dutch elite. But when the onetime pupil began to diverge from that standard fare, moving toward pure abstraction by rendering solitary chrysanthemums, then landscapes that veered closer to horizontal strips of color, his uncle was so appalled, he demanded his nephew drop the second “a” from the family name, Mondriaan, lest the men be linked in viewers’ minds. 

A lone botanical was nothing compared to where he ended up, journeying through cubism to the right- angled geometry we remember him for today. Mondrian made something as deceptively simple as a black-edged grid of primary colors a universally recognizable signature—not only in art but across a spectrum of design offered in homage. Think: YSL’s 1965 Mondrian dress. 

His personal life also provides plenty of fodder for the curious: Mondrian had a series of liaisons with women, and probably men as well, but lived alone in an ascetic studio. He had a passion for ballroom dancing, and his manner of kissing was memorably odd: hard and long, lasting for 20 minutes or more. The snippet that may say it all? Mondrian even shaved his face in a rigidly geometric manner, lathering and razoring one half completely before starting on the other. $40 

This anthology, the latest in a series of Great Women books from Phaidon, is truly a who’s who, covering more than 300 artists spanning 500 years, 64 countries, and an art-supply store’s worth of mediums. There are contemporary works, such as Ruth Asawa’s delicate hanging wire sculptures and Chakaia Booker’s manipulated rubber tires, as well as 18th-century court artist Marie-Anne Collot’s naturalistic marble portrait of Catherine the Great and, from more than a century prior, Maria Faydherbe’s alabaster Virgin and Child. Plenty of names may be new to you, but with Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Maya Lin, Kara Walker, and the like, the book is also a good reminder of how many women have reached superstar status. 

In keeping with the collection’s genesis as a 21st-century commitment to democratization, each artist receives the same real estate—one page—which may bode well for future sales of art books. It’s hard to imagine seeing, say, Janine Antoni’s irresistible Lick and Lather (1993)—a double self-portrait in chocolate and soap—and not being curious about her other works. Known for her body-centric practice, Antoni carved, then repeatedly licked, the chocolate bust and washed herself with the soap. Enough to whet anyone’s appetite for more. $70

No cultural movement happens in a vacuum, and in this book Smee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic at The Washington Post, looks beyond the artists’ ateliers, taking a sweeping historical approach to chronicling the advent of impressionism. 

Smee’s telling centers on charismatic ringleader Édouard Manet and his friends Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, who were all trapped in Paris during the siege of 1870 to ’71 while the other pivotal artists of the day managed to escape. His thesis is that after surviving what Victor Hugo called the Terrible Year—one marred by war and starvation—the wellborn trio rejected darkness for light, the quality that has come to be most associated with impressionism. Importantly, Smee contributes to a recent reconsideration of Morisot, who for too long was denigrated for painting women, girls, and domestic interiors. 

With his novelist’s eye for detail—and a touch of a writerly imagination—he also brings Manet and Morisot’s emotional entanglement to life. There is just cause for the soapier parts: Manet was married, and Morisot wed his brother. Meanwhile, Manet’s wife gave birth to a son before their marriage who may have been sired by her husband’s father. It’s complicated. $35 

Looking for a book with a touch of je ne sais quoi quirk? Opt for this slim volume, which marries black-and-white photography with spare text from a French artist who valued the two equally. Originally published in 1980 and now reissued in English, this photo novel, as its creator called it, tells the story of his great-aunts (widowed Suzanne, never-married Louise) living together in Paris. Yes, there’s a whiff of Grey Gardens here. 

By the time Guibert begins his project, the sisters are quite elderly, and he does not shy away from their aging bodies. We see Suzanne’s bunions and Louise’s veil of white hair, which, it turns out, has not been cut since she left the Carmelite order of nuns 40 years earlier—when Suzanne “ransomed” her liberty. Told in concise vignettes, the narrative weaves in Suzanne’s late husband, his lover, and a dog. We should all be grateful to Guibert’s parents for beginning the tradition of Sunday lunch with the aunts. 

This edition includes an epilogue that ends on a poignant note: Guibert died from AIDS in 1991, at the age of 36, the same year Suzanne passed away at 95. Louise outlived them both. $35

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