The spirit of Valentine’s Day, such as February itself, is kept pretty short and sweet. On the occasion of a notorious commercial day that can cause resentment, delightfulness, or both at the same time, we have collected art books about letters and love in all its forms – Platonic, Romantic, Family, Artistic, Politics. Read on for a book to get your artistic militant Boo, a memoir with letters between Barbara Chase-Riboud and her mother, a compilation of art-historical love affairs and more. Enjoy and xoxo. –Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
What art can tell us about love By Nick Trend
What art can tell us about love Is a journey through art history through some of the most legendary love affairs, and when the idea of ”mueses” comes to mind, this book deliberately shuns it and finds it “alienating” and “worsening”. And although biographical details offer a useful context for works by Édouard Manet, Tamara de Lempicka and Frida Kahlo, to name just a few, for art historian Nick Trend, the paintings, sculptures and photos are puzzles to decode, looking for, looking for The species, looking for the kind of truth, can omit or even reject historical reports. Ripe figs, cracked pomegranates, pink shoes and light grin give winking allusions to these love stories and complications.
But where suggestive symbols are absent, as in Rembrandt’s 1652 Self -portraitSubtle stories emerge that illustrate the effect of love. Trend describes how, 10 years after the death of his first wife Saskia, the representation of the Dutch artist of himself with weapons Akimbo in the lime of his painter transmits the new goal of new love. Trend appeals directly to the reader and presents the universality of that “most complicated, most powerful and most comprehensive emotions” as a key that enables us to understand important works of art, the people they have made, and those who inspired them. –Aida Amoako
Order the book in advance | Laurence King, March 2025
Esther Mahlangu: Painting is in my heart
In the joyful geometric designs of the South African artist Esther Mahlangu, the limits of sight and sound mix together. “The colors can sometimes argue, but it is important that they harmonize,” she says in the interview for Painting is in my heart. This slender volume lies the universe that comes in, consisting of reproductions of the beautiful compositive paintings and beads of Mahlangu, which became a beacon of South African art by infusing the creative traditions of Amandebele in its work. It is impossible to give to defaitism when it is confronted with the conviction of the 89-year-old artist: “Although I may have been seen as a pioneer, I will continue with the traditions that have been entrusted to me.” –LA
Buy on Bookstore | Thames & Hudson, January 2025
Armed by design: Posters and publications of Cuba’s organization of solidarity of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin -America (Ospaaal)
The influential Cuban Ospaaal -Political Movement may be closed in 2019, after more than 50 years of revolutionary activity, but their legacy in graphic design cannot be underestimated; They formed a language of anti-imperialism that continues to inspire and impress.
Founded in Havana in 1966 after the Tricontinental conferenceOspaaal has produced nearly 500 posters, magazines and books that have created a large supporter in the Global South. In Armed by designThe Interference Archive organization established in Brooklyn has compiled a quadital-tome of the revolutionary graphic images of the group, which reached its top under the leadership of artistic director Alfredo Rostgaard (1966-1975). For his contribution, Josh Macphee, who himself is a fantastic graphic artist, writes about the Cuban -trained Rostgaard who has left little about his design process, but would help define the aesthetics that we started to associate with the group, including a cinematic quality, in assignment of illustrations and typographic experiments. And he summarizes the overall influence of Ospaaal well: “There is little doubt that the Ospaaal Publishing Program is one of the most extensive and innovative systems of print production and distribution that left ever has seen. While both the Soviet Union and China created massive propaganda devices, their output was narrower in political scope and considerably more controlled in terms of aesthetics. ”
There are essays by Nate George, Sohl Lee, Lincoln Cushing, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, Javier Gastón-Greenberg, Ernesto Menéndez-Conte and André Mesquita, an interview with Jane Norling and a conversation with Joseph Orzal-all. The only thing I wished that it was tackled is the last years of the group when the graphics of the deep fell into a graphic mess, but I think all the great things should end, and sometimes not with a bang but a whine. –HRag Vartanian
Buy the book | Common notions, January 2025
How to fuck like a girl: essays By Vera Blossom
The blog How to fuck like a girl Is partly diary, partly advisory column about sex and gender of Vera Blossom, “your favorite local brown girl from Trans experience”, as she says. The book form-that completely new material includes with a prayer-as-manifesto, a call that one should visit again in times of deprivation. “We do a ritual outside and we evoke Lightning and Thunder and Brimstone, so that the marble columns that will hold on to this sad little empire will burst, and we will all come down.” It will flush you with a feeling of your own strength, if you catch my drift.
Elsewhere in the book, Blossom’s Tone is both conversing and experimental. It is strewn with brutal small footnotes (“If you don’t know what a twink is, I think this book may be above your reading level”) and observations that have to pause halfway through the page to think about it: that contrast is a ” Good way to mess with gender “, or that damn is a bit like writing. There is a poem in which each line starts with “I want”, and another in which every place had blossom’s sex that has no bedroom. And she offers really good advice for Valentine’s Day: “Sex does not have to start and end with a kiss and a sperm,” she reprimands us. “It can start at first sight, on Hello! … It can take place after the orgasm in the laughter, in the conversation you have as soon as your brain is temporarily clear from that hedonistic fog of lust.” –Lisa Yin Zhang
Buy on Bookstore | Dopamine/Semiotext (E), December 2024
A complicated passion: the life and work of Agnès Varda By Carrie Rickey
When director Agnès met Varda director Jacques Demy, he was fresh from filming Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco and unknowingly was about to start his own long -term love affair. Demy invited Varda for a local café, where they apparently shared a love for somewhat obscure drinks: he drank a plume (beer mixed with lemonade), and she a half-verba infusion. Carrie Rickey Quotes Varda remembers the experience: “We enjoyed ourselves.” I imagine that there is a world that is not said there, perhaps a world that is impossible to articulate.
Like all relationships, theirs was deep, vulnerable and complicated. There are the difficulties in being an artist Couple-“Varda’s star got up while Demy’s was on the horizon,” writes Rickey at one point. There are also the details of every family dynamics, Varda is the pragmatist and Demy de Dromer in this. And there was the fact that Demy negotiated about his own sexuality. On 48, after 21 years of living, he moved with producer David Bombyk. “Jacques and I are in a silent anger against each other,” says Varda in her documentary series Varda Par Agnès.
They would reconcile. Towards the end of his life, with Varda as a caretaker, Demy started to think and write about his childhood. She suggested that he filmed instead of writing. “You should make it,” he said. The result, five years after his death, was that of Varda The world of Jacques Demy (1995). This is not a book about love in itself – but that makes it even clearer how love carries, endures and penetrates all things. –LZ
Read the review by Sophie Monks Kaufman | Buy on Bookstore | WW Norton & Company, August 2024
Mickalene Thomas: Everything about Love
Many moons ago I co-organized a 12-hour marathon lecture from work by Audre Lorde and her friend, the poet Adrienne Rich, at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. People were free to read what they wanted, but even though I had so much work to choose from, I lost the count of how often someone read the whole or part of the essay of Lorde “”Use of the erotic: the erotic as strength(1978). The text chants an energy that focuses on so much more than excitement or temptation, but instead drives home the ways in which oppressive societies limit women’s access to this essential ‘source of power and information’. Paging through the catalog Mickalene Thomas: Everything about LoveOne can only think of this political reading of the erotic, which, as Lorde indicates, offers a source of additional and provocative power to the woman who is not afraid. “Thomas, from her own side, seems to be driven to complicate and enrich what love, admiration and reflection can offer, so that the Funhouse mirror refuses, so that American culture so often reflects its chosen subject of black women, and instead pointing out On what Lorde could describe as what Lorde could describe “that physical, emotional and psychological expressions of what is the deepest and richest in each of us.”Alexis Clements
Buy on Bookstore | DAP, July 2024
Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy: Ring of Iron, Ring or Wool
There are many types of love, but it could be said that the most hyperbolic of all is the love between two surrealist painters. At least, the monograph of 2024 Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy: Ring of Iron, Ring or Wool It will be a very strong case for interpersonal chemistry and deep intersection of these two painters, married in 1940 to the death of Tanguy in 1955 – a loss that has demonstrably never recovered. Including personal Ephemea, images, career height points and correspondence between the two, the monograph not only shows two fascinating art career that are tightened against each other, but a permanent and overwhelming love. As Sage wrote in a letter to Heinz Hghes on November 6, 1959, as quoted in monograph: “I don’t believe that there was ever such a total and devastating love and understanding if there was between us. It was just a fusion of two creatures in one blinding totality. ” –Sarah Rose Sharp
Read the review Buy on Bookstore | Skira, March 2024
I have always had a memoir By Barbara Chase-Riboud
The artist, poet and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud has lived an extraordinary life, and she took her mother for the ride for more than three decades. Her memoirs 2022 I always knew Trace the remarkable story of the artist -based artist through the letters she wrote at home. From her first trip to France in 1957 to her mother’s death in 1991, moves Chase-Riboud and makes art between London, Paris, Rome, Beijing and beyond. Her warm, enthusiastic letters give us a fascinating look at the climb of a young artist in a time of great adversity, but also a great opportunity. Her constant correspondence makes it clear that every success and adventure – and there are many – is shared with her beloved mother. –Lauren Moya Ford
Read the review Buy on Bookstore | Princeton University Press, October 2022
