This month’s most anticipated art books are tinged with revolutionary and/or apocalyptic energy. Olivia Liang’s work of historical fiction tells the story of two filmmakers working during Italy’s leadership years, while art historian Thomas Crowe presents some of the French Revolution’s most iconic (and unforgettable) images. Meanwhile, film critic AS Hamrah detailed the denigration of the film as content that is by turns saddening and sometimes amusing. As the temperatures drop, grab a blanket and read a book below to make yourself comfortable.
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Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life
by Sue Roy
I like to joke that Picasso invented Cubism so that he could paint breasts and butts at the same time (see three awake womenseveral scenes with Raphael and Fornarina, etc.). Two years ago, “Pablo-matic” — a notoriously vile Brooklyn Museum exhibition that attracted equally vile criticism — offered more of Picasso’s womanizer jokes. But strangely, feminist intervention ignores the many contributions of the many women who cared about Picasso, modeled for him, inspired him, debated with him, and excited him. Sue Roy details the lives of six women – Fernand Olivier, Olga Kocherova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, François Gillot and Jacqueline Roque – who shaped his life and art. Their stories vary widely – from underage lovers to famous surrealist photographers – but all are fascinating. Picasso once quipped that women were either goddesses or doormats, but Roy’s book depicts them as human beings.
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silver book
Author: Olivia Liang
In this new work of historical fiction, Italian filmmakers Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini explore fascism in art and life. Liang is known for expanding the scope of his arts writing, incorporating visual analysis and cultural history into his memoirs, and now their second novel blends direct quotes from famous directors with imagined dialogue and characters. The story is set in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, also known as “Italy’s Leading Years”, which is perfectly timed. However, what Liang captures most is the texture of the times: the world is changing rapidly and massively, yet people are having sex, as if compulsively. Here pleasure and danger pervade everyday life.
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Murders in the Rue Marat: The Case for Art in the Revolution
Thomas Crow
Thomas Crowe decided to become an art historian after encountering the work of Jacques-Louis David Death of Marat (1793) in the 1960s. This so-called Pieta The French Revolution resonated with the Crows of the counterculture, and its poignancy remains undimmed now. Crowe’s new book tells the story of the painting’s legacy and how the image has surfaced again and again amid waves of political dissent. He also tells its origins through the eyes of the painter David, the martyr Marat, and the assassin Charlotte Corday.
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Last Weekend Cinema
by AS Hamra
You may have noticed that, overall, last year was terrible. Hamra, n+1 film critic and author Earth’s demise live broadcast: Film Writing, 2002-2018 (2018), a detailed account of 12 eventful years from March 2024 to March 2025, in which every bad thing that happened in the film industry: the Los Angeles wildfires, Donald Trump’s re-election, and the growing threat of artificial intelligence all accelerated the disparagement of movies. Hamra describes it all in turn in detail that is both sad and amusing.
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angel bread
by Patti Smith
I tend to think that most artists feel compelled to create because on some level they need the world to be different or have a desire to transform what they were given into something new. Patti Smith’s new memoir tells one such story, beginning with her childhood imagination and its escape growing up in an abandoned housing estate. Her life is a life of loss, but it is also a life of creation. Punk Icon’s Pre-Memoirs, 2010 just kidswinner of the National Book Award, promises to be even more personal. She spent 10 years writing.
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Hilma Af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future
Author: Julia Voss and Daniel Birnbaum
Wassily Kandinsky has long been credited with painting some of the first abstract paintings in the history of Western art. But proving it for the first time is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, and indeed art historians throughout this century have continued to rewrite assumptions. Perhaps most famously, Hilma af Klint is finally getting the credit she deserves – her abstract art predated that of Kandinsky. But rather than fostering a competitive spirit, the two writers—Julia Voss and Daniel Birnbaum—conspired to create a woven, his-and-hers biography. There is no reason to believe that these painters ever met. Instead, the author looks at the common social forces that the two European painters navigated in their lives and art.
