ARTBOOK BLOG

RECENT POSTS

DATE 12/7/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman on 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s'

DATE 12/5/2024

The Primary Essentials x Artbook Pop Up

DATE 11/28/2024

Blue collar pilgrims in 'Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944'

DATE 11/28/2024

Happy Thanksgiving from Artbook | D.A.P.

DATE 11/24/2024

Photorealism lives!

DATE 11/22/2024

2024 Staff Pick Holiday Gifts!

DATE 11/21/2024

NYPL Jefferson Market presents Neal Slavin with Kevin Moore on 'When Two or More Are Gathered Together'

DATE 11/18/2024

“All is beauty, all is measure, richness, serenity and pleasure” in ‘Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage’

DATE 11/16/2024

Kaleidoscopic and dynamic, Orphism comes to the Guggenheim

DATE 11/13/2024

From Belly Dancers to Bingo Enthusiasts

DATE 11/11/2024

Know your propaganda!

DATE 11/9/2024

Yumna Al-Arashi pays poetic tribute to her great-grandmother and an ancient tattooing practice

DATE 11/7/2024

Long before social media, Sophie Calle fearlessly overshared


RECENT POSTS

LACY SOTO | DATE 12/7/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman on 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s'

Saturday, December 7 at 3 PM, Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents a book signing event celebrating 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s' with photographer Chloe Sherman in conversation with writer and activist Michelle Tea. Book signing to follow.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/5/2024

The Primary Essentials x Artbook Pop Up

Thursday, December 5, from 6–8 PM, please join us to celebrate the opening of our December pop-up with Brooklyn home goods store of great intelligence and beauty, The Primary Essentials! Throughout the month, TPE will present a curated selection of more than 50 titles, with a focus on the study. Customers can receive complimentary book plates and in-person calligraphy for extra special holiday gifting. PLUS: on Sunday, December 8, painter JJ Manford will sign his new monograph from Derek Eller / Harper’s.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2024

Happy Thanksgiving from Artbook | D.A.P.

On this quintessentially American holiday, both beloved and fraught, we honor the importance and beauty of gathering. At a time when our culture may seem more divided than ever, and more focused on consumption than connection, we take joy in this family photograph from Reel Art Press’s new book on FSA-era denim—the quintessentially American fabric. The image is captioned: “Feggen Jones lived with 14 children on an 86-acre farm purchased through the FSA. He had two cows, three mules, four hogs, 200 chickens, two dogs and a cat. He owned a Ford truck and an Oldsmobile sedan. His cash crop was seven acres of tobacco and he also grew five acres of cotton, seven acres of wheat, 12 acres of corn and two acres of vegetable garden. Jones was formerly a sharecropper in this area and was obviously a very busy fellow but I am sure he got a lot of help from his many kids. His OshKosh overalls look in pretty good condition considering.” Zebulon, North Carolina, March 1942.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2024

Blue collar pilgrims in 'Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944'

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is the most festive of holidays. For others, it’s fraught. This year, we found a little brightness in this photograph from Reel Art Press’s new book on FSA-era denim, “the fabric that built America.” Graham Marsh writes, “Known as the color of the working class, blue was the cheapest color to produce. Even today, the term ‘blue-collar’ refers to someone who does manual labor. This wasn’t the designer denim look, brothers and sisters, but clothing for real back-breaking hard work. When this clothing wore out, they patched it, sometimes patching a patch until they were wearing the patch itself. It was a tough life, but these were the pilgrims that built America with determination and grace.” Pictured here, “Daughter of a farmer resettled on Kearney Farmsteads in Nebraska,” May 1936.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/24/2024

Photorealism lives!

Amy Sherald’s 2017 oil painting, The lesson of falling leaves, is reproduced from new release Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, published to accompany the major survey opening this week at MOCA LA. Spanning from the 1960s to today, and including everyone from Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes to Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter, this book proves that the genre is not just alive and well, but sometimes challenging, weird and confrontational. In her catalog essay, MOCA curator Anna Katz discusses Sherald. “The dichotomy between painting and photography, drawn along lines of racial exclusion and inclusion, is stark in the work of self-described ‘American Realist’ Amy Sherald, who was catapulted to national fame at the unveiling of her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. The lesson of falling leaves exemplifies her selection of Black sitters, often strangers, whom she chooses for their ‘quality of existing in the past, present, and future simultaneously.’ … Sherald’s signature is the depiction of the bodies (skin, hair, nails, eyes) of her portrait subjects in grayscale. She uses grayscale to invoke the nineteenth-century daguerreotype, which comprised some of the earliest portraits of African Americans. In the history of European and North American art, Black people rarely figured in painted portraits and enjoyed their first opportunities to be portrait subjects upon the dissemination of the relatively accessible means of photography. The photographic is thus doing heavy lifting here: whereas in [works by artists like Jesse Treviño and Robert Bechtle], the nonhierarchical distribution of details anchors the images to a specific time and place, in Sherald’s painting the photographic locates a historical origin of representation for Black subjects, while also pointing out a history of absence and pointing toward a future inclusion. The photographic is a corruption, an acknowledgment and an abrogation of painting’s racist foundations.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/22/2024

2024 Staff Pick Holiday Gifts!

Check out our hand-picked list of staff favorites for everyone you love to gift—from the hardcore art lover to the photo aficionado, from the sophisticated traveler to the obsessive collector . . . and more!

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/21/2024

NYPL Jefferson Market presents Neal Slavin with Kevin Moore on 'When Two or More Are Gathered Together'

Thursday, November 21, from 6–7:30 PM, the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library presents photographer Neal Slavin in conversation with editor Kevin Moore for the launch of the new, expanded edition of 'When Two or More: Are Gathered Together,' published by Damiani Books. The event will take place in the Willa Cather Room, on the first floor of the library, and will be followed by a signing.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/18/2024

“All is beauty, all is measure, richness, serenity and pleasure” in ‘Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage’

There is so much to see in new release Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage. Published to accompany the major retrospective at Fondation Beyeler, on view through January 2025, it features the artist’s work across all movements, from early Fauvist landscapes and interiors to the radical, monochromatic nude cutouts of the 1950s. The book’s design is also notably pleasing and unique, with two heavy gatefolded covers bound in to the one beautifully produced paperback volume. Pictured here: Grand nu couché/Nu rose (1935). Excerpted in the headline: an excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” which inspired Matisse throughout his life.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/16/2024

Kaleidoscopic and dynamic, Orphism comes to the Guggenheim

Science, technology, artistic freedom! Ah, the optimism and unfettered exploration of the Belle Époque. Then: the First World War, followed by the devastation of the 1918 influenza epidemic. In November 2024, the Guggenheim Museum opens Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, the first in-depth examination of this avant-garde movement whose name, borrowed from the Greek poet-hero Orpheus, was coined in 1912 by French literary giant Guillaume Apollinaire. “‘Orphism’ referred to the kaleidoscopic and dynamic paintings produced by a constellation of transnational artists exploring the boundaries of representation to convey their experiences of modern life,” Guggenheim senior curator Tracey Bashkoff writes. “Artists connected to Orphism engaged with ideas of simultaneity—which they equated with modernity—creating compositions that often capture motion, encompass disks of vibrant color, and evoke multisensory responses. Situated among vanguard movements of the period such as Cubism and Futurism, Orphism pushed further into modes of abstract expression, whereas these other idioms remained invested in figurative content. … To invoke [František] Kupka, Orphism is an amorphous concept. Apollinaire invented the term to describe an abstracted pictorial idiom, but he did so by specifically conjuring the ultimate bard, the mythological Orpheus. In doing so, he productively allied painting, poetry and music with one another—and with modernity itself.” Featured spreads show work by František Kupka, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Gino Severini and Mainie Jellett.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/13/2024

From Belly Dancers to Bingo Enthusiasts

Out now from Damiani, the new, expanded edition of Neal Slavin’s classic 1976 photobook, When Two or More Are Gathered Together, collecting more than 100 photos of groups big and small, scientific, artistic, gastronomic, athletic, etc, etc, etc. … from the 1970s to the present. Pictured here, “Yogis, Los Angeles, California” (1974). Kevin Moore writes, “Certainly, over the last fifty years, the nature of groups has changed—how they organize, how they meet, where they meet, and what they meet for. Much of this activity now happens online, on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. But in many cases, the online realm is a parallel space, a portal of introduction and information that interfaces with in-person assembly. No matter how they form, the reasons for groups have not changed much over time. Groups exist to express common identity, to provide companionship, offer support, and a sense of belonging. Groups also form to preserve, share, agitate, entertain, or simply to escape. In the fractured and often divisive times in which we live, exacerbated by politics, technology, and propaganda, groups have come to provide the social sustenance often missing from traditional outlets, such as jobs and families. Groups, with their processes of arguing, consensus building, and voting, are our common experience of working democracy.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/11/2024

Know your propaganda!

Never have we been so aware of propaganda, so overwhelmed or overexposed. Here to save the day and to put things into perspective is FUEL’s highly researched, graphically fascinating Propagandopolis, collecting a trove of twentieth- and twenty-first century media manipulations from around the world—from Afghan anti-Soviet posters to Zimbabwe guerilla graphics. Pictured here, from the United States, a rather appealing pro-choice poster from 1981. “The design was first published by Heresies, a New York-based feminist art collective founded in 1979,” Bradley Davies writes. “It originally featured in a 1981 issue of the group’s magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and was quickly reproduced on posters, leaflets, adverts and T-shirts by feminist organizations both in America and internationally.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/9/2024

Yumna Al-Arashi pays poetic tribute to her great-grandmother and an ancient tattooing practice

Yemeni-Egyptian American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi still remembers, with longing, the unique, faded, but still highly emblematic tattoos that marked her beloved great-grandmother Aisha’s face below her lips. Now imbued with mystery, these marks were once traditional among Yemeni women. Today, as that country continues to contend with years of ongoing war and conflict, the tradition itself has also faded, along with the possibility of understanding its true meaning—both personally to the women who have partaken, and to the culture in general. In this stunning 392-page first monograph, published and beautifully designed and printed by Edition Patrick Frey, Al-Arashi presents more than 300 photographs, made in homage to Aisha, on her own journey through Northern Africa, where many women of Aisha’s generation, identifying both as Amazigh and Arab, still bear the traces of this ancient practice.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/7/2024

Long before social media, Sophie Calle fearlessly overshared

“Because revenge is a dish best served cold.” So reads the text on the curtain that covers Sophie Calle’s “Mother-Father” (2018), reproduced here from Overshare, the catalogue to Calle’s traveling retrospective, on view now at the Walker Art Center. Death and mortality have been a running theme in Calle’s work, including this series, begun in the 1990s, in which she photographed headstones that read “Mother” or “Father” without any other identifiers. In other series, she famously spied on people in the street, invited them to sleep in her bed, or snooped through their belongings while working as a hotel maid. She traced the dissolution of her romantic relationship. She collated personal ads. She documented people seeing the ocean for the first time. “Calle has centered the personal, the intimate, and the emotional while refusing to cede judgment to anyone else on what’s too much or what goes too far,” Henriette Huldisch writes. “There is nothing accidental or involuntary in Calle’s way of oversharing—a word she would certainly never use. Calle is always in full control of which stories she chooses to tell. She shows us better than anyone that perhaps oversharers know what they’re doing.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/6/2024

A shudder of American self-recognition in 'Omen'

Featured spreads are from Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive. Drawing from approximately 40,000 works of the FSA Photographic Archive (1935–42) at the New York Public Library, and gorgeously printed in the deepest of black inks, this oversized paperback tells the darker version of the American story under the stark terms of injustice. “It is an uncovering of a more or less literal grave, a grave made out of light, to borrow a phrase from the poet Alice Notley. And it is a reanimation of the bodies found there, who are also figures of brightness and shadow. … The horror of Omen is not that this is happening to someone over there. The horror of Omen is that this is happening to me. This picture was already inside me. I can’t get it out.” Photographs are by Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein and Gordon Parks.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/1/2024

Hot book alert! 'Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy' is out now from the Morgan Library & Museum

“She knows more about rare books than any other American. She has spent $42,000 for a single volume and outwitted a rich duke at an auction. Her opinion on Caxton editions is sought by the greatest scholars. She is chic, vivacious and interesting, in fact, a ‘dandy, wholesome American girl.’ … She wears her hair long and does not use glasses, runs to Europe on secret missions and is the terror of continental collectors’ agents. Her name is Belle Green [sic].” So wrote the Chicago Tribune on August 11, 1912. A visionary Black woman who passed as white while rising to become the world’s most respected collector of rare books, Greene was the subject of the bestselling 2021 historical novel The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Here, the notoriously stylish, sophisticated and secretive Morgan librarian is pictured in a 1911 portrait by Clarence H. White. Both the photograph and the quotation above are reproduced from our own 2024 blockbuster, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, published to accompany the exhibition on view now at the Morgan Library & Museum. Featuring 175 reproductions of Greene, the library, her travels and the items she collected, this 304-page hardcover offers a panoramic, scholarly portrait of Greene as collector, library executive and woman of the world.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/31/2024

Halloween reading

Horror fans, rejoice. Jordan Peele’s Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay is out now from Inventory Press. The companion to Peele’s complete annotated screenplay for Get Out, this indispensable guide to Us adds alternate endings, deleted scenes, stills from the film and annotations by hannah baer, Theaster Gates, Jamieson Webster, Jared Sexton, Mary Ping, Shana Redmond and Leila Taylor. Annotating a scene featuring Lupita Nyong’o as Red, Webster digs into Freud and his concept of the uncanny. In part: “Looking at the word uncanny or unheimlich etymologically, Freud sees that it is created from heim (which means home or familiarity), but not in the sense of opposites of feeling at home/not feeling at home, but rather as one derived from the other, meaning that what is uncanny was once familiar, what we felt at home with, which has now become its Other, alien. … Importantly, there is new interest in the uncanny which seems to follow on renewed interest in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, in unconscious omnipotence, forms of radical alienation, questions about the limits of knowledge, and new forms of unconscious guilt and masochism. This has, of course, been important in colonial histories and the transmission of historical violence and omnipotent fantasies of generations past, and how these keep reappearing again and again. Stopping this intergenerational repetition of violence might mean having to confront what is the most uncanny in day-to-day life, hiding in plain sight.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/27/2024

Denim deep dive

This 1926 advertisement for Levi Strauss’ original copper riveted waist overalls is reproduced from Reel Art Press new-release Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944—a pure fashion history resource collecting more than 200 photographs of unself-conscious Americans living and working in their well-worn Depression-era denim. Culled from FDR’s Farm Security Administration archive of more than 170,000 photographs by such notable documentarians as Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano and Russell Lee, alongside many unknown names and anonymous contributions, this is a true denim deep dive. The story of Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, “the godfathers of denim workwear,” is covered, alongside photographs of farmers, share croppers, train conductors, factory workers, mechanics and much more. “This book was an exciting—and enormous—undertaking, searching through hundreds of thousands of images into the hidden depths of the archive to unearth priceless denim gems,” Tony Nourmand writes. “The photographs were taken by some of America’s foremost photographers and each portrait, expression and movement is framed with the eye of a master. In this context, the detail of the denim—heft of the weave; fraying chore jacket layered over chambray shirt; patched overalls; white stitching contrasting against blue; metal rivets on rolled up jeans above steel-capped boots—is seen as startlingly modern.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/26/2024

Join Artbook | D.A.P. at Shoppe Object High Point, 2024

Join us October 26–29, in Booth 1795, for the Fall 2024 edition of Shoppe Object at High Point—featuring nothing but the very best in Home and Gift—at Historic Market Square in High Point, North Carolina.

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/21/2024

The must-have monograph on Yoshitomo Nara

Featured spreads are from new release Yoshitomo Nara, published by La Fábrica to accompany the acclaimed retrospective on view now at Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, en route to the Hayward Gallery in June 2025. Here, you can see a selection of the artist’s sweet yet sinister paintings and the book’s clean, inviting design. Also of note: the beautiful baby blue cover with strong title graphics and one of Nara’s adorable, yet ever-so menacing children seemingly spotlit in white, her arm oozing just a little bit of blood. “Nara’s gravitation toward the figure of a child is to give voice to those who are universally disenfranchised but also against systems and exploitations of power,” Mika Yoshitake writes. “They are powerful narratives to embolden ‘the weak’ with which the artist himself identifies in his past.”

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/20/2024

'Mickalene Thomas: All About Love' opens at Philadelphia Museum of Art

“To see yourself, and for others to see you, is a form of validation. I’m interested in that very mysterious and mystical way we relate to each other in the world.” So Mickalene Thomas is quoted in All About Love, the catalog to the celebrated American artist’s major touring exhibition on view at the Barnes Foundation now. We are proud to have published this vibrant yet scholarly, seductive yet serious book, whose clothbound, image-only cover comes wrapped in a clear vinyl jacket with Thomas’s name printed front and back in gold—the remarkable cover figure’s eyes making direct contact with the beholder. Touching on all aspects of the artist’s work, including painting, collage, print, photography, video and installation, and featuring an interview by Rachel Thomas and essays by a luminary cast including Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, Renée Mussai and Christine Y. Kim, this is a show-stopping book for any serious art lover’s shelf.