A Holiday Art Book Gift Guide, for Every Artsy Archetype

The best art novel of recent years is Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures. It’s a tricky genre, but readers both steeped in and mystified by the art world will find it affecting. Olivia Laing’s genre-bending The Silver Book melds art writing, historical interviews, and fiction in a novel that follows famed Italian filmmakers navigating fascism (reviewed here). And Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People is a moving meditation on a cool hue’s history and meaning, tracing everything from Coretta Scott King’s blue wedding dress to the blue of the sky and sea marking the Middle Passage.

This year, Americana icon Stephen Shore published Early Work—early as in age 13. It might sound audacious, but the images are anything but amateur; as our reviewer notes, MoMA acquired Shore’s work when he was just 14. If you want something more classic and Christmas-y, there’s Lee Friedlander: Christmas, a collection of holiday photographs by one of the medium’s greats. For the more conceptually inclined, consider Sophie Calle’s Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished, a compendium of projects she never completed, first assembled when she moved into the Picasso Museum—where, she told A.i.A., she began thinking about the legacy she’ll leave behind.

For a kinky Christmahanakwanzika, try Johanna Hedva’s essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, in which the artist-writer (profiled here) frames illness and disability as a kind of metal, forged through endurance of pus, puke, and pain. Or pick up Nayland Blake’s My Studio Is a Dungeon Is the Studio: Writings and Interviews 1983–2024, a book our reviewer called “conceptually horny.” Blake memorably writes: “The tools developed by kinky people would be helpful in an art world that professes an interest in social movements and interactions but remains quite naïve about how to cultivate trust and safety.”

Equal parts smutty and scholarly, The First Homosexuals is a richly illustrated door-stopper charting the rise of gay identity in artworks spanning 1869–1939. For a less visual tome that leaves more to the imagination, try Phil Melanson’s Florenzer, a novel about a gay painter named Leonardo set in Florence—the gay capital of the Italian Renaissance thanks to its comparatively lax sodomy laws.

It’s hard to think of a photographer who has blended social and fashion photography more deftly than Coreen Simpson, who at 83 has just published her first monograph. Our reviewer praised the book’s “elegant exuberance.” Scholar Uri McMillan’s Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color chronicles experimental Black and Brown New York artists who moved thoughtfully between art and fashion for political reasons; you can read an excerpt detailing the formative friendship between Ming Smith and Grace Jones here.

Think they’ve read it all? Help them collect a classic: Verso’s new John Berger Classics series offers a lovely gift set of the late critic’s work. Or get them something fresh. Two notable December releases include Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky, a biography of the dropout conceptualist, and Loophole of Retreat, a collection of essays derived from Simone Leigh’s storied convening of influential Black women in Venice.

Art historian Thomas Crow has just published a full book on David’s The Death of Marat, tracing how it became a talisman for both his scholarship and for later revolutions. Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an enthralling biography of sorts, focusing less on Stein’s life and more on how her work flourished after her death. And Yoko—David Sheff’s long-awaited, definitive biography of Yoko Ono—finally arrives (reviewed here).

This one’s for those at the intersection of science, technology, engineering, art, and math—but also for everyone else. Few books this season are more visually dazzling than Archigram: The Magazine, a clamshell set packed with facsimiles of the collective’s smart, gorgeous zines—including one pop-up. There’s also Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (reviewed here), which argues that AI is effectively enlisting artists to “onboard” the culture to tools that will ultimately be used for mass destruction—a sharp, convincing take admittedly bereft of holiday cheer.

This year brought the first English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s seminars On Painting, which our reviewer called “chaotic and magnificent.” For something that goes down more easily, try the new biography of Jean Baudrillard, which traces how he lived his ideas; my review teases out some of his thoughts on art.

Apropos of everything, Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933–1943 (reviewed here) details how British artists did and didn’t resist fascism a century ago. Or, to imagine a United States that pays artists, respects workers, and commissions work critical of American history, try John Murphy’s New Deal Art—a reminder that such an America is not fantastical, but in fact once existed.

Have a relative intrigued by art and ready for a crash course? Phaidon’s revised and updated American Art Book (disclosure: I contributed) is a gorgeously illustrated honker of a coffee-table book that introduces a wide range of beloved artists. They can flip through, find works that draw them in, and read about the ones they like. Maybe then you’ll have more to discuss at your next holiday gathering.