My nomination of either Paul Galvez’s Courbet’s Landscape: The Origins of Modern Painting or Benjamin Buchloh’s Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History would inevitably be dismissed as biased (the first author is my spouse, the second a very close friend), so I had to cast my net wide (and away from the modernist field) in order to find a book in which the close reading of specific works is as richly intertwined with the mapping of the cultural and epistemological context of their creation: David Young Kim’s Ground Work: A History of the Renaissance Picture (Princeton University

Flowers have been a hot topic the past few years: promiscuous symbols for everything from sex to death, mourning to deceit, love to cliché to decay. So Orwell’s Roses (Viking), Rebecca Solnit’s rhizomatic rumination on pleasure and politics mapped onto the figure of George Orwell and his rosebushes, was apropos. It turns out that Orwell, one of the great heroes of political critique made into art, was also a passionate and devoted lover of flowers and gardening. He saw the English as a nation of flower lovers and hobbyists (or as he put it, “stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters,

Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press) is a marvelous mix of theory, politics, and personal exposé. She wrestles fearlessly with the pieties of our cultural moment. Above all, she latches on to the concept of freedom—used and abused by absolutists of every political persuasion—and delivers a well-reasoned analysis of its contextual conditions: freedom versus unfreedom, freedom from ethical responsibility, and freedom to explore the darkest recesses of the imagination in our art and our erotic lives. Nelson’s refreshing ability to probe her own lived

WILD THINGS ARE HAPPENING: THE ART OF MAURICE SENDAK. Edited by Jonathan Weinberg. Delmonico Books/The Columbus Museum of Art, 2022. 248 pages.

THE FRONT AND BACK ENDPAPERS of Maurice Sendak’s perennially beloved 1963 book Where the Wild Things Are are covered in subdued bursts of foliage in yellow, blue, green, orange, and brown. The thicket of leafy plants is overlaid by a loose grid of hatch marks that have always made me think of the fine mesh of a window screen. The reader’s face looms just before the screen, with only a view of the semi-exotic jungle beyond, but it’s a view ripe for an

UP YOUR ASS. BY VALERIE SOLANAS. Sternberg/Montana, 2022. 104 pages.

“MY ONLY CONSOLATION’S that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and a queer,” quips Bongi Perez, the intrepid antiheroine of Valerie Solanas’s Up Your Ass. Written between 1962 and 1965, the play features a wisecracking masc lesbian panhandler and sex worker who sounds a lot like the writer herself. Notorious for shooting Andy Warhol and his associate Mario Amaya in 1968, Solanas’s best-known text is her SCUM Manifesto (1967), outlining a program of male elimination. But it was Up Your Ass, a lesser-known dramatic work, that lay

SURREALIST SABOTAGE AND THE WAR ON WORK. BY ABIGAIL SUSIK. (Manchester University, 2021. 296 pages.)

IN A PANTOMIMED SCENE from Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), the bon vivant Pierre Revel visits an upscale restaurant’s kitchen to vet the preparation of his meal. Holding an aging pheasant carcass to his nostrils, a chef affirms its quality for the “delighted gourmet,” who, in turn, luxuriates in “the spoiled meat odor as greedily as if it came from a cluster of lilies of the valley.”

This campy vignette opens Ilya Ehrenbourg’s essay “The Surrealists,” translated from the Russian for

INTERNATIONAL FRIENDSHIP: THE GIFTS FROM AFRICA. BY CHE ONEJOON. Kehrer, 2021. 192 pages.

ON OCTOBER 13, 2010, Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade stood at Collines des Mamelles—twin hills that overlook the Atlantic Ocean and an important point of departure to the Americas from the entrepôt of the Cape Verde Peninsula during the transatlantic slave trade—and welcomed 163 Haitian university students who would be receiving free education after the catastrophic earthquake that January. The president was an impassioned rhetorical advocate for Haiti following the disaster. Days after the earthquake,

LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN. BY CELIA PAUL. New York Review Books, 2022. 352 pages.

IF TRUTH AND ARTIFICE WERE OPPOSED, we would have no painting, no poetry, no speech, no life. Yet there is tension, undoubtable, incorrigible, a catch in the flow of perception, thought, and deed, as the dreams that live in some strange interior take shape and enter the shared reality of a work. Celia Paul, in both her painting and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her own inner life, as well as a careful chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that is barely perceptible, hardly there at all, and yet

IT WAS VULGAR AND IT WAS BEAUTIFUL: HOW AIDS ACTIVISTS USED ART TO FIGHT A PANDEMIC. BY JACK LOWERY. Bold Type Books, 2022. 432 pages.

THE PAST DECADE has seen an outpouring of what writer and organizer Theodore Kerr calls AIDS Crisis Revisitation, a genre defined by its nostalgia for the pre-1996 years of HIV/AIDS activism, particularly ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). A major contribution to this literature, Jack Lowery’s intricately researched history of Gran Fury trains its spotlight on the artists and designers who collaboratively authored much of ACT UP’s iconic propaganda.

IMAGE OBJECTS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS. BY JACOB GABOURY. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. 312 pages. 

JURASSIC PARK, the 1993 blockbuster sensation, contains a sly, almost Velázquezian instance of mise en abyme. In the eponymous theme park’s futuristic genomics lab and control room, scientists fabricate the ultimate prehistoric spectacle using desktop computers, software applications, and file systems manufactured by the real-life Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). These prominently featured SGI workstations don’t just play an essential role in the film’s narrative structure—allowing for plot

INSTRUCTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LEARNING HOW TO LIVE NOW, BY CARMEN WINANT. London: SPBH Editions, 2021. 119 pages.

“LET ME PAUSE HERE to say that ‘instructional photographs’ is a term that I have made up; there is no preexisting dedicated category for this kind of picture,” writes artist Carmen Winant in her slim, pocketable book Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now. On the opposite page, a woman gingerly pulls hardened plaster from her face; culled from a photographic “how-to” on mask-making, the black-and-white image has been shorn of captions and context, extricated from the words

IN THE FUTURE, there will be no writing; we will communicate solely like bees through TikTok dances. In the interim, during the slow/fast glide toward the desuetude of the written word, attention spans dwindle, readers seem to cathect increasingly onto texts the length of a caption, and people like myself pen mournful eulogies that may reasonably be labeled “tl;dr.”

The new subscription-based press Isolarii is experimenting with a cunning strategy for attracting readers to medium-length reading: It makes books with pages the size of the display on a second-generation iPhone SE. The design is a