THE BEST BOOKS OF 2011

Ten scholars, critics, writers, and artists choose the year’s outstanding titles.

SVETLANA ALPERS

Imagine that you are listening to a spirited conversation between a French art historian and a German painter. De Rouget and Daimler, as they are called, are at lunch on a recent October Sunday near Pontarlier. It is where Degas vacationed briefly in 1904 and where absinthe is made. In Il était plus grand que nous ne pensions: Édouard Manet et Degas (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Scala/Collection Ateliers Imaginaires), Éric Darragon, author of a subtle biography of Manet and writings on contemporary German

books February 2008

George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail

FRANCIS PICABIA was already an adept of the most variant isms by the time he arrived in Paris in 1919, at age forty, and placed himself at the forefront of the latest avant-garde, then falling into rank under the banner of Dada. Unlike many of the artists involved in the movement, for whom its emergence was a direct consequence of the First World War, Picabia had spent the previous four years traveling, far from the front, in a sheltered world of money, sanatoriums, and art. It is therefore not surprising that he focused his Dadaist aggression primarily on the art world itself rather than on