With the winter holidays just a week off, it’s time for DARTs annual best photo and art book roundup. As Alice said before sliding down the rabbit hole, “what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” In no particular order, here are some of the year’s best that should suit the Alice in you. Above: LMAKgallery / Second Floor Books and Design; photo © Peggy Roalf

Donald Judd: Interviews (David  Zwirner) Chosen by Michael Glover for Hyperallergic

One of the finest American nit-pickers was Donald Judd, and we get a full tasting of the impressive range of his interests and opinions in a fat book just published by David Zwirner called Donald Judd: Interviews. Punchy, serious, comical, outlandish, Judd talks with drive and steesly forthrightness about art, society, bad behavior, the undesirability of talking about one’s own work, the utter uselessness of the Museum of Modern Art back then (but what would you think of it now, Donald?), and a great deal more in this pleasingly unpredictable, 1000-page gathering of unbridled views. 

Henry Darger (Prestel) Chosen by Michael Glover for Hyperallergic

Henry Darger was still very much an unbridled outsider when, in 1999, John Ashbery wrote a book-length poem called Girls on the Run (1999) in celebration of his strange and fantastical art. Newly available in a revised edition (first published in 2014), the substantial, landscape-format book by Klaus Biesenbach called nothing but Henry Darger shows it off with an almost cinematic degree of excess. Here come skipping along those throngs of near-fairy-tale girls and boys, so sweet and so mock-innocent-looking until you pry into some of the more ominous detailing.

Paula Rego: The Art of Story (Thames and Hudson) Chosen by Michael Glover for Hyperallergic

The year’s finest monograph about a female artist is Paula Rego: The Art of Story, Deryn Rhys Jones’s account of the trajectory of the 84-year-old, Portugal-born printmaker and painter.

Rooted in an often savagely playful brand of storytelling, Rego’s pictures owe as much to literature and folktales as it does to the work of other painters, and Rhys Jones delicately unpacks its mysteries. Alice in Wonderland has been lucky to escape her attentions. So far.

Above: Hauser & Wirth Bookshop; photo Schenck 

Light Break by Roy DeCarava (First Print/David Zwirner). Chosen by Vince Aletti for Photograph Magazine. 

Following the reissue of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, DeCarava’s 1955 collaboration with Langston Hughes, and accompanied into print by a reissue of the sound i saw (2001), his brilliant “improvisation on a jazz theme,” Light Break is the first important survey of DeCarava’s work since the MoMA retrospective Peter Galassi organized in 1996, and it feels even more momentous. Trained as an artist, DeCarava tended to make his photographs compositions of dark and light, but it was darkness that he saw most clearly. The blacks in his photographs – in truth, as he pointed out, “infinite shades of gray” – are rich and subtle, with a velvety, smoky depth. And when his subjects are fellow African Americans, that enveloping darkness seems protective and comforting – not an alienating void but a familiar, welcoming place. DeCarava was a meticulous printer (he describes returning to one print again and again over a period of ten years before he was satisfied with the results), and the black-and-white reproductions here are superb – all the more important when so many of the book’s selections are new. Sherry Turner DeCarava, the art historian who is Roy’s widow, introduces this broader view of his work with an essay she wrote for a little-seen 1981 book: “His outlook was always emotionally connected, truthful, energetic, and fascinating.” A picture of Romare Bearden at work finds the painter in shadow, but basking in the luminosity that seems to radiate from his canvas. I imagine DeCarava in the same position. He understood light as a medium of expression and darkness as a well of emotion. It’s tempting to overpraise his accomplishment, if only to make up for its relative neglect, but he deserves to be seen alongside Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo as one of the greats.     

Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines by Vince Aletti (Phaidon Press) Chosen by Richard B. Woodward for Collector Daily 

This elegant tome, clad in Art Deco black-and-gold, is a testament to one man’s ardor for and knowledge of fashion photography. Few writers can match the critic and curator Vince Aletti on either score….Aletti singles out magazines where photographers not associated with fashion (Martin Parr, Cindy Sherman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tina Barney, Thomas Demand, Collier Schorr) adapted their talents to ideas about ritual displays of the body and clothes. If at times this roster of blue-chip artists seems assembled for duty to dignify the commercial business being promoted in the book—there are more Diane Arbuses than one would expect, considering her stated aversion to the genre—Aletti does not fail to devote plenty of space and rhetoric to two of his long-time favorites, the innovative, hard-core, no-apologies-for-working-in-fashion Steven Meisel and Steven Klein. Editor’s note: see my interview with Vince here

Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, And Sexual Violence In the 1970s by Nancy Princenthal (Thames & Hudson). Chosen by Holland Cotter for The New York Times.
This cogent, nuanced book — long in the works — focuses on the ways the rape of women has been depicted in the visual arts. For centuries, images of it were in the hands of male artists and often filtered through a scrim of mythology and religion. In the 1960s and ’70s, female artists — Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Valie Export and Suzanne Lacy among them — laid claim to the subject, manifesting its trauma in their own bodies, in uncompromising performances that were market-resistant in their day and feel right on time for a misogynist present. (Read the book review.)

Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham by Laura Kuhn (The John Cage Trust). Chosen by Holland Cotter for The New York Times.

The 39 letters in this slender volume date from 1942 to the mid-1940s. Preserved by Cunningham and discovered after his death in 2009, they constitute the foundation stones of one of the great Modernist love affairs, one that began as a teacher-student crush (Cage was the teacher) and blossomed into an artistic collaboration and 50-year marriage. We only get Cage’s view of the affair in the letters, but the emotions expressed are intense enough to speak for two: “I nearly left this earth a few minutes ago — ecstasy — word from you,” he writes, and, again and again, “Love you.” As a bonus, scattered throughout this book-as-valentine are snapshots of the New York City home the couple shared. (Read the book review.)

Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World edited by Sébastien Cherruet and Jacques Barsac (Gallimard). Chosen by Jason Farago for The New York Times.

She didn’t just design the now world-famous chaise longue basculante, an easy chair on a movable crescent-shaped steel armature — Charlotte Perriand even modeled it for promotional photography, lazing on the ultra-modern-for-1928 recliner while sporting a necklace strung with industrial ball bearings. In this hefty catalog for the blowout retrospective on view now at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Perriand comes across as a design reformer who also knew, better than many of her colleagues, how to sell and how to persuade. Prepare to swoon over her ski resorts, to envy the impossibly chic Air France offices she designed in London, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, and to scour eBay listings for vintage Perriand chairs for the rest of your life. (Read the exhibition review.)

Taschen in Soho, with cushy Philippe Stark seating

Julie Mehretu edited by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley (Whitney Museum of American Art/DelMonico Books/Prestel). Chosen by Jason Farago for The New York Times.

This artist’s imperative midcareer retrospective — up now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and traveling next year to the Whitney in New York and the High Museum in Atlanta — comes with a rich catalog that captures her paintings’ stuttering intensity and discloses her abstracted source material (wildfires, riots). Ms. Mehretu’s early, architectonic paintings came at a high-water mark for globalization; her recent art, more anxious and more impressive, features thrumming, multilayered fields of color and ricky-tick calligraphic swoops that seethe with the contemporary volatility of states and climates. The book is dedicated to the pioneering Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who died before he could complete his contribution, but whose global engagement animates many of its other essays. (Read about her contribution to “Artistic License” at the Guggenheim.)

Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus by John R. Blakinger (The MIT Press) Chosen by Martha Schwendener for The New York Times

An overdue treatment of the Hungarian-born artist and designer Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001) explores his career, from designing books in Berlin in the 1930s to teaching at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and founding the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. Technology and war are often common threads in Kepes’s work. Innovating forms of camouflage during World War II, his designs coincided with clashes around M.I.T.’s connections with the military during the Vietnam War. Mr. Blakinger argues that Kepes represents a new form of modern artist fluent in and influenced by technology: “the artist as technocrat.”

Banksey Captured by Steve Lazarides (Lazarides) Chosen by Stuart Jeffries, for the Guardian

Steve Lazarides worked with Banksy for 11 years, initially documenting the artist at work back in 1997, then becoming his agent, strategist and even minder….Lazarides has now self-published a book of his photographs from the time he travelled the world tasked with making sure Banksy didn’t get arrested or duffed up and didn’t run out of spray paint. 

Jeffries asked, “How come you two were never arrested?” “The secret,” Lazarides says, “is hi-vis jackets and traffic cones. Nobody stops you if you have them.” However, there was a morning in New York’s Meatpacking District (“before it was gentrified”) when a few transgender sex workers took exception to Banksy painting a wall. “Some of them misconstrued what he was writing as homophobic and called the cops. That’s about as close to getting arrested as we got.” Lazarides and Banksy had various scams to help them get away with things. “Once I gave him a letter saying he had permission from a film producer to paint a wall. And I would be the film producer, armed with a burner phone. If I got a call, I was primed to say, ‘Sorry mate, I meant him to do the other side of the street.’”

Nan Goldin: The Other Side (Steidl) Chosen by New York Magazine’s Strategist editors

The newly updated edition of Nan Goldin’s book of photos (which chronicles the lives of her drag-queen and transgender friends in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s) goes even further into the other side by including the voices of her subjects amid her snapshots of them.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (Aperture) Chosen by New York Magazine’s Strategist editors 

Curator and critic Antwaun Sargent uses powerful images by 15 artists, from Campbell Addy to Ruth Ossai, to create a moving tribute to the international community of black photographers.

Rizzoli, on Broadway in the Flatiron District

Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting (David Zwirner) Chosen by New York Magazine’s Strategist editors 

Timed to the painter’s exhibit of the same name at David Zwirner, this monograph features essays by Teju Cole and Hal Foster.

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York by Christina Weyl (Yale University Press) Chosen by Charles Darwent for The Art Newspaper

In 1940, fleeing Nazi invasion, Stanley William Hayter moved his engraving studio from Paris to New York. The decade it spent there would be of huge importance. Introducing the future Abstract Expressionists to Surrealist automatism, Atelier 17 revolutionised American art. But the studio was particularly important for women. As with the period as a whole, these have been written out of history. Christina Weyl’s scrupulously researched book puts them back centre stage, examining the extraordinary inventiveness of engravers such as Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson, and the role of Hayter’s studio as a crucible for them.

Editor's note: Also see the 2019 DART roundup of indie booksellers here