Books, books, books—they surround us, mentally and physically, in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, in stacks on the floor acting as end tables, or just standing there, tall, majestical, like columnar yews. We couldn’t live without them. They’re our friends, some old, some new. And we can’t help adding to them, much to the chagrin of those already sharing our homes. If you’re like us, and looking to spread the love this holiday season, we have some suggestions for you.
Catalogs From Curators, for Aspiring Ones
Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral
Consider Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral, on the occasion of the first European retrospective (at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag on view through April 4) of work by the 98-year-old. She and Alex Katz were great friends, and they emerged on the New York post-war art scene at the same time. They both loved the landscapes of Maine and in the early ’50s, they jointly bought the little cabin that Alex and Ada Katz still summer in up there. Unlike Katz, though, Dodd didn’t find fame until recently, and the75 paintings in this new book shows why she deserves it. —Dodie Kazanjian
George Condo is the exuberant catalog for the biggest and most ambitious show of his career. The exhibition, on through February 8, is at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Both show and catalog nail down the essence of Condo, which is that he is a gesamtkunstwerk in himself, as is this book. References to music and literature dance together with the 80 paintings, 110 drawings, and 20 sculptures. Art history, the human figure, and abstraction co-exist happily to build the vast and fertile imaginary world he has created over four decades, that has established Condo as a modern master. —D.K.
Man Ray: When Objects Dream
Man Ray, another American artist who spent time in Paris, is having his day now, too, with a blockbuster show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Man Ray: When Objects Dream.” That’s also the title of a 338-page catalog, starring the magical and transformative rayograph (a camera-less photograph) that he invented in 1920s Paris. Flirting with both representation and abstraction, his rayographs are put in context with his paintings, photographs, drawings, objects, and films in this handsome book. —D.K.
The Woman Question 1550–2025
Art historian and curator Alison Gingeras’s The Woman Question 1550-2025 (out in January but available for preorder) rounds up 130 women artists, many forgotten and most of them never given their due, over nearly five centuries. It’s the catalog that accompanies Gingeras’s monumental exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and it rewrites art history from the perspective of women, asking and answering many questions within the big one, and debunking the myth of female absence in art history once and for all. —D.K.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
Coinciding with Janny Saville’s major retrospective at London’s National Gallery of Art, a monograph of her work, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, pieces together 60 paintings and drawings, many of which haven’t been seen before. The show moves to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth at the end of this year, an occasion that will mark the first major U.S. exhibition for the artist. —Chloe Schama
Of all the impressionists, August Renoir can get a bad rap—all those cherubic children with their flushed cheeks. You can practically smell the baby powder (or 19th-century equivalent) wafting off the canvas a century later. And so the Morgan Library’s “Renoir Drawings” exhibition—and the catalog from DAP Press—comes as something of a revelation, an inventory of casual experimentation, intimate arrangements, and post-painting records. If you love Renoir, there’s a lot to learn—and the same might be said if you don’t harbor any affection for him at all. —C.S.
New Humans: Memories of the Future
As we wait for the New Museum’s reopening in early 2026, we have New Humans: Memories of the Future, the catalog for the upcoming exhibition, which will chronicle humanity’s clashes and convergences with technology. —C.S.
From Under the Tree, Into the Kitchen
Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art
Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art is the food-meets-art collaboration you didn’t know you needed until its sunny cover came across your desk. There are few chefs who could commandeer the attention of one of our greatest living artists, but count Ruthie Rogers among them. Here she partners with none other than Ed Ruscha to deliver a tribute to the humble but endlessly inspiring lemon—celebrating all its acerbic variability with recipes ranging from risotto al limone to the ur-lemon tart. A tangy treat. —C.S.
French Classics: Easy and Elevated Dishes to Cook at Home
There is something so straightforwardly delightful about this cookbook, a forthright guide to the kind of recipes—moules mariniére, beef bourguignon—that make you feel as though you’re attending your grandmother’s dinner party, if she was entertaining on Park Avenue. And yet, there’s nothing fussy or stuffy about Matthew Ryle’s French Classics; rather, it’s a streamlined and simplified (without sacrificing authenticity!) take on the classics we all love. —C.S.
One Pot: 100 Simple Recipes to Cook Together
On my Christmas list: a super-sized Le Creuset casserole dish, with which to feed the many mouths in my family. I’d also love to get my hands on—and my wooden spoons into—One Pot: 100 Simple Recipes to Cook Together, a multifaceted manual to everything you can do with it. Recipes range from breads to cakes to those elusive one-pot dinners. —C.S.
Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Everyday.
When you’re tired of cooking, or need to bolster your sense of why we do it at all, dip into Tamar Adler’s lovely, poetic new book, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Everyday. It’s a diary of sorts, collecting reflections from her kitchen and her past—the clouds of french toast she cooks for her son when there’s a snow day and time for a hot breakfast; the farro soup she ate on a trip (“biblical pottage”) and then made for a friend undergoing chemotherapy—“an elixir, a human food that started before us all.” Such observations are casually dispensed, as the most profound wisdom often is. —C.S.
Photography From Vogue, and Beyond
Paolo Roversi (Photofile)
Thames & Hudson this year issued a monograph, Paolo Roversi, for the photographer whose sprawling retrospective opened earlier this year at Pace Gallery in New York. Less well-known in America than in the European countries where his career has flourished, Roversi (now 78) is nonetheless a master of the fashion image that can seem both ephemeral and striking—a distinct perspective. As he told Mark Holgate in an interview this summer, he wants “to work with my heart as much as my camera.” —C.S.
Pamela Hanson was the ’90s fashion photographer who perhaps best captured her subjects’ sense of carefree fun: her models skipped down the streets, sipped wine, and threw their hats in the air. Though don’t accuse Hanson of having a type. In Pamela Hanson: The ’90s, the photographer shows that she was always driven by her subjects’ individual spark more than any desired aesthetic outcome. —C.S.
The work of another giant of the ’90s (and beyond) is collected in a new book, Steven Klein: Vogue, a celebratory assortment of some of the provocateur’s most striking images created for this magazine. As much as those images celebrate surfaces—shiny, plasticky, impenetrable—they are also always conceptual. The bold and uncompromising work is an ongoing lesson in the power of risk-taking. —C.S.
Additionally, Annie Leibovitz’s new edition of Women pairs her 1999 collection with more recent photographs, taken between 1993 and today, and new essays by Gloria Steinem and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. If the first edition was a survey of possibility, this collection is more about accomplishment, celebrating women who have had an impact on the world. —C.S.
Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real
When Tyler Mitchell became, in 2018, the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of Vogue (and at the age of 23, no less), he made history. Since then, he’s photographed many more times for Vogue, had solo exhibitions, and earlier this year, shot the catalog for the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition. His new book, Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real shows just how broad his range is; here there are fashion images, landscapes that evoke early 20th-century impressionists, and singularly revealing portraits—a figure, crouched down and veiled by a spray of water from a garden hose, conveys a fuller sense of her existence than if she had been in the clear. —C.S.
Any book on this list would delight the aesthete on your list, but this major new volume from Assouline—with its damier-printed case and hundreds of splendid images from Louis Vuitton’s 171-year history—may be especially apropos. Written by the Franco-Swiss journalist and filmmaker Arthur Dreyfus, From Louis to Vuitton charts the maison’s evolution from small-time luggage purveyor to paragon of French elegance, a journey full of treasures. —Marley Marius
Big in Japan
This season I couldn’t resist Hiroshige, Henri-Alexis Baatsch’s latest contribution to Japanese art. The monumental scale and luxury of the book (the cover feels like silk to the touch) and Baatsch’s lively text makes me feel like I’m right there with Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), discovering those iconic landscapes. Hiroshige’s influence on Manet, Monet, and Van Gogh is undeniable. (Baatsch is also the author of the just-as-magisterial book Hokusai: A Life in Drawing, which came out this time last year. Same size, same attention to detail, but the focus was Katsushika Hokusai, the mid-18-century master of the woodcut.) —D.K.
Finally, Hokusai’s Method, an omnibus edition of Hokusai’s drawing manuals, or “e-tehon.” I, of course, had to have all of them. But I should add that the two beautiful, large, silky covered volumes fall into the category of what my husband says about jumbo-size books: “Once you put them down, you just can’t pick them up. —D.K.
#Coffee #Table #Books #Give #Holiday #Season
