The best contemporary art books to enjoy now

When it comes to art books, contrary to popular pessimism, print still very much has a pulse. From maverick monographs and topical tomes to coffee table icebreakers, these are the best art books of the moment.

The best contemporary art books

Mirror Mirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art

Subtitled ‘The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art,’ Michael Petry’s monograph delves into all things shiny in modern creative practice. Originally a demonstration of a painter’s technical skills, the art of the reflection has been transformed by its role in sculpture and installation. In a self-obsessed culture that loves to look at itself, MirrorMirror examines art that that questions the place of the viewer.

MirrorMirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art by Michael Petry, £45, Thames & Hudson

amazon.co.uk

Writer: Jonathan Bell

Bonnard

If you're going to buy one book on the pre-eminent French colourist, Isabelle Cahn's huge slip-cased monograph is the one to go for. Offering both the scale and quality needed to immerse yourself in Pierre Bonnard's copious output, from his thoughtful, if voyeuristic, vision of domesticity, with the more insalubrious fringes of the demimonde peeping through his layered, hazy palette.

Bonnard, Isabelle Cahn, £99, Prestel

amazon.co.uk

Writer: Jonathan Bell

Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman's House

This year marks 30 years since the artist, filmmaker and gay activist Derek Jarman died, aged just 52, in London in 1994. He had been diagnosed with Aids in December 1986, a decade before radical antiretroviral treatment lifted life expectancy of those diagnosed with HIV up to a more general, expected level. A new book by Gilbert McCarragher, a Dungeness local, friend and photographer, invites us to experience the world as Jarman saw it from within the house, and of which he wrote in his diary, in 1990:

‘Prospect Cottage is the last of a long line of “escape houses” I started building as a child at the end of the garden: grass houses of fragrant mowings that slowly turned brown and sour; sandcastles; a turf hut, hardly big enough to turn around in; another of scrap metal and twigs, marooned on ice-flooded fields – stomping across brittle ice.’

This new book, and McGarragher’s devotion to both the house and its subjects offer touching insight to Jarman as a person, beyond his significant cultural and political achievements. Art historian Frances Borzello’s moving foreword also illuminates Jarman’s deeply poetic nature, allowing us to understand, in some way, the gnawing void that those closest to him are destined to live with every day.

Writer: Caragh McKay

£25, amazon.co.uk

Luna Luna: The Art Amusement Park, by André Heller

In 1987, the first ever art amusement park was born. More than 30 of the era’s most acclaimed artists – including David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dalí, and Keith Haring – designed unique and fully functional fairground attractions, from rides to interactive sculptures and games. A new book, Luna Luna: The Art Amusement Park, written by André Heller and published by Phaidon, chronicles the art-meets-amusement utopia. This reissue is published for the first time in English and includes a special UV ink spine text that glows in the dark, like the moon.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£34.95, phaidon.com

Cooking with Scorsese & others: The Collection 

A decade after the series began, this volume brings together all three instalments of Hato Press’ acclaimed Cooking with Scorsese, an ongoing homage to the experiences, stories and sensations of food on film, inspired by the master of food on film – director Martin Scorsese. This compendium extracts sequences from 50 films features everything from Jûzô Itami’s Tampopo (1985) to the delectables in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). It’s a sumptuous ode to food as a filmic device to unite, fuel, entertain and seduce.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£28, hatopress.net

‘Abstract Expressionists: The Women’, by Ellen G. Landau and Joan M. Marter

Abstract Expressionism: the supercharged, ultra-gestural response to a changing world. Instead of documenting what they saw, artists looked inwards and used their feelings as raw material. We’ve all heard of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, but what about their female counterparts? A new book by Ellen G. Landau and Joan M. Marter seeks to remedy this imbalance, spotlighting the (often unsung) heroines of Abstract Expressionism, including ​​Lee Krasner, Perle Fine, Dorothy Dehner, Helen Frankenthaler and Alma Thomas.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£45, merrellpublishers.com

Censored Art Today, by Gareth Harris 

In recent years, debates and scrutiny surrounding censorship have swelled to new levels of intensity, notably in the world of arts and culture. But in a globalised, digitised, subjective world, who are the censors, and what are the consequences of censoring art? These themes are at the heart of Gareth Harris’ engaging and timely analyses in Censored Art Today. From political censorship in China, Cuba and the Middle East to the suppression of LGBTQ+ artists, cancel culture and the algorithms policing art online, Harris’ superbly-researched book poses critical questions about the trajectory of free speech, free expression and ultimately, who gets to decide.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£19.99, waterstones.com

The Gourmand’s Egg. A Collection of Stories & Recipes 

It’s been Dalí’s muse, Hitchcock’s nightmare, and for others, one of the most versatile culinary ingredients human nature ever invented. It turns out that the egg also makes a great ingredient for a book. With written contributions from Ruth Reichl and Jennifer Higgie, The sumptuously illustrated The Gourmand’s Egg, published by Taschen celebrates the long-running relationship between eggs and art, ranging from antiquity to now. This cracking read covers the full spectrum of egg potential: poached, scrambled, whipped into a cocktail, transformed into an art medium, or used as a tool for protest.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£40, taschen.com

Adriana Varejão

This first English-language monograph on Adriana Varejão explores how the Brazilian artist has stretched the discipline of painting to its extremes as she reifies the legacy of Brazil's colonial past, pluralist identities, disparate cultures, religion, eroticism and Modernism. From early paintings created in the 1990s to recent multimedia installations, pages explode with chaotic, pulsating red viscera rupturing with force from cold, domestic structures.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

$75, gagosianshop.com

Great Women Painters

The recorded history of painting is long and comprehensive; for the female pioneers, it’s less so. In her 1971 essay, Linda Nochlin asked Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? The answer, she found, is that there were great women artists, they had just all too often been denied opportunities for greatness. Inspired by Nochlins text, a new book Great Women Painters, published in October, will explore the work of 300 artists born in 60 countries from the 16th to 21st centuries, framed as an A-Z of the key female players in painting history. Among those featured include Vanessa Bell, Etel Adnan, Rana Begum, Cecily Brown, Judy Chicago, Elaine de Kooning, Genieve Figgis, Katharina Grosse, Carmen Herrera, Luchita Hurtado, Shirazeh Houshiary, and Julie Mehretu.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£49.95, phaidon.com

Doug Aitken: Works 1992–2022

Diving into the staggering career of American artist, Doug Aitken: Works 1992–2022 explores everything from the ambitious artist’s large-scale film installations, site-specific sculptures in extraordinary locations, to happenings like Station to Station (2013), which saw a train containing a nomadic studio cross the USA from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with performances staged at each stop. The 600-page tome is punctuated by texts by the likes of Dean Kuipers, Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Susan Solomon.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£100, mackbooks.co.uk

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp means different things to different people. To some, he fathered the readymade, to Willem de Kooning in 1951, he was a ‘one-man movement’. Published in 1959, the book Marcel Duchamp became the bible of the artist’s work. It was the result of years of Duchamp’s collaboration with its author, art historian and critic Robert Lebel, and offered a comprehensive and penetrating study of the artist: from his early painting, subsequent farewell to painting, to his fixation on the fetish. Marcel Duchamp went out of print for 60 years, but the Grove Press English edition is now back in circulation with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ authorised facsimile.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£100, hauserwirth.com

The Women Who Changed Art Forever: Feminist Art – The Graphic Novel

In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin asked, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' The issue, she wrote, ‘lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education'. There had been great women artists, they had just been denied the opportunity of greatness. The Women Who Changed Art Forever by Valentina Grande and Eva Rosetti tells the story of four trailblazers of feminist art: Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, Ana Mendieta and the Guerrilla Girls. The fight for equality is a long road. The graphic novel narrates this unfinished story with vibrance and accessibility through those that paved, and continue to pave, the way to a more equal art world.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£14.99, laurenceking.com

The Hotel by Sophie Calle 

Privacy. These days, it’s everywhere, and nowhere. In 1981, Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid to breach it, for art. At the Hotel C in Venice, the French artist snuck a camera and tape recorder into her mop bucket. As she cleaned, she voyeuristically and methodically documented the personal belongings of guests; their bedding, books, postcards, and toiletries. She rifled through rubbish bins, diary entries, letters and family photographs. She eavesdropped on arguments and sex and sprayed herself with perfume that wasn’t hers. The Hotel, published for the first time as a standalone book in English, is a provocative examination of privacy, lack thereof, and what fragmented possessions might reveal about our lives – all told through belongings that were never meant for Calle, or us, to see.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

$40, sigliopress.com

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei 

Experiencing the art of Ai Weiwei is like biting into a scorpion. Plenty of sting, searingly sharp, and hard to swallow. And so it should be. The Chinese artist has dedicated his life, career and freedom to exploring some of the most pertinent issues facing humanity. His long-awaited memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, is a century-long epic tale of China narrated through his own life and the legacy of his father, the celebrated poet Ai Qing, who was banned from writing and subjected to hard labour for 20 years. As Ai told us in an interview last year: ‘I [decided] to write a book about what was happening, so my son knew his grandfather and his father, from their own words.’

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

RRP £25, penguin.co.uk

From the Sculptor’s Studio: Conversations with 20 Seminal Artists, by Ina Cole

There’s a majestic quality to the artist’s studio; a sense of potential in the often-private to-and-fro of an artist as they wrestle with concept, form and execution. From the Sculptor’s Studio, published by Laurence King, is a record of where the magic happens. Writer Ina Cole conducted conversations with 20 seminal sculptors, exploring the artists’ lives and work in their own words, in their own environments. The book features 165 images of studios and artworks, alongside portraits of each sculptor, which includes Phyllida Barlow, Anthony Caro, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, Richard Long, David Nash, Cornelia Parker, Marc Quinn, Eva Rothschild and Rachel Whiteread.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£45, laurenceking.com

Photography Now, by Charlotte Jansen

For photographers in the 20th century, things were more straightforward. Whole genres could be sparked by a single photograph of something the world had never seen. These days, standing out in an image-saturated post-Instagram world is tough. In this comprehensive, authoritative and international book, writer and longtime Wallpaper* contributor Charlotte Jansen surveys the 50 most significant photographers working today, with high-quality reproductions of their work, commentary and interviews. Artists featured include Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hassan Hajjaj, Andreas Gursky, Juno Calypso, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Catherine Opie, Martin Parr, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Juergen Teller. It's an important book in an age when society faces the increasingly heavy social responsibilities of photography, and visual communication more broadly.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£35, octopusbooks.co.uk

Peter Blake: Collage

Throughout his seven-decade career – which included co-designing The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve – artist Peter Blake has redefined what collage can be: a collision of media, genre, time and space. Peter Blake: Collage reveals the British artist’s knack for extracting fragments of banal reality, and transforming them into compositions that could only exist in imagination. It also captures the artist’s flair for fusing seemingly disparate, distinct items, figures and scenes into one cohesive artwork, one that has cemented his status as the ‘Godfather of British pop art’. As old school friend David Hockney notes in the book’s foreword: ‘Peter understands that collage places one time on top of another’.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

thamesandhudson.com

The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists

Creativity does not stop at the studio door; for many, it extends to the kitchen. This is the subject of Phaidon’s The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists, in which 70 leading contemporary artists present 100 recipes, illustrated with personal photographs, paintings, collages, sketches, iPhone snaps, and illustrations. Among the features – which include contributions by Subodh Gupta, Jeppe Hein, Carsten Höller, Laure Provost, Kehinde Wiley, Ragnar Kjartansson, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija – we were excited to find Charles Gaines’ Southern-Style Candied Yams, a recipe originally commissioned for the March 2021 issue of Wallpaper*.

Writer: Harriet Lloyd-Smith

£29.95, phaidon.com