This month’s most anticipated art books are tinged with revolutionary and/or end-times energy. Olivia Liang’s work of historical fiction tells the story of two filmmakers working during Italy’s Years of Lead, while art historian Thomas Crow takes on the French Revolution’s most iconic (and most haunting) image. Meanwhile, the film critic A. S. Hamrah details the denigration of cinema into content in turns both feel-bad and funny. As temperatures drop, grab a blanket and cozy up with one of the books below.
-
Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life
by Sue Roe
I like to joke that Picasso invented Cubism so that he could paint tits and ass at the same time (See Three Waking Women, several Raphael and the Fornarina scenes, and so on). Two years ago, “Pablo-matic”—an infamously cringe Brooklyn Museum exhibition that attracted equally cringy criticism—offered many more Picasso-the-womanizer jokes. But that feminist intervention curiously omitted the many contributions of the many women who cared for Picasso, modeled for him, inspired him, debated him, and turned him on. Sue Roe details the lives of six women—Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque—who shaped his life and art. Their stories vary wildly—from an underage lover to a famed Surrealist photographer—but all are fascinating. Whereas Picasso once quipped that women are either goddesses or doormats, Roe’s book portrays them instead as human beings.
-
The Silver Book
by Olivia Liang
In this new work of historical fiction, Italian filmmakers Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini navigate fascism in art and in life. Liang is best known for expanding what art writing can be, weaving visual analyses and cultural histories into memoirs and now, their second novel, which melds direct quotations from the famed directors with imagined dialogue and characters. Set during a period lasting from the late 1960s to early 1980s, better known as Italy’s Years of Lead, it couldn’t be timelier. And yet what Liang captures best is the textures of the times: the world changing at a fast pace and big scale while people are having sex and making things as if compulsively. Pleasure and peril here punctuate the everyday.
-
Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution
by Thomas Crow
Thomas Crow decided to become an art historian after encountering Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) in the 1960s. This so-called Pietà of the French Revolution resonated with a countercultural Crow—and its poignancy is by no means diminished now. Crow’s new book tells the story of the painting’s legacy, how the image surfaces time and again among waves of political dissent. He tells too of its origins through the eyes of David the painter, of Marat the martyr, and of Charlotte Corday—the assassin.
-
Last Week in End Times Cinema
by A. S. Hamrah
As you’ve probably noticed, the last year has been, generally speaking, bad. Hamrah, n+1 film critic and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 (2018), has meticulously chronicled every bad thing that happened to the film industry over 12 eventful months, from March 2024 to March 2025: the LA wildfires, the reelection of Donald Trump, and the rising threat of AI have all accelerated the denigration of cinema into content. Hamrah details it all in turns both feel-bad and funny.
-
Bread of Angels
by Patti Smith
I tend to think that most artists feel compelled to create because in some way, they need the world to be different than it is, or crave transforming something given into something new. Patti Smith’s new memoir tells one such story, starting with her childhood imagination and the escape it served growing up in a condemned housing complex. Hers is a life of loss but also creation. Where the punk icon’s previous memoir, 2010’s Just Kids, won the National Book Award, this one promises to be even more personal. It took her 10 years to write.
-
Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future
by Julia Voss and Daniel Birnbaum
It was long thought that Wassily Kandinsky was responsible for painting the first abstractions in Western art history. But firsts are famously difficult, if not impossible to prove, and indeed, this century has seen art historians rewrite assumption after assumption. Most famously perhaps, Hilma af Klint finally got the credit she is due—her abstractions predate Kandinsky’s. But rather than foster a competitive spirit, two writers—Julia Voss and Daniel Birnbaum—have conspired together on a braided, his-and-hers biography. There’s no reason to believe the painters ever met. Instead, the authors look to the shared social forces the two European painters navigated in their lives and in their art.
