DVAA Book Club
Books read 2018 to present
2024
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir
Author: Bernard Cooper
“My Avant-Garde Education is at once an artist's coming-of-age story and a personal chronicle of the era of conceptual art, from a writer "of uncommon subtlety and nuance" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). It is a record of the wonders and follies of a certain era in art history, always aware that awakening to art is, for a young person, inseparable from awakening to the ever-shifting nature of the self.”
Wednesday, October 16, 2024 The Slip: The NYC Street that Changed Art Forever
Author: Prudence Peiffer
“An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work.“
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 The Dream Colony: A Life in Art
Author: Ealter Hoops with Deborah Treisman
“An intimate tour through fifty years of American art history” (New Yorker) through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it-with an introduction by legendary artist Ed Ruscha”
Wednesday, July 17, 2024 Art is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionairies and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night
Author: Jerry Saltz
“With his signature blend of candor and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist—reminding us that art is a kind of channeled voice of human experience, a necessary window onto our times. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers.”
Wednesday, June 19, 2024 Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art
Author: Judith E Stein
“Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy’s artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties rescues the legacy of the elusive art dealer and tells the story of a counterculture that became the mainstream. A tale of money, taste, loyalty, and luck, Richard Bellamy’s life is a remarkable window into the art of the twentieth century and the making of a generation’s aesthetic.”
Wednesday, May 15, 2024 If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present
Author: T.J. Clark
“In If These Apples Should Fall, celebrated art historian T. J. Clark looks back on Cézanne from our current moment when such judgments need justifying. What was it, he asks, that held Cézanne’s viewers spellbound? At the heart of Cézanne’s work lies a sense of disquiet: a hopelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety beneath the splendid colors. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Camille Pissarro, Matisse, and others in relation to Cézanne’s. Above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cézanne’s achievement. “
Wednesday, April 17, 2024 The Lonely City: Adventures in the art of Being Alone
Author: Olivia Laing
“Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.”
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 The Exhibitionist: A Novel
Author: Charlotte Mendelson
“The Exhibitionist is the latest, extraordinary novel from Charlotte Mendelson, a dazzling exploration of art, sacrifice, toxic family politics, queer desire, and personal freedom.”
Wednesday, February 21, 2024 Art Writing in Crisis
Editors: Brad Haylock and Megan Patty
“This book is a timely compilation of texts that expose the conditions of art writing and publishing, and propose collectivity, diversity, and solidarity.”
Wednesday, January 17, 2024 The Muralist
Author: B.A. Shapiro
“From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Art Forger comes a thrilling new novel of art, history, love, and politics that traces the life and mysterious disappearance of a brilliant young artist on the eve of World War II.”
2023
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 Day Book: The Journal of an Artist
Author: Annie Truitt
“Although my life is different from Anne's I found many inspiring thoughts and ideas in her writing. Her heart laid bare for a glimpse into the challenges facing a mother and artist. Creativity versus survival, doing something meaningful, what your life's work means to you. My internal landscape opened up as I was reading. The answers to our questions do come, but not on our timetable. I was moved by many passages, one of which I'd like to share. Thought provoking and heart awakening.”
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 Attribution
Author: Linda Moore
“Written with vivid prose, rich references to seventeenth century Spanish art, compelling characters and a historical puzzle, Attribution is the story of one contemporary woman's journey to understand the past--and unlock her future.”
Wednesday, September 20, 2023 Off the Wall: Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg
Author: Calvin Tomkins
“I should make a shelf for all the art books I have read to try to school myself on the subject. Even though I know that's not the most effective way to learn, I find myself reading lots of artist bios because I feel terribly guilty that I know so little about art. This one, though, turned out to be something different than the traditional bio. It's really more about the intersection of art (Robert Rauschenberg), music (John Cage), and dance (Merce Cunningham). It's like the biographical equivalent to my favorite quote--'Art doesn't happen in a vacuum."
Wednesday, August 16, 2023 Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Author: Daniel Silva
“Now, this master novelist who "tells his story with zest, wit and superb timing, and engineers enough surprises to startle even the most attentive reader" (Wall Street Journal) continues his remarkable success with this latest blockbuster. A powerhouse novel showcasing the outstanding narrative skills, brilliant imagination, and deep knowledge of emerging global threats that are the hallmarks of his "expertly crafted" (Bob Woodward) works, Silva's latest is a must read for both his multitudes of loyal fans and growing legions of converts.”
Wednesday, July 19, 2023 The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Author: Dominic Smith
"This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier novels Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.”
Wednesday, June 21, 2023 Picasso's War
Author: Hugh Eakins
“A riveting story of how dueling ambitions and the power of prodigy made America the cultural center of the world—and Picasso the most famous artist alive—in the shadow of World War II”
Wednesday, May 17, 2023 Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir
Author: Amy Kurzwell
“Themes of guilt, Jewish identity, and the complex relationships among daughters, mothers, and grandmothers . . . expanded upon with humor and honesty.” —School Library Journal
Wednesday, April 19, 2023 Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keefe and/or The Life and Art of Georgia O’Keeffe
Author of Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keefe: Dawn Tripp
Author of The Life and Art of Georgia O’Keefe: Jan Castro
“A breathtaking work of the imagination, Georgia is the story of a passionate young woman, her search for love and artistic freedom, the sacrifices she will face, and the bold vision that will make her a legend.”
“An unusual treasure The Life and Art of Georgia O’Kefe, is an illustrated work about the life, world, inspirations, and paintings of this famous American artist. 136 full-color and black-and-white illustrations.”
Goodreads Reviews of Georgia, Goodreads Reviews of The Life and Art of Georgia O’Keefe
Wednesday, March 15, 2023 - South of Pico: Afro-American Artists in LA 1960’s and 1970’s
Author: Kellie Jones
“In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces. With South of Pico, Jones expands the understanding of the histories of black arts and creativity in Los Angeles and beyond. “
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 - Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920- 1930
Author: Steven Watson
“Now available in paperback, this richly-illustrated book contains more than 70 black-and-white photographs and drawings. Steven Watson clearly traces the rise and flowering of this movement, evoking its main figures as well as setting the scene--describing Harlem from the Cotton Club to its literary salons, from its white patrons like Carl van Vechten to its most famous entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong among many others. He depicts the social life of working-class speakeasies, rent parties, gay and lesbian nightlife, as well as the celebrated parties at the twin limestone houses owned by hostess A'Lelia Walker. This is an important history of one of America's most influential cultural phenomenons.”
Wednesday, January 18, 2023 - The Passion of Artemisia
Author: Susan Vreeland
“From extraordinary highs - patronage by the Medicis, friendship with Galileo and, most importantly of all, beautiful and outstandingly original paintings - to rape by her father’s colleague, torture by the Inquisition, life-long struggles for acceptance by the artistic Establishment, and betrayal by the men she loved, Artemisia was a bold and brilliant woman who lived as she wanted, and paid a high price.”
2022
Wednesday, November 16, 2022 - I Always Loved You
Author: Robin Oliveira
"A novel of Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas's great romance from the New York Times bestselling author of My Name Is Mary Sutter The young Mary Cassatt never thought moving to Paris after the Civil War to be an artist was going to be easy, but when, after a decade of work, her submission to the Paris Salon is rejected, Mary's fierce determination wavers. Her father is begging her to return to Philadelphia to find a husband before it is too late, her sister Lydia is falling mysteriously ill, and worse, Mary is beginning to doubt herself. Then one evening a friend introduces her to Edgar Degas and her life changes forever. Years later she will learn that he had begged for the introduction, but in that moment their meeting seems a miracle. So begins the defining period of her life and the most tempestuous of relationships"
Wednesday, October 19, 2022 - Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa
Author: Marilyn Chase
“This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices—family, friends, teachers, and critics—to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist.”
September 21, 2022 - Lee Krasner: A Biography
Author: Gail Levin
“It’s about time someone set the record straight about artist Lee Krasner.... Absorbing....Succinct... Invaluable.... A compelling biography that is as important an addition to the library of American art as any book on Pollock.” -- Chicago Sun-Times “For the love of art....Art historian Gail Levin frames the extremely colorful life of Lee Krasner, major ass-kicking Abstract Expressionist and formidable genius in her own right, better known for boosting the career of her splashier-than-life husband, Jackson Pollock.” -- Vanity Fair
August 17, 2022 - The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908
Author: Hilary Spurling
The author’s discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse’s health and work is an extraordinary revelation. She also enters into Matisse’s struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity…an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.
July 20, 2022 - The Principles of Uncertainty
Author: Maira Kalman
An irresistible invitation to experience life through a beloved artist’s psyche, The Principles of uncertainty is a compilation of Maira Kalman’s New York Times columns. Brilliant, whimsical paintings, ideas, and images - which initially appear random - ultimately form an intricately interconnected worldview, an idiosyncratic inner monologue.
June 15, 2022 - Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art
Author: Ruth Brandon
In 1913 Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase exploded through the American art world. This is the story of how he followed the painting to New York two years later, enchanted the Arensberg salon, and changed art forever. The book details a love triangle among Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché-- who became the author of Jules and Jim, and Beatrice Wood-- who became a celebrated ceramicist. And how Duchamp fell into obscurity until, decades later, he became famous for a second time for the Fountain (the urinal).
May 18, 2022 - The Art Forger
Author: B.A. Shapiro
Historical fiction based on a true crime, the infamous $500m art heist of 1990, which took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The plot centers around a young struggling artist, Claire Roth, who excels in reproducing famous works of art. A classic Faustian pact, The Art Forger explores themes of ethics, art, and cupidity while providing an insight into the history of fraudulent art.
April 20, 2022 - Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Author: Stephen Nachmanovitch
March 16, 2022 - The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War
Author: Roger Shattuck
February 16, 2022 - Private Lives of the Impressionists
Author: Sue Roe
January 18, 2022 - The Thirty Names of Night
Author: Zeyn Joukhadar
2021
November 17, 2021 - How to Paint a Dead Man
Author : Sarah Hall
It's the story of the lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator— that intertwine across nearly five decades in a luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power.
October 20, 2021 - The Art of Love: the Romantic and Explosive Stories Behind Art’s Greatest Couples
Author: Kate Bryan
The Art of Love tells the stories of 35 famous couples from the art world, exploring the variously passionate, tender, challenging, loving and tragic relationships that led to some of the world’s most famous artworks.
July 2021 - The Bridal Chair
Author: Gloria Goldreich
Ida Chagall, the only daughter of Marc Chagall, is blossoming in the Paris art world beyond her father's controlling gaze. But her newfound independence is short-lived. In Nazi-occupied Paris, Chagall's status as a Jewish artist has made them all targets, yet his devotion to his art blinds him to their danger. When Ida falls in love and Chagall angrily paints an empty wedding chair (The Bridal Chair) in response, she faces an impossible choice: Does she fight to forge her own path outside her father's shadow, or abandon her ambitions to save Chagall from his enemies and himself?
June 2021 - Loving Modigliani
Author: Linda Lappin
The ghost of Jeanne Hébuterne returns to Montparnasse in Linda Lappin’s new novel, Loving Modigliani, retelling the story of Jeanne Hébuterne’s fate as a woman and an artist through three timelines and three precious objects stolen from the studio: a diary, a bangle, and a self-portrait of Jeanne depicted together with Modi and their daughter. A century later, Jeanne Hébuterne’s artwork will be rescued from oblivion.
May 2021 - Becoming Philadelphia: How an Old American City Made Itself New Again
Author: Inga Saffron.
Essays from Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic following recent success and failures. A fearless crusader who is also a seasoned reporter, Inga Saffron ranges beyond the usual boundaries of architectural criticism to explore how big money and politics intersect with design, profoundly shaping our everyday experience of city life. Even as she celebrates Philadelphia’s resurgence, she considers how it finds itself grappling with the problems of success: gentrification, poverty, privatization, and the unequal distribution of public services.
April 2021 - 33 Artists in 3 Acts
Author: Sarah Thornton
Through these intimate scenes, 33 Artists in 3 Acts explores what it means to be a real artist in the real world. Divided into three cinematic "acts"—politics, kinship, and craft—it investigates artists' psyches, personas, politics, and social networks. Witnessing their crises and triumphs, Thornton turns a wry, analytical eye on their different answers to the question "What is an artist?"
March 2021 - The World to Come
Author: Dara Horn
A million-dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history--from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam.
February 2021 - The Printmaker’s Daughter
Author: Katherine Govier
In the evocative tale of 19th century Tokyo, The Printmaker’s Daughter delivers an enthralling tale of one of the world’s great unknown artists: Oei, the mysterious daughter of master printmaker Hokusai, painter of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
January 2021 - How to Be An Artist
Author: Jerry Saltz
Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art world’s most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds.
2020
December 2020 - Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool
Author: Trevor Schoonmaker
November 2020 - The Moon and Sixpence
Author: W. Somerset Maugham
October 2020 - How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art
Author: David Salle
September 2020 - Utopia Parkway: Life and Works of Joseph Cornell
Author: Deborah Soloman
August 2020 - Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston
Author: Musa Mayer
July 2020 - Role Models
Author: John Waters
June 2020 - The Brilliant History of Color In Art
Author: Victoria Furley
May 2020 - Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life
Author: Twyla Tharp
April 2020 - The Matisse Stories
Author: A. S. Byatt
March 2020 - Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
Author: Peter Schjeldahl
February 2020 - Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe
Author: Anne M. Wagner
January 2020 - Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order)
Author: Bridget Quinn
2019
December 2019 - Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas
Author: Micheal Stone and Eric Fischl
November 2019 - Just Kids
Author: Patti Smith
October 2019 - The Italian Teacher
Author: Tom Rachman
September 2019 - Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
Author: Mark Dery
June 2019 - Memento Park: A Novel
Author: Mark Sarvas
May 2019 - Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow
Author: Laurie Wilson
April 2019 - The Map and the Territory
Author: Michel Houellebecq
January & February 2019 - Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changes Modern Art
Author: Mary Gabriel
2018
December 2018 - An Artist of the Floating World
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
October 2018 - Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
Author: Nell Painter
September 2018 - Steal Like an Artist
Author: Austin Kleon
July 2018 - Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World
Author: Miles J. Unger
May 2018 - Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse
Author: Stanley Meisler
April 2018 - Leonardo Da Vinci
Author: Walter Isaacson