DVAA Book Club

Books read 2018 to present

2023

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. “

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.”

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.”

  • Goodreads Review

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"

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.”

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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).

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

April 20, 2022 - Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

March 16, 2022 - The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War

February 16, 2022 - Private Lives of the Impressionists

January 18, 2022 - The Thirty Names of Night

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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?

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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?"

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

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.

  • Goodreads Reviews

2020

December 2020 - Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool

  • Author: Trevor Schoonmaker

November 2020 - The Moon and Sixpence

October 2020 - How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

  • Author: David Salle 

September 2020 - Utopia Parkway: Life and Works of Joseph Cornell

August 2020 - Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston

July 2020 - Role Models

June 2020 - The Brilliant History of Color In Art

May 2020 - Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life

April 2020 - The Matisse Stories

March 2020 - Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018

February 2020 - Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe

January 2020 - Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order)

2019

December 2019 - Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas

November 2019 - Just Kids

October 2019 - The Italian Teacher

September 2019 - Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

June 2019 - Memento Park: A Novel

May 2019 - Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow

April 2019 - The Map and the Territory

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 

2018

December 2018 - An Artist of the Floating World

October 2018 - Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

September 2018 - Steal Like an Artist

July 2018 - Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World

May 2018 - Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse

April 2018 - Leonardo Da Vinci