Small Books

A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history In her memoir, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly...

This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality. In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting...

Alex Pilcher’s A Queer Little History of Art is a beautiful book that illustrates the wide variety of queer art from around the world exploring bodies and identity, love and desire, and prejudice and protest through drawing, painting, photography,...

Curator and critic David Anfam’s crucial exploration of the Abstract Expressionist movement, updated to include scholarship of the past decade and a half Abstract Expressionism is arguably the most important art movement since the Second World War...

A window into the world of functional everyday design The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of “super normal design”: alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable...

Derek Jarman's Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love.   “For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.” —Derek Jarman   Originally...

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained...

In a world of infinite images here is a guide to 65 of the best ever taken. From early experiments with light and form through Leica masterpieces and now artificially generated images, take it or leave it, this is our opinion as to why these particular...

For as long as there’s been paint, there have been women painters – these are the painters you may not have heard of who have shaped the way we see. From artists at the forefront of the Dutch Golden Age to avant-garde radicals in Soviet Russia and...

 Explore the dynamic world of 1960s pop art through Lucy Lippard's insightful analysis of this groundbreaking international art movement. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series presents timeless works by...

 What is the purpose of art in a world on fire? Can it be a genuine form of political resistance? What is the purpose of art in a world on fire? In this exhilarating and deeply inspiring work, Amber Massie-Blomfield considers the work of artists,...

 Improve your skills and techniques for drawing mammals! This small, portable book presents more than 500 drawings for 100 species of mammals, collected into categories of habitat—land, water, and air. In this book, artist and teacher Michel...

 The must-have guide for all artists who draw the human figure! This small, portable book presents a unique perspective on the human body for artists to study and implement in their drawing work. In this book, artist and teacher Michel Lauricella...

This visual gift book introduces readers to the field of Black figuration by highlighting key works from the National Portrait Gallery exhibition The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure. The selections included in this brief introduction...

Reissued to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, this book explores one of the most important art schools of the last hundred years. The Bauhaus, a school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919, informed the aesthetic...

An extraordinary synthesis of more than a century’s worth of art across Central and South America, Latin American Art Since 1900 covers everyone from popular figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, to a wide range of other artists who are less...

A new edition of the groundbreaking book by Whitney Chadwick maps the complete history of women artists from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to today. Art historian Whitney Chadwick’s acclaimed bestselling study challenges the assumption that great...

 An overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that responds to today’s environmental crisis, from species extinction to climate change. Art and Climate Change collects a wide range of artistic responses to our current ecological emergency...

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to...

“I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don’t invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made—but to be untangled—in the real world.” —Vincent van Gogh to Émile...

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism...

The twentieth volume in the renowned ekphrasis series, this collection of Virginia Woolf’s writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.   Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the...