The spirit of Valentine’s Day, like February itself, is best kept short and sweet. On the occasion of a notoriously commercial day that can provoke resentment, elation, or both at the same time, we’ve gathered art books about letters and love in all its forms — platonic, romantic, familial, artistic, political. Read on for a book to gift your artsy militant boo, a memoir featuring letters between Barbara Chase-Riboud and her mother, a compilation of art historical love affairs, and more. Enjoy, and xoxo. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
What Art Can Tell Us About Love by Nick Trend
What Art Can Tell Us About Love is a trip through art history via some of its most storied love affairs, and if the idea of “muses” springs to mind, this book deliberately eschews it, finding it “alienating” and “aggrandizing.” And while biographical details provide useful context for works by Édouard Manet, Tamara de Lempicka, and Frida Kahlo, to name a few, for art historian Nick Trend, the paintings, sculptures, and photographs themselves are puzzles to decode, in search of the kind of truth historical accounts might omit or even dismiss. Ripe figs, cracked pomegranates, pink shoes, and slight smirks give winking allusions to these love stories and entanglements.
But where suggestive symbols are absent, such as in Rembrandt’s 1652 self-portrait, subtle narratives emerge illustrating love’s effect. Trend movingly details how, 10 years after the death of his first wife Saskia, the Dutch artist’s depiction of himself with arms akimbo in his painter’s smock conveys the newfound purpose inspired by new love. Trend appeals directly to the reader, presenting the universality of that “most complicated, most powerful and most all-encompassing of emotions” as a key that allows us to understand significant works of art, the people who made them, and those who inspired them. —Aida Amoako
Pre-order the Book | Laurence King, March 2025
Esther Mahlangu: To Paint Is in My Heart
In the joyful geometric designs of South African artist Esther Mahlangu, the limits of sight and sound blend together. “The colours can sometimes quarrel, but it’s important for them to harmonize,” she says in the interview for To Paint Is In My Heart. This slim volume belies the universe unfolding within, comprising reproductions of the exquisite compositional paintings and beadwork by Mahlangu, who became a beacon of South African art by infusing AmaNdebele creative traditions into her work. It’s impossible to give into defeatism when faced with the 89-year-old artist’s conviction: “While I may have been seen as a pioneer, I am simply carrying on the traditions that have been entrusted to me.” —LA
Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, January 2025
Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)
The influential Cuban OSPAAAL political movement may have shuttered in 2019, after over 50 years of revolutionary activity, but their legacy in graphic design can’t be underestimated; they molded a language of anti-imperialism that continues to inspire and impress.
Founded in Havana in 1966 after the Tricontinental Conference, OSPAAAL has produced nearly 500 posters, magazines, and books that created a large following in the Global South. In Armed by Design, the Brooklyn-based organization Interference Archive has compiled a quadrilingual tome of the group’s revolutionary graphics, which reached its apex under the leadership of artistic director Alfredo Rostgaard (1966–1975). For his contribution, Josh MacPhee, who is a fantastic graphic artist himself, writes about the Cuban-educated Rostgaard who left behind little about his design process but would help define the aesthetics we have come to associate with the group, including a cinematic quality, commissioned illustrations, and typographic experimentation. And he summarizes the overall influence of OSPAAAL well: “There is little question that the OSPAAAL publishing program is one of the most expansive and innovative systems of print production and distribution the left has ever seen. While both the Soviet Union and China created massive propaganda apparatuses, their outputs were narrower in political scope, and significantly more controlled in terms of aesthetics.”
There are essays by Nate George, Sohl Lee, Lincoln Cushing, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, Javier Gastón-Greenberg, Ernesto Menéndez-Conde, and André Mesquita, an interview with Jane Norling and a conversation with Joseph Orzal — all very worthwhile. The only thing I wished that was addressed is the final years of the group when the graphics fell off the deep end into a graphic mess, but I guess all great things have to come to an end, and sometimes not with a bang but a whimper. —Hrag Vartanian
Buy the Book | Common Notions, January 2025
How to Fuck Like a Girl: Essays by Vera Blossom
The blog How to Fuck Like a Girl is part diary, part advice column on sex and gender by Vera Blossom, “your favorite local brown girl of trans experience,” as she puts it. Its book form — which includes entirely new material — opens with a prayer-as-manifesto, an invocation one ought to revisit in times of hardship. “We’re doing a ritual outside and we’re summoning lightning and thunder and brimstone so that the marble columns holding this sad little empire up will crack, and all of us will come tumbling down.” It’ll flood you with a sense of your own power, if you catch my drift.
Elsewhere in the book, Blossom’s tone is both conversational and experimental. It’s studded with cheeky little footnotes (“If you don’t know what a twink is, I think this book might be above your reading level”) and observations that’ll make you pause mid-page to mull over them: that contrast is a “good way to mess with gender,” or that fucking is kind of like writing. There’s a poem in which each line begins with “I want,” and another that lists every place Blossom’s had sex in that isn’t a bedroom. And she offers some really good advice for Valentine’s Day: “Sex doesn’t have to begin and end with a kiss and a cum,” she chides us. “It can begin at first glance, at hello! … It can continue into the laughter after the orgasm, into the conversation that you have once your brains are temporarily clear of that hedonistic fog of lust.” —Lisa Yin Zhang
Buy on Bookshop | DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e), December 2024
A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda by Carrie Rickey
When director Agnès Varda met director Jacques Demy, he was fresh off filming Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco and unknowingly about to embark on a long-term love affair of his own. Demy invited Varda to a local cafe, where they apparently shared a love of somewhat obscure drinks: He drank a plume (beer mixed with lemonade), and she a half-verbena infusion. Carrie Rickey quotes Varda recalling the experience: “We enjoyed ourselves.” I imagine there’s a world left unsaid there, perhaps a world impossible to articulate.
Like all relationships, theirs was deep, fragile, and complicated. There are the difficulties of being an artist-couple — “Varda’s star was rising while Demy’s was on the horizon,” Rickey writes at one point. There are also the specifics of each family dynamic, Varda being the pragmatist and Demy the dreamer in this one. And there was the fact that Demy was negotiating his own sexuality. At 48, after 21 years of living together, he moved in with producer David Bombyk. “Jacques and I are in a silent rage against each other,” Varda says in her documentary series Varda par Agnès.
They would reconcile. Toward the end of his life, with Varda as a caregiver, Demy began to think and write about his childhood. She proposed that instead of writing, he film. “You should make it,” he said. The result, five years after his death, was Varda’s The World of Jacques Demy (1995). This is not a book about love, per se — but that makes it even clearer how love bears, endures, and permeates all things. —LZ
Read the Review by Sophie Monks Kaufman | Buy on Bookshop | W. W. Norton & Company, August 2024
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
Many moons ago, I co-organized a 12-hour marathon reading of work by Audre Lorde and her friend, the poet Adrienne Rich, at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. People were free to read whatever work they wanted, but despite having so much work to choose from, I lost count of how many times someone read all or part of Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978). The text channels an energy that focuses on so much more than titillation or seduction, but instead drives home the ways in which oppressive societies limit women’s access to this essential “source of power and information.” Paging through the catalog Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, one can’t help but think of this political reading of the erotic, that, as Lorde indicates, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.” Thomas, for her own part, seems driven to complicate and enrich what love, admiration, and reflection can offer, refusing the funhouse mirror through which US culture so often depicts her chosen subject of Black women, and pointing instead to what Lorde might describe as “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.” —Alexis Clements
Buy on Bookshop | DAP, July 2024
Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy: Ring of Iron, Ring of Wool
There are many kinds of love, but it could be argued that the most hyperbolic of them all is the love between two Surrealist painters. At least, the 2024 monograph Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy: Ring of Iron, Ring of Wool makes a very strong case for the interpersonal chemistry and deep interlocution of these two painters, married in 1940 until Tanguy’s death in 1955 – a loss from which Sage arguably never recovered. Including personal ephemera, images, career highlights, and correspondence between the two, the monograph showcases not only two fascinating art careers that sharpened against each other, but an abiding and overwhelming love. As Sage wrote in a letter to Heinz Henghes on November 6, 1959, as quoted in the monograph, “I do not believe there has ever been such total and devastating love and understanding as there was between us. It was simply an amalgamation of two beings into one blinding totality.” —Sarah Rose Sharp
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Skira, March 2024
I Always Knew A Memoir by Barbara Chase-Riboud
The artist, poet, and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud has lived an extraordinary life, and for more than three decades she took her mother along for the ride. Her 2022 memoir I Always Knew traces the American-born, Europe-based artist’s remarkable story through the letters she wrote home. From her first trip to France in 1957 until her mother’s death in 1991, Chase-Riboud moves and makes art between London, Paris, Rome, Beijing, and beyond. Her warm, enthusiastic letters grant us a fascinating look at a young artist’s ascent at a time of great adversity, but also great opportunity. Her constant correspondence makes it clear that every success and adventure — and there are many — is shared with her beloved mother. —Lauren Moya Ford
Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Princeton University Press, October 2022
