This year may be more than halfway over, but it has already delivered many fine art books for a range of tastes and artistic appetites, and we’ve combed through catalogs, media announcements and metaphorical bookshelves to bring you the best new titles. Some releases reckon with famed art institutions, old and new, while others document how contemporary artists have embraced video to different ends. Many of the books recommended here are visually stunning, including a particularly lush record of works held by the recently reopened Frick Collection. Others view the genre of ‘art books’ through a wider lens and ask us to rethink how bygone culture wars over controversial art have shaped today’s political rifts.
Read on for our recommendations to learn more about the books we think you should add to your 2025 reading pile.
Adventures in the Louvre by Elaine Sciolino
The Louvre is perhaps the world’s most recognizable art institution, but its inventory and history are less well known. Former New York Times Paris correspondent Elaine Sciolino takes readers on a lively tour through the museum’s labyrinthine halls in her spirited account of its majesty and magnetism. Adventures in the Louvre will delight many readers, as it’s a kind of insider’s account, exposing how the Mona Lisa “enslaves” the gallery and documenting the fraught politics the museum’s recent exploits (like hosting Beyoncé and Jay-Z for a music video) have entangled it in. Dishy and captivating all at once.
Vitamin V by Phaidon Editors
Treat Vitamin V as an encyclopedia (and less as a history book) and you will savor this visual compendium. It grapples with how contemporary artists have embraced, weaponized and dissected video in their work over the past decade. With more than 100 contemporary artists featured, Vitamin V deftly tackles a difficult task: robustly interrogating moving-image art across its static pages. The result is broad but perceptive, surveying artists like Zineb Sedira, Ayoung Kim and Wael Shawky in a compilation that reminds us how quickly video has transformed—and now perhaps devolved thanks to A.I.—in only ten short years.
Art in a State of Siege by Joseph Koerner
Joseph Koerner, the eminent Harvard art historian, has delivered his deeply rewarding Art in a State of Siege. The book takes three artworks made in a time of social distress and political crisis—Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights (1500), Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) and William Kentridge’s Art in a State of Siege (1986)—to examine how artistic dissent is fomented under such conditions. Each artwork is stripped down to its bare features (at a time when “life becomes bare survival”) as it is reconsidered through the lens of collective strife. With lively prose and rich references to aid his exegesis, Koerner shows how artists working in turbulent times often produce remarkable visual “omens.”
The War of Art by Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Through a series of compelling case studies, art historian Lauren O’Neill-Butler highlights how artists have advocated for social and political change through provocative artworks and powerful actions. Since about the 1960s, American artists have publicly pushed for equality, equity and justice—from one coalition forcing the Museum of Modern Art to provide free admission to the public to a recent artists’ group pressuring art institutions to end ties with the Sackler family over the opioid crisis. The War of Art is a thrilling ride that chronicles the power that artists have both to reflect political issues through their work and to organize together to advance lasting change.
Those Passions by T. J. Clark
T. J. Clark, one of Britain’s foremost art scholars, arrives with a bumper essay collection capturing two decades’ worth of writing (largely taken from the London Review of Books). Those Passions threads together the modern chaos of politics with the stable signifiers of bygone art to track how artists have long responded to the upheaval of their times, from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Jacques-Louis David. The exercise enriches our understanding of political art, made amid events like the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 2011 riots in England, to conceptualize the uneven space where the two meet. The writing is sometimes erudite, but for those who persevere, the reward is a mighty lesson from a foremost art historian.
The Fricks Collect by Ian Wardropper
After a $330 million upgrade, the Frick Collection reopened with great fanfare in April. (Read our review: Observer’s Guide to the New Frick: Highlights and Hidden Details.) To coincide with its relaunch, Frick Collection museum director Ian Wardropper has released The Fricks Collect, a lush visual history of the institution and industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s efforts to build one of America’s finest art collections. The book features sumptuous photographs of the Frick’s prized artwork, ranging from European masters like Diego Velázquez to the father of modern art Francisco Goya. It also features discerning commentary on the unique collecting habits of its namesake. Worth the price.
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Of all the exhibition-specific books to arrive this year, Jack Whitten: The Messenger is one of the best. Jack Whitten, the artist at the center of the namesake retrospective at MoMA, “The Messenger,” made work that was both mystical and highly individualized, which is now sensitively chronicled here. Pairing discerning essays by Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu with archival personal writing from the painter, The Messenger reveals the evolution of the artist’s abstract project. A Black artist overlooked until his later years, Whitten mapped memory, trauma and racial politics to vivid visual ends. His epic work is now rightly recognized by institutions like MoMA and memorialized in print for those unable to see it up close.
The Last Supper by Paul Elie
America’s culture wars, fueled by anxiety over gender identity and anti-racism today, largely began in the 1980s. It was a time when the political right aligned with religious conservatives and a backlash set in against the progressive movements of the 1970s. In The Last Supper, Paul Elie makes a riveting case for recognizing “controverts”—radical artists from Andy Warhol to Madonna—who exploited religious images and iconography and weaponized blasphemous art to push back against the era’s conservative turn. Each produced work that challenged the sanctity of religion in American life and left cultural imprints still felt decades later.
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