From 17th-Century Antwerp to 1960s New York: The Best Art Books to Seek Out in 2025
Updated: 2 days ago
Mighty tomes, deep dives and fresh perspectives — the most eagerly awaited volumes being trailed by art-world publishers focus on subjects including the still-life painter Clara Peeters, Andrew Wyeth, the Vorticists and NYC’s ragtag radicals
1.Frankenthaler (revised and expanded edition) By John Elderfield Publisher: Gagosian / Rizzoli, 31 December 2024
Born in New York in 1928, Helen Frankenthaler would become one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. In a career spanning six decades, she created lyrical abstract paintings executed using her signature soak-stain technique, as well as an impressive body of watercolours and prints, including lithographs, etchings and woodcuts.
The leading expert on her work, John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has revised and expanded his landmark 1989 monograph on the artist for the 21st century.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Swan Lake I, 1961. Oil on canvas. 89⅛ x 93¾ in (226.4 x 238.1 cm). Private Collection. Helen Frankenthaler, Swan Lake II, 1961. Oil on canvas. 93 x 93½ in (236.2 x 237.5 cm). Private Collection. Both pictured in a spread from Frankenthaler by John Elderfield
It includes a new chapter that covers work made post-1988, as well as 300 full-colour reproductions of artworks by Frankenthaler and nearly 100 comparative illustrations and documentary photographs. The most comprehensive book on the artist to date, it offers a deep dive into her art, career and legacy.
2.The Palm Springs School: Desert Modernism 1934-1975 By Alan Hess Publisher: Rizzoli, 11 February 2025
Palm Springs is a place of pilgrimage for lovers of modernist architecture. Between 1930 and 1970, it attracted some of the leading names in modernism, including Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, Hugh Kaptur and John Lautner. Although each architect responded differently to the desert climate, terrain and sunlight, they all shared an appreciation of modernist concepts and a desire to explore new approaches to design and form.
On the cover of The Palm Springs School: Desert Modernism 1934-1975 is Albert Frey’s Tramway Gas Station, 1965
This book is the first to explore fully the wide-ranging architecture of the Palm Springs School, from Neutra’s steel-and-glass boxes to the earthy, organic homes of Lautner. Alan Hess’s text is complemented by rich archival and contemporary photography, as well as written contributions from architects and cultural historians including Eddie Jones and Christine Madrid French.
3.Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth By William L. Coleman and Allison C. Slaby Publisher: Rizzoli, 11 February 2025
Over the course of his 70-year career, the American artist Andrew Wyeth created more than 1,000 works — including tempera paintings, watercolours and drawings — inspired by Kuerner Farm in Pennsylvania. The farm was the home of Karl and Anna Kuerner, German immigrants who settled in Chadds Ford after the First World War.
A detail of Loden Coat, 1975, one of the ‘Helga Pictures’ in Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth
This book explores Wyeth’s evolving relationship with the Kuerners, as well as with Karl’s enigmatic caregiver Helga Testorf, whom he painted extensively between 1971 and 1985 in a series of portraits now known as the ‘Helga Pictures’. It also looks at his decades-long connection to the property itself. ‘I didn't think it a picturesque place,’ he once said of Kuerner Farm. ‘It just excited me, purely abstractly and purely emotionally.’
4.Clara Peeters By Alejandro Vergara-Sharp Publisher: Lund Humphries, 3 March 2025
Born near Antwerp around 1589, Clara Peeters was a member of the first generation of European painters specialising in still-life pictures, and one of just a handful of professional female artists working in the 17th century.
Clara Peeters (c. 1589-after 1657), Still Life with Flowers, a Silver-gilt Goblet, Dried Fruit, Sweetmeats, Breadsticks, Wine and a Pewter Pitcher, 1611. Oil on panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo: © Museo Nacional del Prado. The artist painted her self-portrait three times in the goblet (centre) and four on the pewter jug (right)
Few details of her life are confirmed, from the place and date of her birth to where she trained, which guilds she joined or who any of her patrons were. Yet her skilled hand and eye for detail — depictions of cut cheese and and tiny glimpses of self-portraits reflected in silverware were her signature motifs — point to her being an incredibly accomplished and popular artist. Fewer than 40 signed works by her are known to exist today, and they can change hands for six- and seven-figure sums.
This new book on Peeters by Alejandro Vergara-Sharp, senior curator of Flemish and northern European painting at the Prado in Madrid, aims to shed light on the historical context of the artist’s work. It will explore how her gender shaped her vocation, and uncover some truths about her extraordinary life.
5.The Fricks Collect: An American Family and the Evolution of Taste in the Gilded Age By Ian Wardropper, foreword by Julian Fellowes Publisher: Rizzoli Electa, 4 March 2025
Following a five-year-long closure and a $330-million renovation, New York’s beloved Frick Collection is due to reopen in April 2025. Between bouts of fundraising, the museum’s director, Ian Wardropper — who is to retire from the role this year — has composed a new volume on the collecting habits of its namesake founding family.
The Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection, New York, which houses Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s full ensemble of 14 canvases The Progress of Love, alongside a remarkable group of French 18th-century furniture. The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Lover Crowned, and Love Letters were commissioned in 1771 for Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, and were installed in a new pavilion on the grounds of her château at Louveciennes
A tale of power and patronage in America’s Gilded Age, it focuses on industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and how with his newly coined fortune — as well as guidance from his trusted decorators and dealers White, Allom & Co., Elsie de Wolfe, Joseph Duveen and Charles Carstairs of M. Knoedler & Co. — he was able to prise many masterpieces from the walls of bankrupt European aristocrats.
Following Frick’s death in 1919, his Beaux-Arts Manhattan mansion was turned into a public museum to display 1,500 of his works of art, which span the Renaissance to the 19th century. Among them are some of the finest paintings by Bellini, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Turner, Velázquez and Vermeer.
The 160-page book is richly illustrated with photographs of art and interiors, and has a foreword by Julian Fellowes, the English actor, novelist and screenwriter best known for creating Downton Abbey.
6.Turner & Constable: Art, Life, Landscape By Nicola Moorby Publisher: Yale University Press, 11 March 2025
J.M.W. Turner was born almost 250 years ago, in April 1775, in Covent Garden, London. Fourteen months later, and some 70 miles north-east, in Suffolk, his great rival John Constable arrived. Between them, these two men took landscape painting to new heights — but in opposite directions. Turner’s glowing and sometimes violent visions of sea and sky teetered on the brink of abstraction, while Constable’s observations of clouds and the changing light of the English countryside were acute.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A., The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-1835). Oil on canvas. 36¼ x 48½ in (92.1 x 123.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is one of Turner’s two oils on the subject, based on sketches he made while witnessing the event
The pair’s competition famously reached a climax in May 1832 at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, when Turner’s seascape Helvoetsluys hung alongside Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, a 6ft-wide work a decade in the making. Realising he was about to be upstaged, Turner added a single, experimental daub of bright red paint, representing a storm-tossed buoy. ‘He has been here and fired a gun,’ responded a shocked Constable.
The White Horse, 1819, by John Constable, now in the Frick Collection, New York. The work was to be the first in a series of so-called ‘six footer’ paintings depicting the River Stour in Suffolk, England
In recognition of Turner’s anniversary, there will be events and exhibitions at Tate Britain and the National Gallery in London, the Whitworth in Manchester, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut. British art historian Nicola Moorby has also penned this book about the artists’ intertwined lives. Sorting fact from fiction, Moorby offers a fresh perspective on their careers while simultaneously charting the triumph of British landscape painting in the 18th century.
7.Self Portraits: From 1800 to the Present By Philippe Ségalot and Morgane Guillet, with an introduction by Robert Storr Publisher: Assouline, 20 March 2025
The New York-based publisher of hand-bound books, Assouline, recently invited the art adviser and Christie’s former international head of contemporary art Philippe Ségalot, along with the studio manager Morgane Guillet, to curate the ultimate ‘impossible’ collection of self-portraits made over the past 200 years.
Louis Janmot (1814-1892), Self-Portrait, 1832, in Self Portraits: From 1800 to the Present. Photo: © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
The result is a sumptuous collection of more than 60 works by artists including Franciso de Goya, Egon Schiele, Claude Monet, Félix Vallotton, Gustave Caillebotte, Marc Chagall, Jeff Koons, Dorothea Tanning, Elizabeth Peyton and Paul Gauguin. The latter famously wrote to Van Gogh in 1888, at the age of just 20, that the eyes in his most recent self-portrait were indicative of ‘the red-hot lava that sets our painters’ soul ablaze’. And while some works in the book don’t technically depict their maker, they all represent how the artist wanted to be seen, understood and immortalised.
The book, which features an introduction by Robert Storr, former dean of Yale School of Art, has been designed in a new, sparse format, with each picture printed to scale — making it the next best thing to stepping into a gallery.
8.Those Passions: On Art and Politics By T.J. Clark Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 25 March 2025
The historian T.J. Clark introduces a cast of provocateurs in this thoughtful work on the role of politics in art. He starts by suggesting that art-world politics in the West is often specious — ‘a mixture of good faith, lack of knowledge, naive voluntarism and nervousness about not being relevant’ — yet there are those who have spoken truth to power and ended up on blacklists, as his chapter ‘Modernity and Terror’ reveals.
As well as writing Those Passions: On Art and Politics, T.J. Clark is the author of works on Manet, Cezanne and Bruegel, and an art critic for the London Review of Books
For the most part, Clark assesses the ways in which artists have responded to the upheavals of their times, using examples that encompass Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Jacques-Louis David’s revolutionary verve, the anarchism of James Ensor and the Marxism of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ultimately, he questions how we judge political art: by its effects, its beauty or its truth? And he explores how capitalism, through consumerism, advertising and society’s unstoppable love affair with the imagery of violence and death, impacts the art we see today.
9.Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional By Briony Fer Publisher: Rizzoli, 1 April 2025
The Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco makes art out of the found object. He is a scavenger, collecting the flotsam of the built environment to reveal the beauty of the everyday. He does this in a variety of ways, through sculpture, photography, painting and installation. Sometimes he’s like an archaeologist, presenting his finds in neat, catalogued rows; at other times he manipulates the object until its use is redundant, revealing the ingenuity of the design (he once squeezed a Citroën DS car into a smooth, propeller-like form).
La DS (Cornaline), 2013, in Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional
This comprehensive volume, published to coincide with the artist’s grand-scale exhibition at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, critically assesses Orozco’s 40-year career. It features many of the artist’s key pieces, ranging from the ephemeral (breath condensed on the top of a piano) to the monumental (a life-size whale skeleton made from pulverised calcium and resin). The result is a glorious inventory of a practice that is as light and playful as it is grittily urban.
10.Anselm Kiefer: The Women By Petra Giloy-Hirtz Publisher: Prestel, 15 April 2025
The post-cataclysmic romanticist Anselm Kiefer is widely regarded as one of the most important living artists. The German artist’s range of subject matter is epic, encompassing Greek and German mythology, Old Norse folktales, Middle Eastern philosophy, the forest, the rise of Nazism, and the works of the novelist James Joyce, to name only a few.
He is perhaps best known for his aeroplanes and battleships made of lead: hulking objects of menacing power. Many of his paintings and sculptures exude an ominous existentialism, and it is no surprise that rubble is one of his favourite materials.
Anselm Kiefer: The Women focuses on a less well-known side of the German artist’s work — his sculptures and paintings of female figures
Less well known, however, are his sculptures and paintings of female figures, exploring the themes of heroism and sacrifice. This publication focuses on the artist’s depiction of women from history and mythology, including the astronomer Hypatia and the French intellectual Madame de Staël.
11.Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, and Radical Pop By J. Hoberman Publisher: Verso, 27 May 2025
Former Village Voice journalist J. Hoberman recalls New York’s avant-garde art scene in the 1960s: a time of free radicalism when disparate groups, drawn by cheap rents and political activism, coalesced in the city to create a thriving counterculture.
In Everything Is Now, J. Hoberman charts the evolution of New York’s once-thriving counterculture. Photo: Courtesy of Verso Books
The book is divided into two sections. ‘Subcultures’ begins in 1959 with the Beat Generation poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg performing coffeehouse poetry under the threat of annihilation (‘Manhattan was understood to be the Prime Target and hence Ground Zero of a nuclear war,’ Hoberman writes).
From then on, it is a fast-paced ride through a rapidly disintegrating city. As jobs disappear, crime rises and heroin floods poor neighbourhoods, the middle classes leave and the artists move in, taking the city’s urban detritus for their material. They set up makeshift galleries, cinemas and performance venues. Bob Dylan arrives with his protest songs, Allan Kaprow stages a ‘Happening’, the poet LeRoi Jones declares a jazz avant-garde and Andy Warhol creates the Silver Factory.
The second section, ‘Countercultures’, begins in 1966 and charts artistic innovation colliding with psychedelia through strobe lighting, drone sound and jump-cut movies, before giving way to minimalism. It ends in the aftermath of Warhol’s shooting, with the Black Panthers on trial and bombs being planted in Manhattan.
12.‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists By James King Publisher: Reaktion Books, 1 June 2025
‘We are getting our little gang together after five years of waiting,’ noted Ezra Pound in 1913. The ‘gang’ were seven highly talented, self-assured artists with a desire to set Britain’s parochial art scene on fire. Championed by the poet Pound, the Vorticists considered themselves to be at the centre of a modernist whirlwind, their paintings a fine balance between order and chaos.
A detail of The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring, 1915 (1961-62) by William Roberts, on the cover of ‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists
James King introduces us to the key protagonists: William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, Edward Wadsworth, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders. As a group they were an unruly alliance — too many egos to hold together for long. However, in the brief but highly productive period between 1913 and 1915, they articulated their rebellious message through exhibitions and the magazine Blast.
This book is notable for its inclusion of Dismorr and Saunders, the two female members who have been overlooked until now. Both made a valuable contribution to a movement that threw a firework into the heart of the British establishment, exposing an environment hostile to artistic innovation. The ‘Vorticist effect’ reverberated long after the group’s collapse, setting a precedent for future radicalism.
Main image, clockwise from top left: Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth, Rizzoli. Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A., Juliet and her Nurse, 1836, Colección AMALITA, Buenos Aires, from Turner & Constable: Art, Life, Landscape, Yale University Press. Frankenthaler: Revised and expanded edition, Gagosian / Rizzoli. The Fricks Collect: An American Family and the Evolution of Taste in the Gilded Age, Rizzoli Electa. Maurizio Cattelan, La Rivoluzione siamo noi (We are the Revolution), 2000, in Self Portraits: From 1800 to the Present, Assouline. Photo: © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Art Resource, NY. Clara Peeters, Lund Humphries