October brings an exciting, eclectic set of new releases that dive into art, fashion, philosophy, and fiction.
They range from richly detailed biographies of Chaim Soutine and Barnett Newman (both centering Jewishness), to Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s candid memoir of persistence, to Chris Kraus’s gripping true-crime novel. Yet every one of this month’s standout titles memorably blurs the boundary between art and life.
Check back throughout the month: our critics are at work reviewing a handful of these books in-depth.
Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession and a Dramatic Life in Art
By Celeste Marcus
In the 1910s, Chaim Soutine began a series of memorably grotesque paintings of meat. An eccentric personality, he befriended Parisian slaughterhouse workers. Having been raised strictly Kosher, he watched with both horror and fascination one day as a butcher gleefully drained the blood out of a goose’s neck. His subsequent canvases capture those twinned feelings of delight and disgust, with works beguiling but never beautiful, colors bright and muddy at the same time. This new biography recounts his dark, interwar upbringing and promises to center his Jewish identity, revealing how both inflected his life and work. —Emily Watlington
Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color
By Uri McMillan
I often find myself suspicious of the capitalist machinations behind the art-fashion hybrids taking over contemporary culture. But a new book by cultural historian Uri McMillan convincingly troubles that easy read, highlighting experimental Black and Brown artists of the 1970s who moved between the commercial and avant-garde realms with transgressive bombast, irreverent especially toward the art world’s elitism. A memorable chapter describes the formative friendship of Grace Jones and Ming Smith—who met modeling, then formed a kind of creative coalition. —Emily Watlington
Minor Black Figures
By Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor’s third novel is set in the restless summer of 2022, when Manhattan was still wired with memories of protest and pandemic. In a fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side, Wyeth, fresh from a Midwest MFA, is struggling to make a painting. Scenes inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman and Eric Rohmer have won him a modest following, but now he strains to square his style with expectations for Black painting. Old questions assume new stakes: What do we owe ourselves? Does art belong to life? Must it? If sometimes too scrupulous in its commitment to the quotidian, Taylor’s is a rigorous portrait of the artist as a young-ish man confronting the “whole dizzy business of trying to be a black painter” in a post–George Floyd world. —Emily Cox
Barnett Newman: Here
By Amy Newman
The vibrant titles Barnett Newman gave to his paintings—Onement I and Vir Heroicus Sublimis, to name just two—sometimes refer to mysterious affective sates. But in this new biography of the Abstract Expressionist, art historian Amy Newman (no relation) suggests that these game-changing canvases were, in fact, rooted in something highly specific: his upbringing as a Jew in a time of pervasive antisemitism. Across 700-plus pages, she thrillingly explores Newman’s vexed relationship to his religion, which shaped his entire worldview, even as he exhibited certain later paintings under names derived not from the Torah but Christian texts such as the New Testament. —Alex Greenberger
Private I: A Memoir
By Lynn Hershman-Leeson
It’s well known that too many women artists working in the 20th century (and earlier) were unjustly neglected. But in a new memoir, Lynn Hershman-Leeson (b. 1941) captures the textures of what it felt like to work in the shadows, the daily life of an artist perservering without much reception or support. In recent years she’s starred in retrospectives around the world, and is now recognized as an artist ahead of her time for fusing art, science, and technology before it was cool. But for decades, she was roughing it. Her conceptual video and performance work was largely relegated to unlikely spheres—department store windows, hotels, and San Quentin State Prison—in lieu of the art world mainstream. The book details how she resourcefully endured periods of poverty while staying committed to her art. —Emily Watlington
Jean Baudrillard
By Emannuelle Fantin & Bran Nicol
This biography is a short one, as Baudrillard left few details about his life, insisting instead that he was merely “a simulacrum of myself.” But the details the authors tracked down are consistetly uproarious: such as that his famous Simulacra & Simulation was perhaps the only philosophy book to ever appear in a Gucci ad, a model holding his book and proving his point. Baudrillard’s biographers show how their subject practiced what he preached, merging philosophy into a kind of performance art: allegedly, he forged Sophie Calle’s diploma, and in his writing, he would fabricate quotes from famous thinkers. As you devour fun facts like these, you’ll get a good sense of his prophetic world view. To quote from a recent Baudrillard conference, he “may no longer be around to analyse our world. But he has already done so.” —Emily Watlington
Archigram: The Magazine
Edited with text by Peter Cook. Text by Archigram et al. Reader’s guide edited by Thomas Evans, Steve Kroeter.
Archigram was one of the most influential architecture groups of all time, even though they never built anything. That was deliberate: their designs were meant to be provocative rather than practical. With their colorful, Pop- and psychedelic-inspired pamphlets of the 1960s, they worked against the sterility of midcentury Modernism—and inspired Richard Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou in the process. These days, archival pamphlets now sell for hundreds of dollars—until this first ever re-issue. More art object than coffee table book, this clamshell collection boasts a popout pamphlet as well as new essays by Tadao Ando, Beatriz Colomina, and Mike Davies. —Emily Watlington
The Four Spent the Day Together
By Chris Kraus
A new true-crime novel by the artist-writer, of I Love Dick fame, is set in the “meth community” of Minnesota. Our protagonist, Catt Greene, splits her life between the LA art world and the frozen Midwest with its rural poverty, as does Kraus. In Minnesota, Catt’s husband works as an addiction therapist, himself a recovering addict. Shuttling between, Catt experiences a kind of class whiplash. When she learns of local lore—that three teens were charged with killing their older acquaintance—she becomes obsessed. As did Kraus: the murder at the heart of the book is based on a true story that entranced the writer. —Emily Watlington