• The best books on Figurative Painting Today - Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism by B. H. D. Buchloch, David Joselit, Hal Foster & Rosalind E. Krauss
  • The best books on Figurative Painting Today - Painting Today by Tony Godfrey
  • The best books on Figurative Painting Today - Painting (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) by Terry R. Myers
  • The best books on Figurative Painting Today - Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting by Barry Schwabsky
  • The best books on Figurative Painting Today - Picturing People: The New State of the Art by Charlotte Mullins

The best books on Figurative Painting Today, recommended by Julien Delagrange

Collectors and curators have been clamouring for figurative art in recent years, as a generation of painters take a more traditional, representational approach to addressing major cultural themes in their work. But is figurative painting today merely a reactionary impulse, a kind of nostalgia for art that preceded modernism, postmodernism and the fragmentation in art-making that was ushered in by conceptual art? There is much more to it than that, argues painter and art historian Julien Delagrange.

  • The best books on Lucian Freud - Emil and the Detectives by Eileen Hall (translator) & Erich Kästner
  • The best books on Lucian Freud - Private View: The Lively World of British Art by Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), Bryan Robertson & John Russell
  • The best books on Lucian Freud - A Free House!: Or, The Artist as Craftsman by Walter Richard Sickert
  • The best books on Lucian Freud - Memoirs of the Life of John Constable: Composed Chiefly of His Letters by C.R. Leslie
  • The best books on Lucian Freud - Nollekens and his Times: Comprehending A Life Of That Celebrated Sculptor, And Memoirs Of Several Contemporary Artists

The best books on Lucian Freud, recommended by William Feaver

Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke about painting, the art world and his life and loves to his confidante and frequent collaborator, William Feaver, on the phone most weeks for many years. Feaver’s transcript forms the core of his definitive two-volume biography. He speaks with us about the best books for understanding the life and work of this renowned painter, and the very particular collaboration that led to this magisterial account of one of the finest painters of the last century.

  • The Best Books by Artists - The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare: Correspondence by Marcel Duchamp & Robert Lebel
  • The Best Books by Artists - Worte Nicht in Giftige Buchstaben Einwickeln by Lisa Wenger & Meret Oppenheim
  • The Best Books by Artists - Diaries by Eva Hesse
  • The Best Books by Artists - Robert Voit: The Alphabet of New Plants by Robert Voit
  • The Best Books by Artists - Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian by Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Best Books by Artists, recommended by Michaela Unterdörfer

Why should we read what visual artists have written? Michaela Unterdörfer, head of publishing for the art gallery Hauser & Wirth, argues that the visual and artistic language of artists makes archival material more immediate and compelling. Artists’ testimonies refer not only to physical archives but above all to the mental archives of artists, their cultural and historic inheritance, which books like these bring to life.

  • The best books on Minimalism - In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
  • The best books on Minimalism - Donald Judd Writings by Donald Judd
  • The best books on Minimalism - Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki
  • The best books on Minimalism - Silence by John Cage
  • The best books on Minimalism - Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal

The best books on Minimalism, recommended by Kyle Chayka

In times of political or personal turmoil, there’s a tendency to seek solace in stripping back life to its bare essentials. Minimalist thought is threaded through Stoicism and Zen Buddhism; absence and space became major preoccupations of 1960s US art. Kyle Chayka, the art critic and author of The Longing for Less, recommends five books on the philosophy that underpins the present fad for minimalist self-help.