Not every art book is meant to be tossed into a beach bag or a carry-on, but summer offers something better than vacation: time. When temperatures rise and routines ease, we often find ourselves indoors with the mental space to explore something deeply. This season’s most compelling art books introduce us to unforgettable figures, invite us into intimate or surreal fantasies and push into the frontiers of what art can express—across culture, time and geography. Here are twelve notable titles worth reading, viewing and thinking about this summer.
David Hockney, published in association with the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Published in association with the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, this stunning book offers a visually engaging and detailed journey through Hockney’s extraordinary life and career. The accompanying exhibition, “Hockney 25,” is on view through August 31, 2025. With contributions from leading scholars and rare archival materials, this new publication complements the immersive exhibition experience. The book captures Hockney’s restless innovation and ability to reinvent his practice across decades.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime edited by Sarah Roberts
A landmark publication for one of the most influential American painters working today, this volume brings together nearly all of Sherald’s paintings to date. Her figures—poised, dignified and arrestingly present—are situated within the lineage of American realism while unmistakably her own.
Sherald rose to national prominence with her portrait of Michelle Obama, but her deeper project is reshaping the way Black life is represented in contemporary art. Her exhibition “American Sublime” opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., on September 19, 2025, and runs through February 22, 2026. The book frames her paintings within historical traditions and offers new context for her quietly radical vision.
Lorna Simpson: Source Notes by Lauren Rosati
The first book focused entirely on Simpson’s painting practice—long overshadowed by her photography—this volume accompanies her solo exhibition at The Met (on view through November 2, 2025) and reveals her ongoing experimentation with figuration and abstraction, layering photographic source material and cultural memory into vivid, enigmatic compositions.
Simpson, one of the most influential artists of her generation, continues to evolve in unexpected directions. Readers interested in how artists reinvent their practices mid-career will find this book visually and intellectually rewarding.
Tina Barney: Family Ties
With sixty large-format photographs, Barney’s new monograph captures the rituals, hierarchies and vulnerabilities of upper-class life. These images—intimate, exacting and often theatrical—balance critique with affection. Spanning more than four decades of work, the book accompanies her first European retrospective, currently on view at Kutxa Fundazioa Artegunea in San Sebastián, Spain (through November 2, 2025), following its debut at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Barney has spent decades documenting the lives of her family and social circle with both familiarity and formal rigor. This title reminds us how close observation and subtle irony can coexist in the photographic medium.
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers
This exhibition catalogue accompanies Johnson’s solo show at the Guggenheim (on view through January 18, 2026) and surveys his multidisciplinary practice—photography, sculpture, painting and immersive installations. The book positions Johnson’s work within broader conversations about race, identity and contemporary visual culture, while highlighting the deeply personal and poetic undercurrents that shape his art.
Johnson, who came of age as part of the post-Black Arts Movement generation, has consistently challenged and expanded notions of what art can do. This book is for those who appreciate conceptual ambition paired with material experimentation, and who want to understand how one artist holds space for complexity and contradiction.
Vermeer’s Love Letters by Robert Fucci
Organized around three intimate paintings of women reading and writing, this book draws readers into the world of domestic Dutch interiors, coded gestures and painterly mystery. The volume brings together works from the Frick Collection, the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery of Ireland and includes essays that expand on Vermeer’s enduring themes of intimacy, distance and time.
Vermeer’s paintings reward close looking, and this book rewards close reading. The scholarly essays offer insight without diminishing the quiet spell of these works. One of the three paintings is currently on view at the newly renovated Frick in New York—an ideal companion experience to the book itself.
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery by Donna Cassidy, Katie Anania and John Corbett
An overdue and authoritative survey of a surrealist painter who quietly defined her own world in midcentury Chicago, this book is as eccentric and haunting as Abercrombie’s dreamlike interiors and lone female figures. Drawing from art history, jazz and personal mythology, her work is finally receiving the critical attention it deserves.
Abercrombie moved in the same circles as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, but her paintings remained deeply solitary and strange. A major retrospective opened at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine on July 12 and runs through January 11, 2026. The psychological depth of her work is intriguing—and this book provides the long-needed context for understanding it.
The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland by Michelle Young
An engrossing narrative of courage and espionage in Nazi-occupied France, this biography brings to light the remarkable Rose Valland, who covertly tracked looted artworks and helped recover masterpieces stolen during the war. Moving through prewar Paris and into the moral and cultural wreckage of the occupation, this is both a riveting history and a tribute to quiet heroism in the art world.
Author Michelle Young is also the founder of Untapped New York and brings a journalist’s eye for detail to this little-known chapter in art history. For readers fascinated by the intersection of art, war and justice, it’s an essential read.
The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer
Tucked along the East River, Coenties Slip was home to artists like Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana before they became canonized. Peiffer reconstructs this moment in New York art history with archival precision and storytelling flair, showing how geography, community and modernism converged in one improbable corner of the city.
Peiffer is a former MoMA curator, and her insider knowledge is evident throughout. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how artists live, work and collide in cities—and how place shapes creativity.
Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York by Guy Trebay
This sharp, unsentimental memoir of youth in the city captures the dirty glamour of 1970s New York, when rebellion, style and self-invention played out in the ruins of a bankrupt metropolis. Trebay’s eye for cultural detail and his refusal to romanticize the past make this a standout not only for art lovers but for anyone curious about the aesthetics of an era.
Trebay, now a fashion critic for The New York Times, writes with precision and bite. For readers who want to understand how a certain kind of New York creativity was forged out of grit and chaos, this is a compelling personal account.
Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi
A vividly drawn portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential—and polarizing—art collectors. Cooper was brilliant, opinionated and deeply enmeshed in the lives and legacies of artists like Picasso, Braque and Léger. This dual biography doesn’t shy away from his contradictions and makes a compelling case for the role of collectors in shaping modern art history.
Clark has long been researching Cooper, and Calvocoressi brings a curator’s eye to the material. Readers who are interested in the personalities, politics and sometimes uncomfortable truths behind great collections will enjoy this book.
An elegantly written study of two towering figures of British landscape painting, this book offers new insights into their work, rivalry and the cultural moment they helped define. For those looking to slow down and look closely, it’s a deeply satisfying summer read.
Moorby, formerly a curator at Tate Britain, brings deep knowledge and a light touch. This book is a reminder that close attention to nature—and to brushstroke—can still move us.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
