It’s officially spring, and along with the blooming flowers, there’s a new crop of art books to enjoy—from a new tome documenting Frida Kahlo’s private home and sanctuary, to the true story of the infamous Isabella Stewart Garden Museum heist, plus Hans Ulrich Obrist’s new memoir and some gloriously colorful coffee table books. Happy reading!
Casa Kahlo: Frida Kahlo’s Home and Sanctuary
By Mara Romeo Kahlo and Mara de Anda Romeo and Frida Hentschel Romeo
The cover of Casa Kahlo. Courtesy of Rizzoli.
Frida Kahlo’s descendants want art aficionados to know that even record-breaking artistic geniuses need support systems.“Casa Kahlo” offers an unprecedented look into the famed Mexican painter’s family home, also called Casa Roja, which stands just blocks away from Casa Azul in Mexico City. Kahlo’s father, Guillermo, bought Casa Roja the year after she married Diego Rivera—who’d promptly paid the mortgage on Casa Azul, which Guillermo had built.
Kahlo would retreat to Casa Roja when Casa Azul got crazy. In 2023, the Mexican painter’s great-grand nieces, Mara de Anda and Frida Hentschel, joined their mother, Mara Romeo Kahlo, in relinquishing the family’s three generations of residence at Casa Roja to open the newly minted Museo Casa Kahlo.
As a book, “Casa Kahlo” brings Casa Roja to the world, presenting hundreds of Kahlo’s personal effects, plus some never-published letters. There are artworks like the painting she first showed Rivera at 18, as well as later drawings. There are personal documents too, alongside keepsakes like her taxidermied butterfly collection, and garments she created—all offering fresh fodder for Kahlo’s clamoring fans. —Vittoria Benzine
Hong Kong Art: A Curator’s History (1987 -2004)
By Oscar Ho Hing-kay
Cover of Hong Kong Art 1987-2004. Courtesy of Rizzoli.
At the start of the new millennium, a group of Hong Kong art insiders set themselves an ambitious mandate: to document the region’s contemporary art history. The Asia Art Archive, which started with a single shelf of books, now comprises nearly 50,000 artifacts, spanning monographs, exhibition catalogues, zines, and the like. It’s the wellspring from which much of a new book on the roots of Hong Kong’s contemporary art is drawn.
Focused on a series of radical exhibitions from the 1980s and 1990s, “Hong Kong Art: A Curator’s History” details a time before the arrival of blue-chip galleries and mega art fairs, one in which a generation of avant-garde artists rejected the commercial success of the city’s cinema and music industries. The “innovative and anarchic” history is authored by Oscar Ho Hing-kay, whose decade as the curatorial director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre helped shape what the city’s art could be. —Richard Whiddington
Rainbow Dreams: Color and Light in Contemporary Art
Edited by Olga Rei and Valentine Uhovski
Cover of Rainbow Dreams: Color and Light in Contemporary Art. Courtesy of The Monacelli Press.
In the midst of global lockdowns, the cultural tastemakers Olga Rei and Valentine Uhovski launched Rainbow Contemporary, a collective with the admirable, though vague, mission of delivering hope and happiness through creative and charitable projects. The collective released t-shirts for hunger relief, collectable silks for vulnerable Ukrainians, and has now dropped “Rainbow Dreams: Color and Light in Contemporary Art”, a 250-page tome of pure technicolor vibes.
The premise of the Monacelli-published book is that color stands as an organizing principle for understanding art today. More to the point, it’s a self-described “ultimate visual treat” and accordingly reproduces on paper some of the most visually appealing artworks of recent years. There’s the iridescent sheen of Tomás Saraceno’s 200-foot solar dome, Paola Pivi’s multicolored inflatable ladder scaling the Grand Palais in Paris, the ethereal mesh architectures of Do Ho Suh, Takashi Murakami’s florals, and Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots. —R.W.
Life in Progress
By Hans Ulrich Obrist
Cover of Life in Progress. Courtesy of Penguin Random House.
World-renowned Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has written hundreds of books, but not one memoir—no matter how his own story has colored his art writings, since he refuses to separate life from art. Regardless, that glaring discrepancy in Obrist’s resume will get patched up this month, courtesy of “Life in Progress,” a 160-page “unputdownable coming-of-age story,” as Penguin puts it, “part insider’s tour of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live a life driven by curiosity, conversation, and coincidence.”
Inside, the curator recounts the key moments in his art world ascent from his own infamously insatiable perspective, from the car that struck him as a kid growing up in the Alps to the kitchen exhibitions he threw while studying politics and economics before facilitating marathon events for Serpentine Galleries, where Obrist has served as co-director alongside three successive peers over the past twenty years. Early encounters with art icons like Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, and Etel Adnan will purportedly provide some of the sweetest moments in this hotly awaited personal mythology. —V.B.
Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist
By Geoffrey Kelly
Cover of Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist. Courtesy of Post Hill Press.
In March 1990, two thieves gained entry to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Garden Museum after hours by impersonating police. There, they tied two guards up and took 80 minutes to steal scores of historic artifacts alongside thirteen paintings by the likes of Degas, Manet, and Vermeer—even Rembrandt’s sole seascape, which appears on the cover of “Thirteen Perfect Fugitives.”
36 years later, the FBI blames the Boston Mafia. Still, no one’s been charged, and the paintings remain at large. Most suspects have died, taking any secrets about the works’ whereabouts with them. Geoffrey Kelly, the FBI’s lead Art Crime investigator on the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, considers these paintings ‘perfect fugitives.’ They don’t have to pay bills or drive cars. They just hide, silently.
Much has been written on America’s most notorious art heist. Kelly, however, has the decisive perspective. He just retired in 2024, after 28 years on the job. Now, he’s a museum security consultant releasing his first book, sharing everything he’s at liberty to discuss about his efforts chasing this case around the globe—including some brand new bombshell details. —V.B.
Memoir of a Collection: Finding Meaning Through Art
By Steven Kasher
Cover of Memoir of a Collection. Courtesy of Abbeville Press.
The ubiquitous presence of documentary photographs in the collections of American museums today owes much to Steven Kasher. His eponymous Tribeca gallery opened in 1997 with the work of Ernest Withers, a photographer who’d been in the thick of things during the Civil Rights movement of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Over the coming 20 years (Kasher joined David Zwirner in 2018), he would broaden the art world’s idea of who and what should be collected, not only platforming the likes of Ming Smith and Vivian Maier, but also elevating work from areas of photojournalism, fashion, and science.
In Memoir of a Collection, a book of illustrated essays, Kasher turns the lens on himself, examining 30-odd artworks from his own collection and exploring his personal relationship to them. It’s an invitation, Kasher says “to look at the images around you, to ask what they mean to you, and to discover what they reveal about who you are.” —R.W.
Petra Collins: STAR
By Petra Collins, Contributions by Melissa Broder
Cover of Petra Collins: Star. Courtesy of Rizzoli.
Genre-defining Canadian photographer Petra Collins has assembled a characteristically bold yet dreamy new book exploring fame. She has ample experience with the topic, after all. Collins came up under the tutelage of influential photographer Ryan McGinley and helped set the aesthetics of the past decade. She’s increasingly credited with creating the vibe behind the sensational TV drama Euphoria, though her demotion from director remained lesser known at first. She even collaborated with the show’s lead, Alexa Demie, on a 2021 release recreating fairy tales.
Rizzoli published Collins’s first official monograph in 2017. STAR is something else—an endeavor as multifaceted as Collins’s career. The story centers on two fictional pop acts that she’s dreamt up, after inventing her own girl group for previous projects. The photographer’s propensity for pushing her medium is nothing new, though. Collins has been deriding the contemporary art world’s false boundaries about what gets to be art for at least ten years. A volume like this is more than a coffee table ornament. It’s as electric and seductive as a headlining set at your favorite music fest. — V.B.
