It’s hard times for readers. Never before had we had so much time to read and so little attention span to process the information presented before our eyeballs. Is it just me or is your brain just start screaming every time you try to read anything that isn’t Samantha Irby or Harry Potter? My brain just sounds like an Egyptian mummy now. It’s unnerving. Screams used to come from my mouth!
As your on call literary doctor I recommend the following medicine: art books, or as I prefer to call them, the elevated adult version of children’s picture books. Phaidon, Taschen and Rizzoli tend to have the best (and most expensive) specimens, but there are plenty of . Here are five of my favorites.
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Designing Graphic Props for Filmaking
I have this whole secret imaginary life that’s completely in my head where I work in graphic design for film sets. I really can’t think of anything more fun: designing props that will get marginal attention by viewers and yet are absolutely essential to establishing the mood of a film. Think about all the film worlds with a you love - Harry Potter, Paddington, anything Wes Anderson touches- and chances are you wouldn’t remember them if they didn’t have a prop designer with a strong point of view. This book gives proper attention to the practice and makes my detail-centric mind shake its metaphorical tail with delight. Written by Annie Atkin’s, otherwise known as Wes Andersons’ main prop genius, it’s a perfect tome for when you just need to look at something orderly and pretty.
"When we’re little we’re brainwashed with history that’s just facts and dates. I try to imagine it back to life with more reality and a sense of humor. Being Irish, you have to have a wicked sense of humor. Some think my work is dark, some think it’s crazy, some just think it’s hilarious." -GF
Genieve Figgis
A Fragonard Acid Trip is how I’d describe Figgis’s work, which caught my eye on Instagram a few years ago. The Irish artist uses puddles of pastels to create an “underlying, decadent perversion” to portraits of nameless French royalty and eyeless baroque ghosts. If this sounds like a nightmare to you, guess what? You’re already living in one! Might as well make it pastel!
Inside North Korea
I find it really hard to watch travel shows knowing that the soonest I’ll be able to travel north of the Pacific will be in, like, 2025. It’s just too painful to think about the summer I could have had, spilling Aperol spritzes on my spaghetti-themed Hawaiian shirt, if it weren’t for the fact that we have an administration who doesn’t believe in science. My solution? Turn my traveling eyes somewhere that was already off-limits pre COVID-19.
Inside North Korea takes you on a visual tour of Pyongyang’s pastel-decked gymnasiums, government buildings, and theaters to show the “socialist fairyland” of Kim Jong-Un’s dreams. Erased by bombing during the Korean War, the capiral city was rebuilt from scratch from 1953, in line with the vision of the nation’s founder, Kim Il Sung. At once brilliant and unsettling, the whole thing feels sort of like what would happen if Wes Anderson designed a gulag.
Caravaggio: The Complete Works
This little book is technically not a coffee table book (it’s more like the size of a Harry Potter book) but it’s an essential part of any art historian’s library. It manages to list the complete oeuvre of the Nepalese street-murderer-turned-Baroque-legend, and really approachable look at the artist’s life while avoiding the usual encyclopedic dimensions of most Serious Art Books. Jargon-free and lots of pictures: my favorite!
Taschen: De Chirico
There’s been a lot of talk about how Edward Hopper is the representative artist of 2020 Quarantine, mostly because his subjects spend a lot of time alone, cooped up in empty, enclosed spaces. I don’t understand this at all because for me the king of quarantine is Giorgio de Chirico. Empty city landscapes, brutalist urban architecture, a creeping sense that everyone has fled the streets for their safety... Maybe it’s all the straight lines and arches, but there’s an angular, straightforward simplicity to a De Chirico that’s very “we are the virus.” If Hemingway painted, he would paint like this.
Georgia O’Keefe and Her Houses
If you were lucky enough to catch the Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum years ago, then your name isn’t Magali Roman. My consolation prize is this beautiful coffee table book about O’Keefe’s famous Santa Fe ranches, which have been my inspiration for retirement since I learned what a cowbell does. I am obsessed with Georgia O’Keefe because, among other things, she was basically the Baba Yaga of the desert. Literally all I dream about is becoming an old crone and crawling into a minimalist ranch like a hermit crab, where I can live the remainder of my days shooting scorpions off my property. This book is my moodboard until then.
Go forth and read like the wind!
