These are some of my favorite books about art, design, film, artists, and the art of living.
One of my favorite art books is The Art of Living, a guide to living the best possible life. Leonardo and the Last Supper is a fascinating journey through the Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci’s extraordinary life and art. Duchamp’s Last Day is an intimate look at Marcel Duchamp’s final hours. The Los Angeles art scene is featured in two reads: Out of Sight and The Dream Colony.
Film is represented by Zona, a deep plunge into Tarkovsky’s film Stalker with a big upside: an introduction to Tarkovsky’s films if you’re not familiar with them.
Cover contains some great design, but it’s how this talented designer made it to a major publishing house that will blow your mind.
My personal favorite art book on this list is Living Well Is the Best Revenge by the wonderful New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins. We see the charm and beauty of the Côte d’Azur and all the brilliant artists who visited Gerald and Sara Murphy beginning in the 1920s. But the book also shines a light on less charming territory: what happens to artistic people when the world encroaches on their lives and a bitter reality overtakes their world.
This is a subjective list, but I hope you enjoy my take on the best art books ever.
Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties by William Hackman
Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties by William Hackman is one of my favorite books about art. I often visited the Pasadena Museum of California Art, MOCA, the Geffen Contemporary, the Broad, the Hammer, LACMA, and fine galleries like Pace Gallery when I lived in Los Angeles.
The book covers key figures and institutions, including Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, Richard Diebenkorn, Llyn Foulkes, David Hockney, Dennis Hopper, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, the Ferus Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Artforum magazine, and many others.
I love the fact that the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon) held the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective.
It’s sad that so many areas, like Venice, that were home to the artists who made LA a world-class art community are now so commercialized and unaffordable.
Out of Sight is an excellent introduction to LA’s art scene, from the bohemian days of the 1960s through its evolution into an art powerhouse that changed the city.
Duchamp’s Last Day by Donald Shambroom
This is a wonderful little book about Marcel Duchamp’s final hours, spent with Man Ray. The conversation about his death is fascinating. It was a fitting end for an artist, and one that may be connected to his art. Did Duchamp compose his own death?
It was Man Ray, or perhaps Duchamp himself, who took the photograph at Duchamp’s deathbed that captured him, calm in death, as his final artistic creation.
Shambroom’s well-researched essay is intimate and touches on art, life, and the death of an important artist.
The Dream Colony: A Life in Art by Walter Hopps
“A panoramic look at art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it.”
Walter Hopps founded the Ferus Gallery with artist Edward Kienholz, launching Los Angeles into a new era as a city of art.
Hopps’s Ferus Gallery was the first to show Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and championed Pop Art. Hopps went on to curate the first retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum. Ferus even drew a raid from the vice squad for pushing the boundaries of 1950s Los Angeles.
This insider account of Los Angeles art in the 1960s and Hopps’s entertaining and irreverent artistic genius make this one of the best and most pleasurable art books I’ve read.
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Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer
In Zona, Geoff Dyer claims that a work of art that changes your DNA can only be experienced at a young age, typically in your teens or twenties, and cannot happen later in life. For him, that work is the 1979 sci-fi masterpiece Stalker, directed by the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky.
I wasn’t particularly interested in reading about Stalker since I hadn’t seen it, but when I picked up Zona in the bookstore, I couldn’t put it down. The film’s influence on Dyer is evident as he passionately and carefully summarizes the story and its meanings. He analyzes not only every reel of the film but also the challenges, and there were many, of making it.
His love of this film is the basis for analogies, metaphors, and associations with art and life. The film leads Dyer to Burning Man, Nabokov, Kafka, Antonioni, Fitzgerald, Nosferatu, The Brothers Karamazov, Solaris, L’Avventura, The Italian Job, Henry James, the Hopi, Buster Keaton, Flaubert, Roland Barthes, Daniel Day-Lewis, and on and on.
Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King
This is just as much a history of Leonardo and the Renaissance as it is about The Last Supper. King sets out to show that culture, commerce, food, fashion, politics, eclectic characters, and religion inspired the insatiably curious artist to create one of the most masterful works of art in the history of the Western world, and he had rich material to draw from.
What I enjoyed most about Leonardo and the Last Supper was Leonardo’s mercurial personality. He often didn’t finish artwork commissioned from him by the rich and by popes. Yet he rarely, if ever, seemed to be disliked or resented by his countrymen or benefactors. He was focused on engineering as much as art. He hiked in desolate areas and ventured into all aspects of life.
I loved how unconventionally and freely Leonardo lived. This is one of the best books about art and one of the most remarkable artists ever.
See on AudioBooks (3 free books). Barnes & Noble, or Amazon/Audible.
The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness by Epictetus
“The result is the West’s first and best primer for living the best possible life – as helpful in the twenty-first century as it was in the first.”
Every middle school student should read this book. It’s one of the smartest and best self-help books ever. Not everyone is going to be a great artist or statesman, but anyone can be an extraordinary person. Epictetus was born a slave but devoted his life to the art of living, and his student Arrian recorded the stoic philosophy he spent his life understanding and teaching.
Here is a small sampling of his quotes:
“No man is free who is not master of himself.”
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”
“Do not try to seem wise to others.”
“A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.”
And it goes on…
This is one of the most valuable and best art books of all time. And that art is the art of living your best life.
Read the New Yorker’s review of Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tompkins.
Poetics by Aristotle
I loved this line from Aristotle’s Poetics: “The plot is the source and the soul of tragedy.”
Poetics offers timeless advice to the writer in a clear and accessible manner. I’ve always felt it was perhaps the best book on the art of writing and literary criticism I’ve read. It stays with you and is as relevant today as it was in ancient times.
Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins
This is a wonderful little book and a joy to read. It captures the French Riviera in the 1920s and the magic Gerald and Sara Murphy created for their friends Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, the Fitzgeralds, and so many others.
The book is not all pearls on the beach and cocktails with Valentino, because the Murphys’ lives included tragedies that will tear at your heart. Gerald and Sara met all their struggles with dignity and duty, leaving the reader with a sense of love and respect for them.
This little gem includes 69 intimate photos that are worth the price of admission by themselves.
Read the New Yorker‘s review of Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins.
Proust in Black: Los Angeles, a Proustian Fiction by Fanny Daubigny
Fanny Daubigny compares Los Angeles film noir with Marcel Proust. I loved the connections she draws between these two opposites and their different styles, genres, and cultures. At some point I started to see the association between Los Angeles and French literature, as well as their shared themes of desire and memory.
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Proust’s world was so internal and his imagination so vivid, original, and singular, but so is film noir. This book goes into the dark recesses of their internal and external journeys.
The cross-referencing is stunning. What I came away with was that there is no high or low art. There is just art.
I feel like I need to read and reread Proust in Black because there is so much there to decipher.
Cover and What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund
How Mendelsund, with little design experience, was hired by Knopf is one of the most amazing stories I’ve read. Cover is more than a book about design; it’s a meditation on the creative process and the love of books by a talented designer. A must for book lovers!
What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund is a worthwhile, important, and fun read. There are so many little gems in this well-illustrated book that help readers become aware of and understand how the mind processes books and reading.
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson
“Chinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue one of the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making.”
Chinatown is my favorite film. I even learned how to write screenplays in the 1980s using Chinatown as the template. I have seen the film and read the screenplay multiple times.
The behind-the-scenes story of the making of Chinatown is almost as interesting as the film itself, which is based on the fascinating history of water in Los Angeles, or rather the theft of water to benefit Los Angeles County and enrich insiders.
The book’s cast of characters (producer Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, director Roman Polanski, and screenwriter Robert Towne) provides some explosive moments and even tarnishes a reputation or two. It’s incredible the movie came together as perfectly as it did, but with this kind of talent, it’s also not a total surprise.
Find the best art books on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might also like the best books about or set in Venice, Italy as well as Some of the Best Diaries and Journals.
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