The Best Art Books of 2023

News Katy Hessel on Her Bestseller ‘The Story of Art Without Men’ Sam Gaskin

There was a remarkable breadth of recommendations for books about art in 2023. In fact, across lists shared by four leading newspapers, only one title received two mentions.

All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guard’s Adventures in Life, Loss and Art by Patrick Bringley got the nod from both The Times and The FT.

Following his brother Tom’s death from cancer at 27, Bringley gave up a job at The New Yorker where ‘they told me I was “going places”,’ for a job in which he said, ‘I was happy to be going nowhere.’

Bringley spent a decade working as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, doing ‘the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew’. The less straightforward job, communicating the solace and joy he found in the museum’s artworks, is where the book succeeds.

Other books recommended by The FT included: the collector bio Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists by Laura Freeman, Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker by Aoife Brady, about the 16th century mannerist painter; and An Atlas of Es Devlin by contemporary artist Es Devlin, who we interviewed about the book and more.

Recommendations from The Times skewed towards past greats such as Monet: The Restless Vision by Jackie Wullschläger, Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt, Looking at Picasso by Pepe Karmel, and Thunderclap by Laura Cumming—a biography of Dutch Master Carel Fabritius, who studied under Rembrandt.

Among the books The Art Newspaper shouted out were two sweeping epics about peoples—Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now and Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance—and Lauren MacDonald’s close study of materials, In Pursuit of Color: From Fungi to Fossil Fuels: Uncovering the Origins of the World’s Most Famous Dyes.

The New York Times’ arts editors offered another 14 recommendations, leading with Holland Cotter’s plug for Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, edited by Lynne Cooke.

Others included books on artists Miyoko Ito, Wade Guyton, Coco Fusco, and Catherine Lord’s wonderfully titled The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, a critique of colonialism that draws from the books of Dr. Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls, a plantation owner on Dominica from the 1870s until his death in 1926. —[O]

Main image: All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guard's Adventures in Life, Loss and Art by Patrick Bringley. Courtesy Simon & Schuster.