Best summer books of 2024: Visual arts

The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935 by Sjeng Scheijen (Thames & Hudson)

The Russian avant garde’s rise and fall, Utopian hopes and tragic demise, extreme politics, big personalities — Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, Rodchenko, Tatlin — is a story gripping as a thriller, and central to 20th-century art history. Scheijen’s account, drawing on artists’ letters, diaries and other substantial archival discoveries, is masterly and moving.

The Book of Printed Fabrics by Aziza Gril-Mariotte (Taschen)

Mulhouse’s Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, temple of textiles, mecca for fashion designers, boasts the world’s largest fabric collection. This lavish, luxurious, exceptional tapestry of its treasures from four centuries — Indian chintzes, decorative toiles de Jouy, Hermès scarves, bold modern patterns — tells tumultuous stories about global trade, technology, changing taste.

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On the Body by Linda Nochlin (Thames & Hudson)

A big welcome to Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable “Pocket Perspectives”: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers. Nochlin compellingly explores “the body in pieces”, metaphor for modernity’s fragmentation, in 19th-century French painting. The series’ other highlights so far are Ernst Gombrich on frescoes and Griselda Pollock on Gauguin.

Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography edited by Lou Stoppard (Mack)

Nobel laureate Ernaux seeks to work like “a photographer, and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered”. This small, engaging volume pairs “Exteriors”, where Ernaux as suburban flaneuse glimpses strangers in cafés, council estates, on the metro, with photographers of the social landscape including Henry Wessel, Garry Winogrand, Daido Moriyama, Janine Niépce.

Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg by Hans C Hönes (Reaktion Books)

Aged 13, Aby renounced his role as heir to the Warburg banking business, on condition his younger brother would buy him every book he ever wanted. Against expectations, this Jewish outsider, mentally and physically fragile, too unruly to accept academic discipline, laid the foundations for modern art history: a heroic tale.

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