‘EVA HESSE: OBERLIN DRAWINGS’ Edited by Barry Rosen ( Hauser & Wirth ) The result is an up-close portrait of the overlapping cultural spheres of fin de siècle Paris, seen from a new and telling perspective. This catalog examines the facets of his many activities, one readable essay at a time. He was an important early admirer of the Pointillist Georges Seurat and also of African sculpture. art critic, publisher, editor, collector and art dealer. This unusual exhibition was devoted not to an artist, but to a workaholic polymath: an anarchist.

‘FÉLIX FÉNÉON: THE ANARCHIST AND THE AVANT-GARDE’ By Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Philippe Peltier ( Museum of Modern Art ) The book’s inclusions and theories can be debated, but it sets a standard for future efforts. It provocatively divides abstraction according to subject matter (the body, the cosmos, landscape, architecture), increasing its accessibility. A herculean effort, it reproduces the efforts of over 200 artists from all seven continents, usually with sharp capsule discussions. This large coffee table/art history book announces its singularity with its cover, a painting by Hilma af Klint, whose recently rediscovered achievement upended the history of modernist abstraction. ‘ABSTRACT ART: A GLOBAL HISTORY’ By Pepe Karmel ( Thames & Hudson ) Mixed with these are new projects by six contemporary artists - Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz and Paul Ramirez Jonas - that illuminate additional aspects of the archive, revealing their contemporary implications. Barr Jr.’s sketches for his famous chart of modernist art movements. All are republished here, with actual-size reproductions of telegrams, photographs, carbon copies of letters (remember those?), newspaper clippings and an early V.I.P. This she did for each of its 18 issues, until 2018. In 2006 Tod Lippy, an artist and editor, invited Michelle Elligott, chief of the Museum of Modern Art’s fabled archives, to write a column on some aspect of its holdings for his just-founded magazine, Esopus. ‘MODERN ARTIFACTS’ By Michelle Elligott & Tod Lippy ( Esopus Books)

The Art Book by Phaidon Press