September Book Bag: from Arthur Jafa’s searing chronicles of Black America to a volume of Goya's prints

Arthur Jafa: Live Evil, Flora Katz (editor), Walther König and LUMA Arles, 360pp, $59.95 (hb)

“Arthur Jafa's work in film, sculpture and installation explores Black being with an unflinching eye for systemic and historic inequity and violence and an exuberant harnessing of disparate manifestations of Black—and particularly African-American—culture,” writes Ben Luke, host of The Art Newspaper podcast A Brush With… This comprehensive overview of Jafa’s work over several decades includes key works such as Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), exploring “the philosophical, historical and artistic implications of his practice,” says a publisher’s statement. Essays and a series of conversations between Jafa and practitioners working in the fields of cinema, arts and theory including Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman also feature.

Emily Mason: Unknown to Possibility, Elisa Wouk Almino (editor), Rizzoli Electa, 264pp, $75 (hb)

The first major monograph on Emily Mason (1932–2019), an underrated post–New York School abstract painter, includes newly commissioned essays and a roundtable conversation with Nari Ward, a former student of Mason’s.“Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado,” painter Robert Berlind wrote in Art in America(2003).

“I got to know Mason’s work more deeply while editing a 2020 monograph on her mother Alice Trumbull Mason, one of the first American abstractionists, now finally getting her due. Emily often recalled her mother’s wry prediction: ‘I’ll be famous when I’m dead.’ In recent years, a similar sense of posthumous recognition has begun to surround Emily herself,” says the book’s editor Elisa Wouk Almino.

Goya: The Complete Prints, Anna Reuter and José Manuel Matilla, Taschen, 600pp, $125 (hb)

“The book is organised chronologically and includes insightful texts by Goya scholars that contextualise and enrich the nearly 300 meticulously reproduced prints, including the Caprichos, Desastres de la Guerra, Tauromaquia, and Disparates,” says a publisher’s statement. Chapters cover topics such as “Landscapes” (around 1799), “Etchings after Vélazquez’s Paintings” (1778-92) and “Lithographs from Madrid” (1819-22). “Goya’s capacity for assimilation is demonstrated in the variety of sources that he drew on for the Caprichos, from literature of the most diverse genres to the foreign prints he could have seen personally or known from collectors such as Sebástian Martinez or Ceán Bermúdez,” writes José Manuel Matilla.

Mrs Kauffman & Madame Le Brun: The Extraordinary Entwined Lives of Two Eighteenth-Century Painters, Franny Moyle, Head of Zeus/Apollo, 496pp, £35 (hb)

This dual biography traces the lives and legacies of two overlooked artists—the Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman and the French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun—who met in Rome late 1789. “[Franny Moyle] examines how each artist navigated fame, scandal, and exile; explores the relationships between them and their peers; and considers how they were caught up in the huge cultural cross-currents that were reshaping Europe,” says a publisher’s statement. Influential figures of the era such as Marie-Antoinette and Catherine the Great, who both sat for Vigée Le Brun, are woven into the narrative.

Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces, Colin Rhodes (contributor), Thames & Hudson, 144pp, £40 (hb)

The New York-born photographer Roger Ballen present his first monograph of colour photography, featuring images of distorted human figures, macabre animals and wrecked toys. The book is divided into six sections—entitled Childhood, Spectre, Animus, Shadow, Libido and Chaos—featuring works created in collaboration with Ballen’s artistic director Marguerite Rossouw who gives the photographic scenarios a comic and tragic feel. Ballen says in a statement: As I delved deeper into colour photography, I had begun to appreciate how it adds a distinct ethereality and complexity to my work, enriching the psychological spaces within my images."

Frank O’Hara and MoMA, Matthew Holman, Bloomsbury, 240pp, $22.45 (hb)

Frank O’Hara wrote his famous and popular poetry collection Lunch Poems (1964) during his lunch hour while working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. O’Hara’s curatorial achievements have however been overlooked to a degree. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, Frank O’Hara and MoMA outlines the impact O'Hara's curatorial work had both on the reception of American Modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself.

“By taking O’Hara out of the familiar contexts in which we know him, we find the Poet Laureate of New York getting his hands dirty in Cold War cultural diplomacy far from downtown Manhattan,” Holman says. “By closely tracking O’Hara’s exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial International Program, from São Paulo to the Venice Biennale, Madrid to Otterlo, as well as various memorial retrospectives of recently deceased friends—including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and David Smith—this book explores O’Hara’s unexplored career as a curator.”