This account of the theft of a South Seas cultural treasure by German colonists in the late 1800s reveals a series of atrocities

Our roundup of the latest art publications

New critical assessment of the vibrant works of the German artist who was exiled to the Netherlands in 1935

All you ever wanted to know about Hokusai, from a history of The Great Wave to a novel about the artist's daughter—selected by the curator Sarah E. Thompson

A new memoir by Patrick Bringley details what it was like to work as a guard at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art

New book uses artist's wartime commission in a coalmine to show his melancholy side and mildly left political strain,

Plus, the Met: a guard’s memoir and Hubert Robert at Stockholm's Nationalmuseum

Ninety previously unseen photographs from the early 1970s reveal the foundations of his practice

As Saint Bartholomew the Great celebrates nine centuries, a new volume explores how the church has, against the odds, remained at London’s heart

The inaugural edition of Tropic Bound takes places in the city’s Design District, but its programming extends across town to highlight South Florida’s book-making scene

Both British queens owned the same prayerbook, curators at Hever Castle in England have found

Our roundup of the latest art publications

Remarkable photographs of thousands of church interiors in rural England and Wales have been brought together in this landmark publication

An excerpt from one of Thiebaud’s final interviews, which features in the catalogue of a survey at the Fondation Beyeler, reveals how the US artist arrived at his signature style

András Szántó spoke to 21 architects about how museum architecture is shaping up, here are some of his findings

The former editor of Frieze magazine says the idea that modernity had to be rational, cool and atheist was detrimental to art

All you ever wanted to know about Vermeer, from a “legendary” show catalogue to an illustrated book for kids—selected by the curators Pieter Roelofs and Gregor J. M. Weber

A monumental biography of the political caricaturist who is one of the greatest draughtsmen in the history of British art

Scholarly essays examine how people lived, from poor tenant farmers to their whist-playing landlords

Stefan Guzy has scoured archives from the Holy Roman Empire and believes he has traced back the ownership of the mysterious cipher book

The artist returned from his trip to America in the 1960s “the personification of self-aware modernity”

Our roundup of the latest art publications

An extract from a biography of the US collector and museum founder looks at how her modest taste was transformed by her inheritance and why her husband was not pleased by a revealing painting

The Art Newspaper’s books editor Jacqueline Riding selects spring and summer publications to look out for, from the Surrealism of Leonora Carrington to 100 years of Black figuration

Gregor Weber's biography "Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection" also supports the controversial view that Vermeer used a camera obscura

New book is first English translation of artist’s album From Childhood to 1943 and a previously unpublished autobiographical text

The artist, who is now in her 90s and voluntarily living in a psychiatric hospital, has a major retrospective under way in Hong Kong

Two recently published, richly illustrated books contain a wealth of movie ephemera including photographs, concept designs, postcards and scripts

In her work, the artist strived to “find our place on the surface of our planet”

Struggling for Christmas gifts? Take a look at the publications we enjoyed over the past year—from an exploration of art and motherhood to an interrogation of the culture wars