Fans pick 100 books like In Wonderland

This is the grand exhibition catalogue that burst through the professional art world’s wall of denial that modern, especially abstract, art would have any spiritual content. The extensive exhibition this book accompanied opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986 and then travelled to The Hague, where it influenced young European art historians (though was largely ignored in the United States). This catalogue contains excellent articles by 17 noted “rebellious” art historians, including an overview by the head curator of the exhibition, Maurice Tuchman. The many color plates are stunning. This book is indispensable for anyone seeking to learn about the subject.

Lipsey, an art historian, was inspired by Coomaraswamy’s perception of spiritual interests in the work of early modernist artists who exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York in the 1920s. Lipsey had a hunch that many more prominent 20th-century artists most likely had a similar engagement with the spiritual. In seeking to present “the hidden side” of modern art, he discusses some 20 renowned artists and relevant movements that attracted many of them in various decades, such as Theosophy, Orphism, and Cubism. The title is taken from a quotation by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who favored a nature-based spiritual sensibility that was distinct from church-based religious art: “It is time we had an art of our own.” Lipsey is an insightful and graceful guide in this area.

The Romantic painters of the early 19th century were intrigued with notions of the sublime, the Absolute, and the unity and divinity of all nature. After the mid-1880s the focus of the avant-garde painters became energized by the quest to escape the bounds of “materialism” (an umbrella term by which they meant positivism, the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics, as well as the destructive effects of industrialism). Lynn Gamwell illuminates the fascination many of the modern artists felt for various scientific discoveries in various decades. For instance, the first exhibition of x-rays by the Berlin Physical Society in 1896 was hailed by the artists as proof that an invisible structure underlies every surface, just as Theosophy asserts! Exploring the Invisible is subtle, thorough, and insightful engagement with this rich interplay.

I noticed when I was interviewing prominent contemporary artists for my book that many of them had a Catholic childhood. Eleanor Heartney noticed the same thing when she began to research the art and artists who became a focus in the culture wars of the 1990s. This is a dimension of the art history of the modern era that has not been told. Heartney explores the influence of an “Incarnational consciousness” in works that transgress boundaries. Beyond that, she frames artistic manifestations of the “Catholic imagination,” tracing the influence of “the beauty of religious art, music, and literature and the slippage in sacramental rituals between the carnal and the spiritual.” Her final chapter is on “Knowledge Through the Body: The Female Perspective.”

As a teen in the 90s, I bought a lot of used science fiction paperbacks from the 70s; I loved this tribute to that era’s key artists and their signature styles. I found this book to be much more than a pretty exercise in nostalgia, however, weaving in smart historical commentary and creating an interesting context for works through subject-related groupings like “Life in the Future(s)” and “Cryptozoology and the Paranormal.”

By chronicling the science fiction art of the time during which Jason Velez in Equimedian is active in fandom and builds his collection, this thorough, gorgeous survey doubles as a kind of extended universe artifact for my novel! It’s a beautiful resource that includes full-page reproductions of stunning covers (including some by authors on this list, like Malzberg), and I find that it inspires me to continue exploring the strange byways of 70s science fiction.

In researching Mary Edmonia Lewis, the nineteenth-century African-American sculptor I highlight in my book, I needed to understand Lewis as a person and as an artist.

Buick’s book explores Lewis’s art within the context of her life experiences and her passions, as well as how race and gender influenced her work. Although Lewis was our first African American and Native American sculptor, throughout her life Lewis was dismissed, praised, misunderstood, and eventually forgotten. Child of Fire gives voice to not only Lewis’ accomplishments, but explains the importance of her work to the canon of American art.

Proust’s passion for the English writers George Eliot and John Ruskin is well known, as is his scrutiny of the Anglophilia of Parisians at the turn of the twentieth century, but his connection with American thinkers and painters has been less carefully scrutinized. ”It is strange," Proust wrote in 1909, "that, in the most widely different departments . . . there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as the English and American.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and James McNeill Whistler are examined as Proust's key American influences. Critic Michael Murphy also investigates the previously overlooked influence of the American neurologist George Beard, whose writings on neurasthenia and "American nervousness” helped contribute to the essential modernity of In Search of Lost Time.

I read this book this month while traveling to the UK Tarot Conference and loved the resonance of tarot cards and people appearing in your life at the right time. Claire McMillian opens up the world of surrealist painter Remedios Varo by way of Pamela’s Smith Tarot cards as markers and guideposts.

I fell down the rabbit hole researching Varo’s artwork after I read it, especially Remedios’ painting of the magician or juggler. Her friend, Leonora Carrington, is also in the book—bringing art, tarot, and love to their immense ambition and their drive to live their life in their art and tarot readings. I loved learning about this post-WWII community of magical women and the art they created across Europe and Mexico.

The photographs compiled in this book were all captured by Enrique Metinides, my favorite Mexican photographer.

Enrique worked as a crime photographer for over 50 years, capturing murders, crashes, and all kinds of catastrophes for Mexico’s infamous tabloids. This photo book is a great testament of Mexico’s palpable surrealism, where death is just one more component of the chaotic landscape.

Even though Metinides worked for the sensationalist press, none of the images in this book could be called that. His photos emanate an enormous respect for the victims and for tragedy itself.

The beauty of his shots do not romanticize the “real-life horror” that we are looking at. Rather, they remind us that sometimes, when in the presence of the devastating forces of life, there’s nothing else to do but be a humble spectator. 

I loved this collection of short stories primarily for the characters that Kevin Wilson created. The humanity and eclectic traits that he puts into them connected with me on a personal level. It’s almost as if the characters could live in a Wes Anderson film. While the people shine in these stories, the plots still have that inventive odd twist that left me smiling. And the story from which the collection takes its name was a melancholic surreal tale that left me thinking about its layers of meaning long after I finished reading it.