100 books like Sonia Delaunay

I adore David Hockney. He draws so beautifully, and in so many different ways, and is always inventive in his art-making. He makes me see more through his art and was a major inspiration for me when I was starting out as an editorial illustrator years ago. This book is a 2020 pandemic conversation between Hockney, now living in Normandy, and his good friend, the art critic Martin Gayford in the UK. It really speaks to the devotion that artists have to observing life and creating something beautiful from it. I love the joy Hockney brings to his work and see that as a powerful energy to create from.

This is a purely visual book of portraits by David Hockney from the beginning of his career until he is nearly 80. It’s full of different styles of drawing and painting and, for that reason, is the kind of book that stimulates visual ideas and makes me want to go straight to the drawing board. In other words, it really gets us thinking in some new ways about how we interpret the world around us in drawing and painting. It’s a good reminder of the pleasures of looking and making.

Artist, designer, writer James Victore urges us to be ourselves without hesitation. Artists don’t fit in, we can’t. We’re observers and makers and require a certain distance from the mainstream to refine our vision and do our work. But we can be afraid to express ourselves fully and stand out from the crowd. This book dishes out confidence like candy. It’s a great place to replenish flagging spirits when they descend as they will from time to time. It’s energizing and makes you want to open your eyes and do what you can to further the unfolding of your truth and spirit. Written in short pithy chapters, you can dip in and out of it whenever you need a boost.

While Nick Cave is primarily a musician/songwriter, this book is a visual record of Cave’s creative journey filled with his early sketchbooks, photos, drawings, and typewritten song lyrics annotated by hand. Many of us artists work in sketchbooks where we can feel free to be messy and exploratory and pour our hearts onto the page. Some of us need words as well as images to explore the world around us, decipher our feelings and uncover our work. I love musing over Nick’s here—so messy and wild to begin and a little more ordered as he ages as one might expect. The book is filled with photos of different parts of his life, drawings and doodles, tight handwritten scripts and taped over typewritten lyrics gone yellow with age. It’s a compendium of a wonderful artist’s creative process. A real joy to sit down with and muse over.

I find midcentury fashion memoirs inspiring because they’re filled with stories of strong, self-realized women who really managed to have it all. This one by Bettina Ballard, French editor for American Vogue in prewar Paris, goes one better because it also offers heartbreaking commentary on the war.

Alongside observations about great designers like Chanel and Dior, Ballard writes stirringly of the tragic, gruesome fates that befell many in her world and the courageous way some resisted the Germans to save their art form, couture. Vogue tries to bring her back to New York, but she swiftly returns to Europe as a Red Cross volunteer—albeit one who sneaks non-regulation eveningwear into her trunk. When she finally goes home to marry (for the second time), she mentions it in an aside.  

This is the second of four books of the collected interviews of famous authors from the Paris Review. Hemingway, Moore, Porter, Ellison, and Huxley are among the fourteen included in this book. Other books in the series include Forster, Faulkner, Warren, Bellow, Welty, Dinesen, Steinbeck, and many others. You may be amazed at how different successful writers are in their thinking about writing and success in their careers. In my studies in over a hundred workshops and many lectures and seminars, I was fortunate to meet and know teachers and students who knew, or studied, with many of these authors. Experiences that make me think you’d value most of Plimpton’s work in this series.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

Regent’s of Paris takes place in a struggling small town automobile dealership during the week preceding a Memorial Day sale.

It’s Glengarry Glen Ross without shoving the reader into a tar pit of despair. I like books that don’t make readers need a shower and antidepressants at the end, at the same time addressing uncomfortable truths. This one delivers with a measure of cynicism.

There’s cynicism in my own work too. I view a cynic as a blend of idealism and sentiment: idealistic enough to see the world as it should be and sentimental enough to recall the exact moment of his/her/their disillusionment.

If you are a fan of Medieval history and Paris, Hugo’s novel is for you. Hollywood, of course, turned it into The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Before I wrote the text for my book published after the fire, in 2019, I read this story and discovered Hugo was a great fan of Medieval architecture, incorporating chapters on the construction of Notre Dame throughout his book. This was invaluable research for me, but it also saved Notre Dame in the 1830s which had been in terrible condition after the Revolution and was almost sold.

Thanks to his novel, which the public loved but the critics dismissed, an arts competition was established to repair Notre Dame to its former glory.

As the much-missed Karl Lagerfeld once said, “Fashion is a train that waits for nobody.” And that train comes whooshing through Paris quite a lot.

This book captures some of the inimitable energy and agitation of Paris Fashion Week, as self-taught photographer Meyabe covers six seasons—men’s, women’s, and couture—over a single year. It includes an introduction by local fashion hero Loïc Prigent and is published by my friends Alex and Marie from Ofr. (who also published Makers Paris #2).

Ofr. is an indie arts bookshop, gallery and publisher, always in the moment, that channels a certain bohemian spirit proper to Paris: “Open, Free and Ready”.