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Must We Praise Sade? In her defense of the notoriously vile writings of the Marquis de Sade, “Must We Burn Sade?,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “In a criminal society, one must be criminal” (introduction to The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, Grove Press, 1966, 58). The oft-cited quote encapsulates the feminist philosopher’s tempered response to the eighteenth-century libertine texts of Donatien Alphonse François (better known as the Marquis de Sade) and their place within modern European history as bastions of unfettered freedom of expression. In novels such as The 120 Days of… Full Review

The contributors to the exhibition catalog Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal . . . write with depth and acuity about the artist’s complex body of work, which spans three decades. By asking questions about the role of the arts in democratizing visuality and creating a more civically engaged public, the essays by Julia Dolan, Sara Krajewski, and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, as well as an interview between Thomas and the art historian Kellie Jones, combine to convey a deeply reflective portrait of the artist and offer new insights into the breadth of his artistic growth. The catalog and the… Full Review

I doubt that this review can do justice either to its subject or to its author, though I was somewhat comforted to read that Bret L. Rothstein himself admitted to disliking puzzles. Still, I may not be the right person to review this book, for I confess that I also loathe most puzzles. Deeply frustrating, they make me feel unworthy to share the company of intelligent beings who appreciate them. What is it that allows some people to “get” a puzzle in a matter of minutes while others futilely ponder them, not getting anywhere? Another pause before proceeding: this book… Full Review

In the intellectual history of European modernity, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) remains the prototype for the extraterritorial thinker. Estranged from institutions of official culture, such a figure is singularly attuned to the dynamism of modern life, a sensitive diagnostician who finds in the most fleeting phenomena visible symptoms of a fundamentally altered relationship between objective conditions and states of mind. The centrality of works of art and literature for Simmel’s reflections on society and the money economy galvanized his students, such as Siegfried Kracauer and Ernst Bloch, who radically reconfigured philosophical writing in confrontation with the rise of mass media and… Full Review

Sixteen years after Jacques Derrida’s death, a new collection of essays and interviews devoted to artists and art by the eminent thinker offers a chance to reconsider his impact on the field and ongoing interest in his work. According to the volume’s title, this interest might lie in the plurality of the arts. But why? Why “the arts” rather than art in the singular? Spock’s famous dictum in Star Trek comes to mind: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”—“or the one.” Was Derrida secretly a Trekkie? This dictum, of course, is at the center of… Full Review

This hefty tome chronicles the decades of freewheeling acquisition that resulted in Louise and Walter Arensberg’s collections of modernist painting and sculpture and of art of the preconquest Americas. The Arensbergs also amassed the world’s largest collection of books by and about empiricist philosopher Francis Bacon, whom Walter (a Harvard-educated poet and literary sleuth) believed to have written Shakespeare’s plays and encrypted them with clues to his authorship. In this book’s coauthored essay, designer Mark Nelson and cultural historian William H. Sherman speculate that Arensberg’s lifelong interest in codes, conundrums, and what Bacon called the “parabolical” (402) underlay the evocative… Full Review

The last two decades have witnessed a steady increase of interest in the history of taste and collecting, in America and beyond. This trend is reflected in, but also stimulated by, the recent establishment of three important book series: Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets (Brill) and the Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 (Routledge), both initiated in 2016, and the Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America (Penn State University Press), initiated in 2014. All three initiatives attest to the interdisciplinary nature of the research… Full Review

The artist Simon Hantaï (1922–2008), who was Hungarian born, made his way to Paris in 1948 and became a longtime French resident. Knowledgeable about both Marxism and Catholic tradition, he was inspired by the art of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as by the visiting exhibitions of Jackson Pollock, to make ambitious abstract paintings and develop a highly personal aesthetic. Well-known in France thanks to gallery exhibitions, he is not as familiar a figure in the American art world. And so the books under review, which offer very different perspectives, deserve a warm welcome. It is impossible to… Full Review

The post–Second World War era was marked by profound changes that altered almost every aspect of British society. These were particularly visible in the domestic sphere, which had been fractured and fragmented by war and was undergoing a long period of reconstruction in the decades after 1945. In his book, Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home, Gregory Salter delves right into the notion of the postwar home in its tangible and intangible formations. The book is presented as a series of case study chapters on male artists: John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Francis Newton Souza, Victor Pasmore, and… Full Review

Nina Amstutz opens her new history of Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes boldly, with the same painting with which Joseph Leo Koerner began his now-canonical Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (Yale University Press, 1990): the 1828 Trees and Shrubs in the Snow (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, Germany). Many of her arguments are efforts to give body to Koerner’s formal insights and to ground his observations more fully in the discourse of Friedrich’s time. Koerner’s ekphrasis is commonly cited as some of the best visual writing in the discipline, and Amstutz admirably keeps pace in a book whose premise… Full Review