Book of the Day > Richard Diebenkorn: A Retrospective. Published by Rizzoli. “The quintessential book on the beloved California artist reveals new scholarly research and firsthand reflections by fellow artists and friends and relatives. A fresh and new overview of this treasured West Coast artist, with hundreds of his paintings, drawings, and prints covering five decades of his illustrious career. The book surveys the extraordinary achievements of Diebenkorn, who successfully explored both abstract and figurative painting. Produced in a slipcase box, this is the ultimate source for art enthusiasts, from his early work of the mid-1940s to his Berkeley and Ocean Park series. The book includes not only his iconic paintings of the California landscape and interior figures but also many of his less-well-known and rarely published works.”

Book of the Day: Jonathan Daniel Pryce: Garçon Style. Published by Laurence King. "Delve into New York, London, Milan, and Paris with close to 300 street-style images by the award-winning photographer Jonathan Daniel Pryce. From impeccable tailoring to vintage finds, these evocative images capture the myriad ways men in the fashion capitals express themselves sartorially. Featuring a foreword by Paul Smith and interviews with a selection of each city's most stylish men, this is a stunning showcase of menswear today."

Book of the Day > Kiss My Genders. Published by Hayward Gallery. “Kiss My Genders celebrates more than 30 international artists whose work explores and challenges traditional gender categories. The book features works from the late 1960s through to the present, and focuses on artists who draw on their own experiences to create content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender. These include Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Jimmy DeSana, Chitra Ganesh, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Zoe Leonard, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles and Del LaGrace Volcano, among many others. Working across mediums, many of these artists treat the body as a sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form. From pop culture and gender dissidence to the embrace of the "monstrous" or "freaky," from the politics of pose to transfeminism and politics on the street, each of these artists throws light on a different way of seeing.”

Book of the Day > Isabel Toledo: Fashion From the Inside Out. Published by Yale University Press. "One of the most exciting fashion designers in the United States, Cuban-born Isabel Toledo has been honored with a National Design Award from the Cooper- Hewitt Museum and a Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion, given by The Museum at FIT. Yet her name and work are recognized only by fashion insiders. This ravishing book brings Toledo’s creations to a wider audience, places them within the context of contemporary fashion, and examines her creative process. Interviewing Toledo, her husband (fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo), and other colleagues, clients, and critics, Valerie Steele gives an account of Toledo’s career and explains that while she has been heralded by leading fashion magazines and featured in stores in New York and Europe, she has not had the long-term financial backing to break out of the niche market. Patricia Mears investigates the artistic and cultural influences on Toledo’s work and analyzes her unusual methods of construction, noting that she designs in three dimensions in her mind and then begins working directly with fabric. Displaying garments Toledo has created since her first show in 1985, this book is a revelatory exploration of a fashion innovator in a mass-market industry. Out of Print."

Book of the Day > Kathy Butterly: ColorForm. Published by Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. “ColorForm is the first major monograph on the work of New York sculptor Kathy Butterly (born 1963). Encompassing 60 sculptures and 20 drawings from throughout Butterly’s career, all of which are reproduced here, it focuses mainly on the last ten years of her work. Butterly is well known for her sculptures that challenge the conventions of ceramic tradition through oblique figurations of the body, with shapes that evoke mouths, feet and genitalia. Her work, which stands in historical dialogue with that of Ken Price, Viola Frey and Robert Arneson, engages with the politics of 20th-century femininity even as it leans ever closer to abstraction. The works collected here chart the evolution of Butterly’s sensibilities and philosophical stance, tracking the development of her highly personal yet immediate and accessible ceramic language from explorations of the body to personhood and autobiography.”

Book of the Day > The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of the Louvre’s Flowers by Jean-Michel Othoniel. "To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Louvre pyramid, French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel was invited to create a work about the presence of flowers in the museum's eight art departments. Visiting the Louvre’s collections of paintings, drawings, sculptures, embroidery and enamel, the artist photographed the flowers that appeared there. Using these images, Othoniel composed his own original herbarium, accompanied with notes on the secret language of flowers and their symbolism in the history of art. Among the 70 flowers Othoniel compiled in this volume, you will find the thistle in Dürer's self-portrait, the poppy in the Paros funerary stele, the apple sitting on a stool in The Lock by Fragonard and the peony attached to the unfastened blouse of the young woman in Greuze's Broken Pitcher. Also included are lesser-known details in lesser-known works—concealed treasures, hiding in plain sight at the museum. Following a similar format to Othoniel’s previous book about flowers, this volume intersperses photographs and drawings with short texts in a luxurious, eminently giftable book."