Five June Art Books Recast Art History as a Present Tense
The most compelling art books arriving this June do more than revisit the past. They use art, biography, and cultural history to show how old conflicts keep resurfacing in new forms. From the 1980s culture wars to modernist Paris and the Weimar Republic, these titles treat history less as backdrop than as an active force.
Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, returns to the battles that surrounded Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. Butler, who was raised amid the era’s fault lines, places those controversies alongside budget politics, new interviews, and the shifting language of free expression. The result is not simply a recap of familiar disputes, but a reminder that the culture wars have never stayed in one ideological camp for long.
Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, takes a different route into modernism. The book begins with a writer in Paris struggling with an assignment on Stein, then opens into an imagined exchange that gradually shapes Levy’s own prose. The premise is intimate, but the effect is larger: Stein’s experiments with language become a way of thinking about how reading alters voice itself.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s Vermeer’s Afterlives, published by Princeton University Press, arrives alongside renewed attention to the Dutch painter’s legacy. Yeazell examines how Vermeer’s enigmatic scenes have invited interpretation across literature and art, from Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring to later critical reassessments. As Kelly Presutti has noted in reviewing the broader Vermeer conversation, the painter has repeatedly been enlisted to answer the needs of the present.
Two other books widen the frame. Rem Before Koolhaas: Journalism by an Architect, from nai010 publishers, gathers Rem Koolhaas’s reporting for Haagse Post between 1963 and 1968, before Delirious New York made him a defining figure in architecture. And Katja Hoyer’s Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, from Basic Books, narrows its focus to the city of Weimar itself, where the Bauhaus and the Nazi Party existed in uneasy proximity.
Hoyer’s book, like the others, is interested in ordinary lives as much as canonical names. That emphasis gives the season’s art books a shared charge: they do not simply reconstruct the past. They ask how cultural memory is built, revised, and put back to work when the present starts to feel uncannily familiar.
