DALÍ IN 400 IMAGES
William Jeffett
The celebrated Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí once stated, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.” He was fascinated with Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind and incorporated elements of these theories into his artwork. So his surreal, hallucinogenic style emerged, often imitated but never bettered. This guide, compiled by the chief curator of the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, contains 400 colour reproductions and a unique selection of historical photographs that span the entire scope of the artist’s career. It shows the complexity of his vision and influences, from 1920s cubism up until he embraced classicism and then re-engaged with the avant-garde in the 1960s and beyond. Always outrageous, always surprising, his legacy continues to captivate audiences.
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT
William Kentridge and Karen Marta
William Kentridge’s film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is a nine-part sequence chronicling his creative process during Covid, when he was locked down in Joburg.
This enormous book — which he likens to a “huge pastrami sandwich”— is a storyboard of those films, a copious, crammed almanac that lays bare his creative process. “The studio is both a physical place and a metaphoric space. It is a place of making, and a place of making meaning,” he says.
In the pages he enters into a dialogue with himself, taking on the personae of Kentridge One and Kentridge Two. In Godot-like aperçus they debate questions of art, memory, history, the nature of work and of time itself. The pages are scattered with wit and oddities, collaged and sketched, with tissue-like interleaves that add further texture. The book is itself an immersive work of art.
AFRICAN ART: THE ARAK COLLECTION
Julie van der Vlugt, Ashraf Jamal, Nneoma Angela Okorie
The ARAK Collection is one of the largest contemporary African art collections in the Middle East, a 4 000-strong range of works by sub-Saharan African artists housed in Doha. It’s a vitally important collection, a showcase of the art of here and now on the continent. Ashraf Jamal, an art writer, lecturer, and essayist, explains that the collection is focused on the idea of African significance as a cultural capital in the world at large. Gathered here are 200 artworks from this treasury. This is not a collection built around what’s fashionable; it is humane, engaged, and engaging.
BLACK EARTH RISING: COLONIALISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Ekow Eshun et al.
This landmark anthology explores how artists of African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American identity examine the tangled ties between race, climate crisis, and colonialism.
It tackles questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement. Works by more than 150 artists are presented in three sections titled Reckoning, Reimagining, and Reclaiming. This is a fascinating and timely book, written mainly by star cultural pundit Ekow Eshun.
PABLO PICASSO: BOY LEADING A HORSE
Pablo Picasso, Annemarie Iker
Pablo Picasso, the titan — or monstre sacré— of 20th-century art, is most often associated with images of distorted faces, blocks of colour, crazed eyes, and jagged lines.
In his long career he wheeled through realism and abstraction, cubism, neoclassicism, surrealism, and expressionism. But his earlier work is gentler, paler. He painted Boy Leading a Horse in 1905-6. The monumental painting was a study for a greater mural that he never completed. Here art expert Annemarie Iker offers a close examination of a composition that has always been swathed in mystery.
IRMA STERN: A MODERN ARTIST BETWEEN BERLIN AND CAPE TOWN
Lisa Hörstmann and Lisa Marei Schmidt
Irma Stern’s bold, colour-burst works are hallmarks of an age when the world was there to be explored. This richly illustrated new book focuses on her portraiture, revisiting the contexts in which they were painted and how they are seen today.
Stern, born in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, studied art and found an early home in Berlin with the so-called Die Brücke artists. In 1920, she returned to South Africa. While marginalised as a woman and a Jew, she also benefited from the apartheid system. Her complex body of work was shaped by both emancipation and cultural appropriation. The authors investigate these layers of her celebrated works.
From the September edition of Wanted, 2025
