This post is part of | Collector’s Notebook | series.

If you’re intimidated by “art books,” you’re allowed to be. Ernst Gombrich begins The Story of Art with a line that still dissolves much of that anxiety: “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” I’ve always read this less as a methodological statement than as a permission slip to look. We are not approaching a marble pedestal called Art History, but human beings making things, and other human beings trying to look at them honestly.

I’ve found that the most meticulously contextualized art writing often leaves me strangely untouched. I remember the facts, but I don’t feel my way of seeing shift. What I crave instead are books that alter my perception, accounts of looking that stay with me, that make the next painting I encounter look different than it did before. Again and again, I’ve found these books not among manuals or surveys, but in the work of novelists: writers who notice atmosphere, hesitation, inner weather, and the slow accumulation of meaning.

During my art studies, I spent a year on the Sotheby’s art writing course. It was invaluable in sharpening my sense of clarity and craft. Yet what stayed with me most was not a formula for “good art writing,” but a quieter reminder: that the strongest writing about art begins with sustained looking, and with the willingness to stay close to experience rather than rush toward explanation.

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There are always far more books being announced than any one life could properly live with. So I read the descriptions, study the reproductions, trace the threads between artists, exhibitions, and ideas, and gradually assemble my own private constellation: the volumes I already know I want beside me in the months ahead, the books I’m most looking forward to reading and adding to my ever-growing collection.

What follows is that first selection for early 2026 -- a personal, forward-looking list of the art books I’m most anticipating these coming months. Under each title, I’ve included the reason it called to me: what I hope it will open, complicate, or quietly accompany as the year unfolds.

Hidden Modernism: The Fascination with the Occult Around 1900 is the catalogue for a major exhibition at Vienna’s Leopold Museum that brings into focus one of the most fertile and least simplified moments in cultural history: the cusp of modernism, when the old structures of belief were loosening and new ways of seeing: artistic, spiritual, social, were still being negotiated.

This threshold is also where my own interests have always lived. My academic work concentrated on early modernism, not its declarations or its finished forms, but its conditions of emergence: the overlapping worlds of Symbolism, life-reform movements, spiritualism, theosophy, psychology, and aesthetic experimentation that made modern art possible before it had a name. It is the era of Hodler, Spilliaert, Klimt, Munch, and Schönberg; a time when nothing was settled, when many futures were still imaginable, and when art was not yet separated from philosophy, belief, and the deepest personal questions. Can’t wait to get my hands on this volume.

Arp: Paper is the books I am most looking forward to this year, when I was finishing my degree, it was precisely this moment in European culture that held me: when artists like Arp, Hodler, Spielhardt, and their contemporaries were trying to invent new visual languages for a world that no longer trusted the old ones. This volume focuses on Arp’s work on paper, perhaps the most intimate, experimental, and revealing part of art practice, where form is not yet fixed, where modernism is still being negotiated line by line. Edited by Arie Hartog and Loretta Würtenberger, the book promises not just a survey but an anatomy of Arp’s thinking process, capturing the moment when abstraction was not yet a style, but a question. For me, this is the kind of book that doesn’t merely document modernism; it allows you to watch it being born.

Francis Bacon: Paintings — The Complete Collection (HENI, 2026) Every year I check for any new publications on Francis Bacon separately, every three months or so. Bacon is not simply one of my central artists, he is the subject of my main academic work. I wrote my thesis on Bacon at the University of Oxford, receiving a distinction, and his paintings have remained a constant presence in my thinking. In short - I am a bit obsessed with his work.

I am especially drawn to publications like this because they allow long, slow, intimate study: returning again and again to the same image, watching how perception changes with time, mood, and experience. With our February Slow Looking deep dive devoted entirely to Bacon, this volume will form the spine of that exploration — not as a textbook, but as a companion for sustained, difficult, necessary looking.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence (National Portrait Gallery, 2026) This forthcoming book arrives at precisely the right moment.

While Bacon is often discussed through violence, distortion, or existential despair, what has always fascinated me most (and what shaped my own academic work) is his relentless focus on presence: the human figure not as subject matter, but as a condition of being in the world.

Human Presence brings together an exceptional group of writers and scholars, and its framing feels deeply aligned with how I have always approached Bacon: not as an illustrator of suffering, but as an artist who forces us to confront what it means to exist inside a body, inside time, inside perception. It will play a central role in our February Slow-Looking schedule, where we will be returning again and again to the question Bacon never allows us to escape: What does it mean to be here?

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting (National Portrait Gallery, forthcoming April 2026). This is one of the books I am most quietly excited about this year, and also one of the most important for the way I look at painting.

Lucian Freud’s work has always lived for me in the tension between drawing and paint: the way a line hesitates, corrects itself, sinks into flesh, becomes weight. This book promises to open that process from the inside. Rather than treating the drawings as preparatory or secondary, it traces how drawing remains embedded in Freud’s painted surfaces - structurally, psychologically, and physically.

For me, Freud stands at the quiet core of twentieth-century painting: unspectacular, unsparing, patient, and devastatingly present. His work has always demanded time, and it rewards only those willing to give it. In May, Slow Looking will turn entirely to Lucian Freud. This book already feels like a key companion for that month.

Experiment Expressionismus — Schiele meets Nosferatu (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, forthcoming March 2026). There are moments in the art-book world when a title alone feels like an event.

How can one not get excited about a book that reads ‘Schiele meets Nosferatu’ on its cover?

This book sits exactly at the fault line that has always fascinated me most: early modernism at the moment it tips into the uncanny. It brings together Expressionist painting and early cinema (two parallel languages of distortion, anxiety, and spiritual unease) and treats them not as separate histories but as a shared psychological climate.

For anyone who is drawn to the world the fragile intensity of pre-war Europe, this is a dream pairing. This is the era I keep returning to: that unstable cusp of modernism where everything feels newly invented and dangerously exposed, where form itself seems to breathe, shudder, and fracture under the weight of the century ahead. A book that traces this connection feels essential.

Marcel Duchamp: MoMA. Duchamp remains the great fracture in modern art, the moment when seeing itself was redefined. This book doesn’t treat him as a provocation, but as a profound thinker of perception, language, and form. It’s a necessary counterweight in this list: where Bacon gives us flesh and Freud gives us gaze, Duchamp gives us mind. Placed alongside the early modernist material in this list, Duchamp becomes what he always was: not a break from history, but a radical continuation of it.

Anselm Kiefer: Women Alchemists (Marsilio Arte, forthcoming July 2026)

Anselm Kiefer is, for me, the only living artist working on a truly cosmic scale, not in size alone, but in seriousness. No one else engages history, myth, memory, destruction, and transformation with such weight, and yet without becoming rhetorical or overbearing.

This book’s focus on alchemy and the feminine principle moves directly into the core of Kiefer’s thinking: art as transmutation, matter as memory, ruin as knowledge. Kiefer does not illustrate ideas; he inhabits them. I do not know another living artist whose work carries such gravity.

I would love to know which of these books caught your attention, and what art books have stayed with you. New discoveries, old companions, recent obsessions: all are welcome. These collections are never complete; they evolve through exchange.

Let’s talk art books. ♦

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