The best new art books of 2026, selected by Christie’s editors

For much of her long life (she died in 2012, aged 101), Dorothea Tanning struggled to escape the shadow of her husband, Max Ernst. Certainly, in terms of their respective reputations as artists: he was considered a daring pioneer of Surrealism, she a latter-day convert to it.

Appreciation of Tanning’s art has increased significantly in recent years, however — evidence coming in the form of a major retrospective held at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía and then London’s Tate Modern in 2018-19. That show’s curator, Alyce Mahon, a professor at the University of Cambridge, has now written the monograph Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World.

The book charts the American artist’s 70-year career, with particular emphasis on how she invested Surrealism with new energy and ideas after the Second World War. It also charts the evolution of her practice across the decades: from painting into sculpture and installation.

This promises to be an exciting year for admirers of the 17th-century Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. In May, the National Gallery in London opens a major exhibition devoted to him (which later travels to the Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago). Before that comes the publication of a new book by Jeremy Robbins, emeritus professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Edinburgh.

It devotes particular attention to Zurbarán’s stunning still lifes, in which everyday items are invested with eternal grace. The artist — who also produced intense Baroque imagery of martyrs and saints — lived most of his life in Seville. The importance of that city in Zurbarán’s time is another key area of exploration for Robbins, as a hub of both the Counter-Reformation and (through its maritime links to the Americas) global trade.

The art historian Martin Gayford interviews Dame Tracey Emin on art, life after cancer, and her cultural influences, including Egon Schiele, Mark Rothko and David Bowie. Frank and confessional as always, Emin’s engaging style makes this an enjoyable read. As an artist, Emin has always been good with words. She has an ear for the unexpected and unpredictable phrase, which keeps the discussions lively and slightly off-kilter.

The result is a compelling self-portrait. ‘Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood — arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me,’ she says. This is Emin: honest, unpretentious and endlessly fascinating.

The Colombian artist Beatriz González, who passed away in January 2026 aged 93, only really received international recognition in the final years of her life. Her first large-scale retrospective in the US opened in 2019. This year sees a major exhibition devoted to her at the Barbican in London (a touring show previously seen at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil, and which later travels to the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo).

A monograph is being published to accompany that exhibition, tracing the course of the artist’s multi-decade career. It is edited by the Barbican’s two curators, Lotte Johnson and Diego Chocano, who explore González’s frequently cited association with Pop art — she liked to use newspaper and magazine photographs as source material. Mixing satire and tenderness, flat figures and acidic colours, González tackled a range of themes, from taste, class and religion to the longstanding political violence in her homeland.

Few contemporary art collections are as ambitious — or as personal — as the Pinault Collection. Built over 50 years, it now encompasses more than 10,000 works, many of which are shown at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and Venice’s Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. This book selects just over 100 of its most striking pieces, offering a highly subjective view of one of the world’s most significant private holdings.

Opening with Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1958), it moves chronologically through six decades of contemporary art, encompassing paintings, sculptures, videos and installations, from Dan Flavin’s luminous minimalism to Maurizio Cattelan’s mischievous provocations. Short expert texts accompany each work, while essays by Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Emma Lavigne and Max Hollein provide context. Less a catalogue than a manifesto, the book celebrates collecting as an act of curiosity, engagement and conviction.

In The Secrets of Painting the Scottish artist, broadcaster and writer Lachlan Goudie documents the making of 20 masterpieces, from blank surface to final brushstroke. The first takes place at the dawn of history, with the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France. We then move through the millennia to Giotto creating his fresco cycle for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua around 1305, followed by Jan van Eyck working on his mysterious Arnolfini Portrait in Bruges in 1434.

Goudie also looks beyond the Western canon, taking in indigenous Australian art, Mughal miniatures and classical Chinese landscapes, before finishing with Jackson Pollock, David Hockney and, finally, the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Across Goudie’s 20 chapters — each one bringing an artist’s studio and practice to life through the lens of a practitioner — a concise history of art unravels that doesn’t just document the evolution of painting, but the course of human creativity.

Korea might not be the first country that comes to mind when thinking about Brutalist architecture. However, during the post-war boom and rapid industrialisation of the 1960s and 1970s, architects created dozens of government buildings, university campuses, cultural institutes and public housing schemes using modular repetition and raw concrete on a monumental scale. The results closely resemble European Brutalism, only with a more Zen-inspired approach to context and landscape.

The British architectural photographer and urban planner Paul Tulett has a passion for the modernist architecture of east Asia. Following on from his 2024 bestseller Brutalist Japan, he photographed some of the finest surviving examples in Korea, from Seoul to Busan, Daegu to Daejeon. More than 220 of the resulting images make up this striking volume.

In 1969, the maverick jewellery designer Bruno Martinazzi conceived the Goldfinger bracelet: a smooth cuff with uncannily lifelike fingers, which grips the wrist like golden armour. The piece speaks of strength and modernity, tempered with a playful wit. It features in a new book on the history of jewellery in art and fashion, which charts the story of ornamental art across the ages.

Showcasing treasures such as Viren Bhagat’s Jali brooch and jewels from the Rothschild collection, the book explores how jewellery has been used to signal sex, power and wealth from ancient Egypt to the modern day. As in fashion, the greatest jewellery designers understood that they were working in the realm of make-believe, and the works in this book ensure there is never a dull or tarnished moment.

In 1999, five years before his death, the celebrated German-Australian fashion photographer Helmut Newton collaborated with the collector Gert Elfering to assemble a single, unique album of more than 100 images from across his career. Each one was mounted on card and accompanied by a note handwritten by Newton. Called his ‘one-off’ album, the work sold at Christie’s in 2008 for £374,500,

Now Phaidon is releasing facsimiles of the album under the title One-off, allowing the public to see many of the images for the first time. Alongside these are some of Newton’s most iconic works, including film noir-inspired black-and-white shots taken for Vogue. The volume opens with an introduction by Philippe Garner, former international head of Photographs at Christie’s, followed by an interview between Elfering and Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. A forthcoming exhibition at the foundation will include all the original photographs featured in the 1999 album.

For several decades, from the 1850s onwards, Paris was a magnet, attracting artists from far and wide to train in its academies, take advantage of its copious exhibition venues and tap into its progressive buzz. This book devotes attention to the British artists who headed there between the late 19th and the mid-20th century — as well as to other parts of France beyond the capital.

These included Edward Burra, who enjoyed visiting the port cities of Marseille and Toulon; Walter Sickert, who lived for many years in Dieppe; and a young Leonora Carrington, who ran off with her lover Max Ernst to a tumbledown farmhouse in the Ardèche. The common thread — according to the book’s author, the artist and writer Simon Morley — was of British creative figures finding in France a land of liberation, which helped free them from the perceived parochialism of their homeland.

When the philosopher Theodor Adorno said that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric, artists were confronted with a dilemma. How were they to engage with the living while keeping faith with the dead? For many, the solution was to create a kind of anti-art, a whole new style that would express post-war desolation in a spare, chastened form.

This was the modus operandi of the Italian conceptualist Fabio Mauri, who, over the following six decades, employed black and white, often using the form of a rectangle, to make observations about science and the universe, light and darkness, and the way good and evil can present themselves in the same interchangeable guise.

This catalogue raisonné, published to coincide with the centenary of the Italian’s birth (and which is also available online), brings this little known avant-gardist to public attention. It reveals a thoughtful individual who, in his artworks, performances and lectures, considered the ongoing legacy of fascism and the power of the media.

Having already penned books on Titian, Tintoretto and Giorgione, Tom Nichols — honorary senior research fellow at the University of Glasgow — has now turned his focus to another leading Venetian School artist: Paolo Veronese.

Veronese’s huge history paintings, such as The Wedding Feast at Cana and The Feast in the House of Levi — with their vibrant colours and sumptuous compositions — are rarely questioned for their beauty. In the past, however, they have been criticised for ‘perceived excess and detachment’, says Nichols. His response? By diving into the social context of the time, the scholar proposes that Veronese was in fact using his pictures to overturn societal hierarchies.

By including marginal figures — from women to people of colour, servants and the poor — within his scenes of civic and sacred grandeur, the artist made a radical comment on power and dignity in Cinquecento Italy. Featuring 60 colour illustrations, this book puts Veronese in the spotlight ahead of the 500th anniversary of his birth in 2028.

Relative Ties shines a much needed spotlight on the remarkable women artists in the Nicholson family, who have long been overshadowed by their famous male relatives. William Nicholson is widely known for his still-life and landscape paintings, and his son Ben Nicholson for pioneering British modernism. This book, however, elevates the profiles of William’s wife, Mabel Pryde Nicholson, their daughter Nancy and daughter-in-law E.Q. Nicholson, as well as E.Q.’s daughter, Louisa Creed.

Mabel, a talented Scottish Colourist, died tragically young of the Spanish flu, but her artistic legacy continued through Nancy, who balanced a creative career running a textile business with supporting her husband, the poet Robert Graves. E.Q. Nicholson was a notable Cubist painter and interior designer, while her daughter Louisa Creed is a textile artist. The book is a discursive essay on the legacy of family, collaboration and what we pass down.

Main image, clockwise from left: Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), Portrait of a Man, c. 1560. Oil on canvas. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (from Paolo Veronese and the Nobility of Painting, Reaktion Books). My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting, Thames & Hudson. Photo: © Thames & Hudson. Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), Summer’s Day, c. 1879. Oil on canvas. 18 x 29⅝ in (45.7 x 75.2 cm). The National Gallery, London (from The Secrets of Painting: The Hidden Art of the Masterpiece from Prehistory to Today, Thames & Hudson). Brilliance: Jewelry Art and Fashion, MFA Boston. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), The Young Virgin, c 1640-45. Oil on canvas. 46 x 37 in (116.8 x 94 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (from Francisco de Zurbarán and the Fabric of the World, Reaktion Books). Helmut Newton (1920-2004), Simonetta’s Eye, Crying, Italian Vogue, Bordighera, Italy, 1982. Gelatin silver print. Image: 18.2 x 12.1 cm. Photograph © Helmut Newton Foundation. Helmut Newton (1920-2004), X-Ray, French Vogue, Cartier Bracelet, Paris, 1994. Gelatin silver print. Image: 24.2 x 18 cm. Photograph © Helmut Newton Foundation (from Helmut Newton: One-off, Phaidon)