1. Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century. edited by Wendy Wick Reaves. $49.95, Rowman & Littlefield. 

In Reflections/Refractions, some of the greatest modern artists–including Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Alexander Calder, and Alex Katz–use sinuous line and gorgeous color to trace the intricacies of their personalities, whether dark and gloomy or bright and fanciful. The book is at once a catalog of twentieth-century self-portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and an exploration of how modern artists view themselves and the world. Eighty color illustrations–drawings and paintings–are accompanied by lively and informative captions, making this volume an endlessly fascinating book for the coffee table and library.

2. Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa, Edited by Hans Silvester. $29.95, Thames & Hudson.

The lower valley of the Omo, at the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, remains one of the wildest places in Africa. Over the course of numerous voyages to this forgotten land, Hans Silvester became fascinated by the beauty of the Surma and Mursi tribes, who share a taste for body painting and extravagant decorations borrowed from nature. This magnificently produced book provides a priceless record of a unique and increasingly fragile way of life, one threatened by conflict, climate change and tourism.

3. Jazz, Henri Matisse. $75.00, Prestel.

With this book you hold an artist’s spirit in your hands. Each page reveals deeply felt ideas, years of dedication to art and its craft, innate sensitivity to visual stimuli and their perfect organization for the most exhilarating, most satisfying result. The precise equilibrium of these elements in Jazz is Matisse’s unique achievement. The dark rhythms, roiling counterpoint, happy staccatos, and jolting dissonances of this Jazz will sound forever. Matisse has taught the eye to hear.

An exquisite synthesis of paper cut-outs and reflective handwritten thoughts on the nature of art.

4. Jeff Koons, Edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth. $70.00, Taschen.

From kinky to kitsch to conceptual, Jeff Koons’ art is anything but conformist. This exhaustive monograph begins with a biographical essay by Ingrid Sischy who tells the personal story of a dedicated artist unwilling to compromise his work even in torrid times. An essay by Eckhard Schneider sees Koons from a European perspective. Arranged in chronological chapters by work groups, the main body of the book features art historian and critic Katy Siegel’s detailed analyses alongside hundreds of large-format images, tracing Koons’ career from 1979 to today. Fans of Jeff Koons’ work will find in this publication not only a sumptuous book-object, but also the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work ever published.

 5. Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, Edited by Christian Rattemeyer. $65.00, Museum of Modern Art. 

Formed by Harvey S. Shipley Miller and donated to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2005, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection was conceived to be the widest possible cross-section of contemporary drawing made primarily within the past 20 years, surveying gestural and geometric abstraction, representation and figuration, systems-based and Conceptual work, as well as appropriation and collage. This volume  brings together approximately 250 representative works.

6. A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, Adrienne Rich. $24.95, W.W. Norton.

Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.

Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.