Chosen Books

Invited designers and commentators have chosen these as the books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
240 books
The Notebooks of Paul Klee, vol. 1: The Thinking Eye
Jürg Spiller, ed.
The Notebooks of Paul Klee, vol. 2: The Nature of Nature
Jürg Spiller, ed.
Nothing if Not Critical
Robert Hughes
Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark
Pamela M. Lee
Ocean Flowers
Carol Armstrong et al.
Oceanic Art
Anthony J. P. Meyer
One Place after Another
Miwon Kwon
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
Rosalind Krauss
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Michael Baxandall
Painting as a Pastime
Winston Churchill
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
Norman Mailer
Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere
Michael Kimmelman
The Power of the Center
Rudolf Arnheim
The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture
Adolf von Hildebrand
Punk’s Dead
Simon Barker et al.
Rachel Feinstein
Bill Powers, ed. et al.
Rediscovered Masterpieces of Mesoamerica
Gerald Berjonneau et al.
Richard Serra, Sculpture
Kynaston McShine et al.
Rodchenko and the Arts of Revolutionary Russia
David Elliott
The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934
Margit Rowell et al.
Saul Steinberg
Harold Rosenberg
The Sculptures of Picasso
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
Lawrence Weschler
Shadow of the Silk Road
Colin Thubron