DAN NADEL | DATE 1/15/2016

Best of 2016: Dan Nadel Shares his Forthcoming Favorites

What follows is a highly personal list of the books I’m most excited about on our Spring ’16 list. These are the books I will rave about to customers and covet for myself.

"Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?" by Gregory R. Miller & Co.
Probably most art histories should include wrestling and comedy in addition to painting and all the rest. Luckily Drexler actually was a wrestler and a comedy writer, not to mention a performer and a superlative painter. We are fortunate to get a book (her first major monograph!) that encompasses all of it.

"Marcel Duchamp: From or By Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy 1935–1968" by Walther König
I think I’ve waited for this object since the first time I saw an original edition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1993. It’s an actual container of the greatest art mind of the twentieth century. Talk to it, pray to it, do what you need to do.

"A Blueprint for Counter Education" by Inventory Press
Want to sit cross-legged in a geodesic dome with me and get heavy? Yes? Bring this along please.

"Nan Goldin: Diving for Pearls" by Steidl
This perfectly sequenced act of lyrical bookmaking is the companion I want in my dotage to remind me why I love what I do.

"Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973" by Foggy Notion Books
In another life I was Ed Sanders, furiously trying to make metaphysical sense out of the insane hippies, freaks and activists all around me. And I used this book as my indispensable visual guide.

"The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings of Bob Nickas, 2007–2015" by Karma, New York
Love him, hate him, or maybe don’t know him, Bob Nickas has been on the ground in the NYC art world for a long time. I read him to get some critical distance on the present. You should too.

"Ed Jones and Timothy Prus: Nein, Onkel, Snapshots From Another Front 1938-1945" by the Archive of Modern Conflict
The most terrifying, stupefying, mystifying and absolutely essential book on this list: Nazis on vacation. Neither banal nor malevolent.

"Ron Nagle: Nagle, Ron" by Silver Gate, Inc.
Nagle drops psychedelic ceramic gems like George Harrison dropped guitar solos. This is, simply, a perfect book on perfect art that also happens to contain an extensive biography.

"William N. Copley" by Fondazione Prada
All Hail Copley: funky painter, master collector, radical publisher and bon vivant. The very model of the twentieth-century American if your model, like mine, runs toward Robert Mitchum crossed with Jerry Lewis. This is the book.

"Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet" by the American Folk Art Museum
I live for this kind of deep dive into art history. Here we get a look at the very foundation of outsider art in North America by seeing Jean Dubuffet’s collection as it was exhibited in East Hampton in the 1950s. Great texts, stunning images.

"Charles Simonds: Dwelling" by Walther König
I love first-person art history, and this exquisitely produced memoir of the author's art and culture in New York in the 1970s is a jewel of image/prose storytelling.

"Thomas Mailaender: The Night Climbers of Cambridge" by the Archive of Modern Conflict
No, not a Luc Besson movie – actual photos of 1930s Cambridge students climbing the gothic spires in pitch darkness. Awesome, kind of unbelievable, and perfectly made.

"Joan Mitchell: Retrospective" by Kunsthaus Bregenz
Have you ever picked up a book on an artist you love and thought, “Ok, but where are all the awesome photos, posters and, like, STUFF?” Well my friend, "Joan Mitchell" Retrospective" is here to banish that thought with a trove of rare images to add to her ever-current paintings.

"Isa Genzken: Mach dich hubsch!" by Walther König
Isa Genzken says no more monographs and serves up a gnarly, electric artist's book instead. Do I want to live there? No, but I really like how it gently fries my brain to visit for a while

DAN NADEL is the Key Account Sales Director at ARTBOOK | D.A.P. He is the founder of PictureBox, a Grammy Award-winning publishing company that produced books and projects from 2000 to 2014. Dan's books include The Collected Hairy Who Publications, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900-1969, Gary Panter, and Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream. As a curator, he has mounted exhibitions including: What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art: 1960 to the Present in Providence and New York; Victor Moscoso: Psychadelic Drawings and Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973-1977. See more at dnadel.com.