What was your favorite art history book you read in 2012?

Did you read any art history books in 2012 that you would highly recommend?

For me, I really enjoy Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi. For an art book that is not considered art history, I would recommend Shouting in the Dark: My Journey Back to the Light by John Bramblitt.

Does a re-read count? Well, I guess it must, if I list it. Philipp Fehl's MONUMENTS AND THE ART OF MOURNING 2007 is a luminius work. Also -- such is the justice of the world -- almost impossible to find. At one point a bunch of copies were sitting boxed in the basement of the Vatican Library. Some reports say that's no longer true, but their whereabouts is unknown. The publisher doesn'I reply to E-mails. I suppose a serious scholarly bookstore -- if there are any left -- might turn up a copy or two. Anyway, the rarity of this work is on a par with its excellence. Happy hunting!

I delved into Michael Camille's posthumously-published The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity as part of a writing project examining modern perspectives on the Middle Ages. That project also took me back to his Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art.

Camille, as always, is learnedly provocative in prose of exquisite beauty. His keen eye revels in exploring the marginalized (both literally and figuratively) in both medieval art itself and in modern appropriations of the medieval. At times, that awareness can seem to overstate the case (e.g. I think that he sometimes obscured the ways in which the religious ideals articulated by the sacred space of the text in medieval prayer books transcended the grotesques in their margins; and his readings of the psycho-sexual politics of the gargoyles are sometimes strained to their breaking point). But such instances usually provoke further and open thought rather than shutting down the discourse.

I read Henry Adams Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and was absolutely blown away. I very seldom get through art history books as they usually get too technical for me, but this was just right.

I read Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz -- it's a big book, rather hard read, but worth it, especially if you're interested in the Downtown NYC scene and the effect of AIDS on art and culture and society. I also read Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s which was pretty good. Also several architecture and urban planning titles, particularly a few on Detroit. I fell in love with Detroit now when I went to the Society of Architectural Historians conference there last April.