Broken Sculptures to Muholi Portraits: Four Art Books That Land This November

A new study of broken sculpture argues that fragments — from Michelangelo's terracotta models to defaced monuments spanning 4,500 years — carry their own power, and it anchors a November slate of four art books ranging from conceptual art reissues to Zanele Muholi's expanded portrait archive.

What's in the fragment?

The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture (C. D. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears, University of Chicago Press, 240pp, £40 hb) examines why fractured statues continue to fascinate. A publisher's statement says the book focuses on "the power dynamics of iconoclastic dismantling and defacement, and how various cultures treat broken statues."

One highlight cuts close to canon: Michelangelo's terracotta Model of a Nude Woman (around 1533). New research suggests the artist may have created it intentionally incomplete — a Renaissance sculptor leaving a work unfinished on purpose. The book accompanies an exhibition that opened in September at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC next year.

Why reissue Gonzalez-Torres now?

Phaidon has published a revised and expanded edition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Nancy Spector (352pp, £39.95 hb), reassessing the conceptual artist who died from an Aids-related illness in 1996. "Almost two decades after its original publication, the monograph accompanying Gonzalez-Torres's 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum is still the canonical text on the artist," a publisher's statement says.

Gonzalez-Torres is best known for his candy installations, usually piled in room corners and replenished as visitors take sweets. Ben Luke, critic and host of The Art Newspaper's podcast, writes: "The candy pieces, like all his works, encourage a wealth of meanings, and can be everything from stridently political to gently lyrical."

Can 26 artists build one vocabulary?

The Voice of the Artist(s): another vocabulary (Gabriela Galcerán, editor; Sternberg Press, 360pp, £23.50 pb) grew out of a video project by the cultural producer Gabriela Galercán. Twenty-six artists each chose one word — one per letter of the alphabet — and responded to it in their own way. Five thematic chapters, including "Power + Politics" and "Agency + Language," then draw connections between their ideas.

Contributors include Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Gary Hill. "They all made me flinch, each for a different reason. I love the wide range of tones and registers that make up this choral effort. Some are intimate, some political, some humorous or oblique," Galcerán says in a statement.

What does 20 years of Faces and Phases add?

The biggest volume, in every sense, is Zanele Muholi's Faces and Phases (Renée Mussai, editor; Mack, 464pp, £65 hb), released to mark the project's 20th anniversary. For more than two decades, the South African artist and activist has documented Black lesbian and bisexual women, along with queer, trans, non-binary and gender-fluid people.

The new edition adds sitters photographed in São Paulo, Salvador, London, Porto and Los Angeles. "These striking photographs are often accompanied by participants' testimonies, sharing their personal stories, feelings, and lived experiences," a publisher's statement says.

Muholi was born in Durban in 1972, at the height of apartheid. In the early 2000s, the photographer began raising awareness of the hypocrisies and hate crimes that remain prevalent against South Africa's LGBTQ+ community — the context Faces and Phases has documented ever since, and now extends across three continents.