An Artistic Reading of Financial Times Selections/Books That Will Shape the Art World in 2025
According to the Iran Book News Agency (IBNA), citing the Financial Times, in a year where art once again stands at the intersection of ritual, history, and technique, the list of best books of 2025 in art, architecture, and design is not merely an introduction to a few readable titles, but a panorama of the aesthetic concerns of our era. These books, each from a different angle, approach a fundamental question: What does art do in the face of truth, destruction, and memory? And more importantly, how does it reshape our view of the world?
According to the Financial Times, these five books together create a picture of ‘The Year of Art in 2025′: a year in which artists’ concerns have gravitated towards the aesthetic experience of truth.
Religion, Beauty, and the Desire for Salvation
From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark by Melanie McDonagh
McDonagh’s book appears to be a historical study, but beneath the surface, it is a profound reflection on the tension between secularism and artists’ spiritual desires. Why artists like decadent Aubrey Beardsley or reclusive Gwen John turned to Catholicism in a space where the doors of faith were closing is not just a historical question; rather, it is a re-reading of the mechanism of artistic creation.
The book shows that for these artists, becoming Catholic was not an escape to security, but a heightened sensitivity: a return to the language of symbols, to the architecture of ritual, to the silence in which the image finds meaning. This perspective transforms the work into a book full of intellectual nuances; a place where spirit and form are in continuous dialogue.
Surrealism in the Heart of Destruction
Lee Miller by Hilary Floe and Saskia Flower
Lee Miller stands at the boundary between seemingly contradictory worlds: fashion and the battlefield, surrealism and historical documentation. The Tate book-catalogue shows that Miller was not merely an observer of history, but a visual interpreter of Europe’s wounds. She could create a powerful metaphor from a simple figure in a photograph; an image of an explosion from fingers on the door of a Parisian perfume shop; a song for a lost civilization from a lone singer in a ruined Vienna opera.
This book is valuable because it explains how a photographer’s eye can build an invisible bridge between the private and the political; a bridge that takes art beyond the boundary of reportage and into the realm of myth.
Goya and the Dark Realm of Imagination
Goya by Ana Reuter and José Manuel Matia
Francisco Goya (Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes) is one of the most important and influential artists in the history of Spain and Europe. He is usually considered the bridge between classical and modern art. Printed books on Goya have always been seen in scattered forms; but this complete collection, for the first time, provides the opportunity for a full encounter with the complex world of imaginative art. His famous quote about the union of imagination and reason takes concrete form in this book: his monsters, errors, nightmares, and bitter humor are brought to life again in stunningly high-quality prints.
This book is not merely an art reference, but an experience that shows why Goya remains a teacher of misfortune and truth for contemporary art.
Freud and the Unvarnished Truth of the Image
Lucian Freud by Catherine Lampert and Toby Treves
The emergence of the Freud catalog is an exceptional event. He himself had forbidden this during his lifetime, perhaps because he knew that any book about him, like his paintings, must face brutal honesty. This collection, in its precise analysis of each work, shows how Freud strips the image of emotional burden to reveal the bare core of truth.
The book is an opportunity to discover the continuity of Freud’s gaze: a gaze that sees the body not as a mystery, but as the everyday life of pain, erosion, and intimacy. Each page is like the opening of a lens that shows the world without filters.
Childish Imagination
Disney Classics by Charles Solomon
Taschen, in this book, vividly revives the visual legacy of the golden age of animation. Early paintings and hand-drawn sketches from films like Snow White, Pinocchio or Bambi are more than just memories: they are documentaries of imagination; signs of a time when animation was still a workshop of fantasy, before it became an industry.
Solomon narrates how Disney artists, by adhering to the 19th-century illustration tradition, created a world that both impacts childhood and, in adulthood, returns us to the source of the earliest stories.
