Rookie Books
Rachel Harrison’s recent show “The Friedmann Equations,” at New York’s Greene Naftali gallery, was a highlight of 2025. To try to break it down briefly, it was classic Harrison: brainy, oblique, and funny. The show’s title alluded to mathematical formulas relating to the universe’s expansion that were used as a sly call for the opening up of society by Chinese dissidents amid Covid lockdowns. It included a number of her lumpy sculptures that mix abstract shapes and found objects, as well as some pieces that alluded to Marcel Duchamp and his feminine alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy. Key was a series of drawings that riffed on portraits of Henry VIII and his court by Hans Holbein; they looked as if the German artist had been influenced by two artists that came only centuries later: Pablo Picasso’s Cubism and Andy Warhol in his Day-Glo celebrity-portrait era.
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What might it all mean? “Maybe sculpture can hallucinate just like technology, like a translation app spitting out its own errant wording,” suggests the press release before alluding to a Duchamp readymade, saying, “It’s in advance of becoming abstract.” I love Harrison’s work so much, but it frightens me, because even after looking at it and reading about it (and even writing about it) for years, I’m deeply uncertain as to whether I actually get it.
So you can imagine my surprise when, on a recent visit to the gallery, Carol Greene handed me a copy of a new children’s book, Hold Still, Henry!, that reproduces Harrison’s Holbein drawings. It was a real needle-scratch moment.
The front cover bears Harrison’s colorful version of a famed Holbein self-portrait that hangs in Florence’s Uffizi Galleries, while inside, page after thick paperboard page (with rounded edges, no less) shows courtiers in their finery, but fed through Harrison’s distorting lens—eyes don’t line up, facial features repeat, and so on.
On the back cover, Henry VIII introduces himself in tyke-friendly language: “I was king of England a very long time ago, from 1509 to 1547. I was a very big man, and very famous for some big things I did!” (Sir Thomas More, whom he beheaded, and whose breathtaking Holbein-painted portrait hangs at New York’s Frick Collection, might like a word.) The king explains that Holbein created portraits of his contemporaries that “made them look noble, but also very human,” adding that “The drawings in this book were inspired by his 500-year-old artworks. Some look like the original portraits, but others do not. Nowadays, an artist can do what she wants!” Let’s hear it for artistic license.
The Harrison volume is the latest from Rookie Books, founded in 2022 by artist Camillo Paravicini of Basel, Switzerland. Paravicini has previously worked with Monster Chetwynd, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Michaela Eichwald, Fabian Marti, Martin Parr, Vaclav Pozarek, and Toni Schmale. Each book comes in a small edition of less than 1,000, and costs €28 ($32.50) plus shipping. Since earning an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art, Paravicini has exhibited at venues including Last Tango Zurich, the Kunstmuseum Lucerne, and Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, and his work is in both public and private collections, including those of the Canton of Lucerne, Julius Baer, and Credit Suisse (which was acquired by UBS in 2023).
Rookie Books
Some of the fanciful books are less unexpected than Harrison’s. Parr’s contribution, Animals, sees the late British photographer, known for his uncompromising look at humankind, turn his lens on our creaturely friends: seagulls making off with someone’s French fries, a dog wearing sunglasses, a giraffe sniffing a smiling kid who peeks out of an SUV’s sunroof. All perfectly cute. The entry from Milan-based artist and designer Du Pasquier, How Many, introduces kids to the numbers 1 through 10, each accompanied by visual cues (a hand for the 5, for example). Educational!
Eichwald’s, though, is less obvious, as the promotional copy for Flower Photo Colouring (2024) explains: “Blithely ignoring traditional methods and conventions, she typically experiments with unexpected and often very unusual materials,” it reads, and I’m not sure what a kid would make of her imagery, some of which is illegible even to me.
“At the beginning, I thought I would only ask people who would make no sense at all, but then it would be a shame to not ask Martin Parr,” said Paravicini in a Zoom conversation. “I’d like to ask Paul McCarthy, for example. I love the idea of him producing a children’s book. It’s nice to have these books that are not, you know, illustration. That would be the first obvious choice but I thought, let’s really go for fine art.”
Paravicini had long thought about this project, but really got started on it during pandemic lockdown. He knows his way around covers and pages; in addition to his own work as an artist, he has a sideline designing art volumes. Asked about sales, Paravicini said, “I can’t complain. This is not a project that I’m making money with. The idea is, I make 300 copies, and if I sell enough I have money to produce the next one. I pitch in a little sometimes. It’s not sustainable. My labor is unpaid. But of course that’s nothing I would complain about.” Assuming it all remains relatively sustainable, future volumes will be done by artists including Henni Alftan, Elene Chantladze, William Kentridge, Florian Meisenberg, and Albert Oehlen.
Rookie Books
Books about, and including, contemporary art for children aren’t as new as you might expect. Hannah Stamler wrote for Art in Americain 2022 about how early 20th-century artists looked to children’s art for inspiration and how, in turn, “Avant-garde interest in the child as artist also led to an interest in the child as spectator.”
Stamler continued, “Affinities between the visual language of childhood and that of modern art, paired with the child’s supposed innocence and impressionability, made the young an attractive target audience for artists attempting to disseminate new ideas about art and politics.” No less than Soviet Russian artist El Lissitzky made a picture book for kids; more recent stars including Yayoi Kusama and Faith Ringgold have done likewise. A number of biographies of modern artists, too, are likewise targeted to kids, stressing the artist as “visionary and rebel.”
Paravicini approached Harrison a few years ago, but she told him the project would have to wait until she had an idea, she said in a phone conversation. Then he sent her a few copies of the existing books. “I thought Michaela Eichwald’s was the best children’s book I’ve ever seen,” she told me. “I was inspired by her book. It’s got no text. It’s the same work you’d see on the wall of Reena Spaulings or the Walker Art Center or anywhere else.”
Harrison began looking at Holbein’s portraits of the English king a year ago, after the second inauguration of President Donald Trump. (“He’s much more dangerous than Henry VIII,” she said.) Once the drawings were on the wall, she wanted the world to see them, she said, and the offer from Rookie Books came to mind.
When I noted that she didn’t seem like the likeliest candidate to appeal to kids, Harrison demurred. “There were lots of kids in my last show,” said the artist. “I’m not ageist. Art is for everybody who wants to look at it. It’s very natural as an artist to think of your audience being inclusive.”
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