Start with high-confidence modern art history (to 1945) books, then narrow by subgenre or adjacent topics.
Modernism: a Very Short Introduction
Christopher Butler
The Literate Eye
Rachel Teukolsky
I Paint What I Want to See
Philip Guston
I Am a Beautiful Monster
Francis Picabia
Picasso's War
Hugh Eakin
What Are You Looking At?
Will Gompertz
Painters of the Northwest
John Impert
Postcolonial Modernism
Chika Okeke-Agulu
The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks
Judith F. Dolkart, Martha Lucy
Monsters and Myths
Oliver Shell, Oliver Tostmann
The Bauhaus Ideal Then and Now
William Smock
Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936
Ann Murray, Deborah Ascher Barnstone
Nineteenth-century Art
Laurie Schneider Adams
