The Best Art Books of 2009

The game-changing art and architecture school, which founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius and shuttered by the Nazis in 1933, has had quite the comeback year—thanks, in large part, to a mega survey up at MoMA through January 25. The show’s companion book—which delves into the movement’s boxy post-industrial aesthetic as well as its revolutionary approach to arts education—is one of three excellent Bauhaus titles to hit the market this year. The other two: Nicholas Fox Weber’s The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (Knopf, $40) , and Ulrike Muller’s Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (Flammarion, $39.95) .