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Sassetta
The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece
Machtelt Israëls
Harvard University Press, 2009

Sassetta, the subtle genius from Siena, revolutionized Italian painting with an altarpiece for the small Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro in 1437–1444. Originally standing some six yards high, double-sided, with a splendid gilt frame over the main altar of the local Franciscan church, it was the Rolls Royce of early Renaissance painting. But its myriad figures and scenes tempted the collectors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today its disassembled panels can be found in twelve museums throughout Europe and the United States.

To produce this landmark volume, experts in art and general history, painting technique and conservation, woodworking, architecture, and liturgy have joined forces across the boundaries of eight different nations. A model of collaboration, it opens new windows onto the creative process of the artist as he confronted a late-medieval church at a crossroad of cultures, the miracle-working body of a holy man, and a community of Franciscan friars breathing the exhilarating air of reform. To confront such challenges, Sassetta raised the most spiritual school of early Italian art, the Sienese, to a higher level of understanding, grace, and splendor.

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The Sculpture of Robyn Horn
Robyn Horn
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
In Robyn Horn’s thirty years as a wood sculptor, her work has evolved from small, lathe-turned objects to ten-foot-high redwood compositions like her Already Set in Motion #1170, which graces a garden at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In creating these forms that rise from the earth at improbable angles, Horn’s primary tool is the chainsaw, and yet a tenderness for her medium reveals itself in the delicate balance of planes that allows her sculptures to both loom and flow, visually indicating that they are precarious when in fact they are sturdy.

The essays and images in The Sculpture of Robyn Horn sketch the industrious career of this Little Rock, Arkansas-based sculptor, illuminating her attention to geometry, physics, and the philosophy of design, and exploring the context and origin of the various series—Geodes, Millstones, Standing Stones, and Slipping Stones, among others—that characterize her body of work.

 
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Seeing the Unspeakable
The Art of Kara Walker
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Duke University Press, 2004
One of the youngest recipients of a MacArthur “genius” grant, Kara Walker, an African American artist, is best known for her iconic, often life-size, black-and-white silhouetted figures, arranged in unsettling scenes on gallery walls. These visually arresting narratives draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamics of race, sexuality, and violence in both the antebellum South and contemporary culture. Walker’s work has been featured in exhibits around the world and in American museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. At the same time, her ideologically provocative images have drawn vociferous criticism from several senior African American artists, and a number of her pieces have been pulled from exhibits amid protests against their disturbing representations. Seeing the Unspeakable provides a sustained consideration of the controversial art of Kara Walker.

Examining Walker’s striking silhouettes, evocative gouache drawings, and dynamic prints, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw analyzes the inspiration for and reception of four of Walker’s pieces: The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, John Brown, A Means to an End, and Cut. She offers an overview of Walker’s life and career, and contextualizes her art within the history of African American visual culture and in relation to the work of contemporary artists including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Michael Ray Charles. Shaw describes how Walker deliberately challenges viewers’ sensibilities with radically de-sentimentalized images of slavery and racial stereotypes. This book reveals a powerful artist who is questioning, rather than accepting, the ideas and strategies of social responsibility that her parents’ generation fought to establish during the civil rights era. By exploiting the racist icons of the past, Walker forces viewers to see the unspeakable aspects of America’s racist past and conflicted present.

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Self-Portrait in Words
Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950
Max Beckmann
University of Chicago Press, 1997
One of the most important German artists of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann is known for the depth and sensuous force of his works, but little is known about his personal life. Self-Portrait in Words reveals Beckmann's experience of life from the first years of his career in Berlin and Paris through his final years in the United States. This collection of Beckmann's writings serves as a companion to his art and a testament to the complexities of his life.

"Barbara Copeland Buenger . . . has done an excellent job of editing and annotating Beckmann's voluminous private and public writings."—Andrea Barnet, New York Times Book Review
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The Sensuous Life of Adolf Dehn
American Master of Watercolor and Printmaking
Henry Adams
University of Missouri Press, 2020
Adolf Dehn belongs to a group of distinguished midcentury American artists who were eclipsed by Abstract Expressionism and the following movements in American art. His lithographs of the Roaring Twenties introduced a note of social satire into American printmaking. He was one of the most gifted and innovative printmakers of the American Scene movement of the 1930s and one of the most significant American watercolorists.

In this wide-ranging biography, Henry Adams explores how a once central figure can come to be forgotten. Noting that Dehn’s watercolor Spring in Central Park has been widely reproduced on calendars, postcards, and other Metropolitan Museum of Art souvenirs, Adams asks why it is that some artists are celebrated as key figures while others, even those who created images that form an integral part of our visual culture, are relatively unknown. With his account of the life of the prolific and influential Dehn, and a look at the circles of artists and writers in which Dehn moved, Adams helps to fill in what he calls the “secret or subterranean history of art.”
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The Shape of Content
Ben Shahn
Harvard University Press, 1985
In his 1956–57 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, the Russian-born American painter Ben Shahn sets down his personal views of the relationship of the artist—painter, writer, composer—to his material, his craft, and his society. He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.
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The Signature Style of Frans Hals
Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in Early Modernity
Christopher D. M. Atkins
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This richly illustrated study is the first consider the manifold functions and meanings of Hals’s distinctive handling of paint. Atkins explores the uniqueness of Hals’s approach to painting and the relationship of his manner to seventeenth-century aesthetics. He also investigates the economic motivations and advantages of his methods, the operation of the style as a personal and workshop brand, and the apparent modernity of the artist’s style. The book seeks to understand the multiple levels on which Hals’s consciously cultivated manner of painting operated for himself, his pupils and assistants, his clients, and succeeding generations of viewers. As a result, the book offers a wholly new understanding of one of the leading artists of the Dutch Golden Age, and one of the most formative painters in the history of art in the Western tradition. It also provides a much needed interrogation of the interrelationships of subjectivity, style, authorship, methods of artistic and commercial production, economic consumption, and art theory in early modernity.
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Six Drawing Lessons
William Kentridge
Harvard University Press, 2014

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”

Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms—and deceptions—through which we construct meaning in the world.

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Sleeping Beauty
A One-Artist Dictionary
John Sparagana and Mieke Bal
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The dictionary. The ubiquitous high-gloss fashion ad. The fraught relationship between artist and critic. Sleeping Beauty ties these disparate strands of our everyday lives together only to strip away everything we thought we knew about each of them. A collaborative work by the artist John Sparagana and the critic Mieke Bal, this truly cutting-edge work takes the shape of a conversation between his creations—distressed, or “fatigued,” magazine pages—and her words, imagining anew the relationships of image to text and of art to those who write about it.
            Bal contributes twenty-six essays, one for each letter of the alphabet, which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference volume. Each one enters deeply into Sparagana’s work, illuminating concepts from Abstract to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy images from fashion magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic. Unmooring the magazine page from its familiar context, these beautiful rags are rendered poetic by Sparagana’s unique art of subtraction, which physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and commercial usefulness.
            Just as Sparagana’s work intervenes in existing images, so, too, do Bal’s explorations qualify existing concepts. But together, in this inaugural volume in the new series Project Tango: Artists and Writers Together, they have given rise to something wholly new: a prophetic one-artist dictionary that simultaneously reenvisions the untapped interactions of images with words and the potential forms of the book itself. 
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Speaking of Furniture
Conversations with 14 American Masters
Warren Eames Johnson
The Artist Book Foundation, 2013
Speaking of Furniture: Conversations with 14 American Masters is a fresh, stimulating, and in-depth examination of the modus operandi of 14 accomplished—and diverse—furniture makers. An engaging history of studio furniture, this colorful, informative study includes engaging conversations with James Krenov, Wendell Castle, Jere Osgood, Judy Kensley McKie, David Ebner, Richard Scott Newman, Hank Gilpin, Alphonse Mattia, John Dunnigan, Wendy Maruyama, James Schriber, Timothy S. Philbrick, Michael Hurwitz, and Thomas Hucker. The insightful interviews illuminate how these creative and gifted craftspeople arrived professionally and what their craft means to them individually. In his enlightening foreword, Edward S. Cooke, Jr. maps out the background of the studio furniture movement. Author and furnituremaker Roger Holmes offers an insider’s perspective on the art and craft of producing exquisite contemporary furniture in his conversational introduction and maintains, “Art or craft, this is very personal work.” This elegant presentation skillfully sheds light on the thought processes and techniques of a celebrated and exceptional gathering of studio furniture makers who are as unique as they are stellar. As sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle remarks, “What I admired was that . . . fine art and craft were the same thing.”
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The Spiral Jetty Encyclo
Exploring Robert Smithson's Earthwork through Time and Place
Hikmet Sidney Loe
University of Utah Press, 2017

Copublished with the Tanner Trust Fund, J. Willard Marriott Library.

Robert Smithson’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson built a masterpiece from local materials, one that spirals counterclockwise into the lake and appears or is submerged with fluctuations in the lake’s locally red, saline water.

The Spiral Jetty Encyclo draws on Smithson’s writings for encyclopedic entries that bring to light the context of the earthwork and Smithson’s many points of reference in creating it. Visitors and armchair travelers, too, will discover how much significance Smithson placed on regional considerations, his immersion in natural history, his passion for travel, and his ability to use diverse mediums to create a cohesive and lasting work of art. Containing some 220 images, most of them in color, with some historical black and whites, The  Spiral Jetty Encyclo lets readers explore the construction, connections, and significance of Smithson’s 1,500-foot-long curl into Great Salt Lake, created, in Smithson’s words, of “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.” 

Winner of 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book.
Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.

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Stories in Stone
The Enchanted Gem Carvings of Vasily Konovalenko
Stephen E. Nash
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Vasily Konovalenko’s unique, dynamic, and theatrical sculptures stand alone in the gem-carving world—bawdy but not salacious, political but not diplomatic, boisterous and exuberant yet occasionally sensitive. Stories in Stone offers the first comprehensive treatment of the life of this little-known Russian artist and the remarkable history of his wonderful sculptures.
 
Part art catalogue and part life history, Stories in Stone tells the tale of Konovalenko’s impressive works, explaining their conception, creation, and symbolism. Each handcrafted figure depicts a scene from life in the Soviet Union—a bowman hunting snow geese, a woman reposing in a hot spring surrounded by ice, peasants spinning wool, a pair of gulag prisoners sawing lumber—painstakingly rendered in precious stones and metals. The materials used to make the figurines are worth millions of dollars, but as cultural artifacts, the sculptures are priceless. Author Stephen Nash draws upon oral history and archival research to detail the life of their creator, revealing a rags-to-riches and life-imitates-art narrative full of Cold War intrigue, Communist persecution, and capitalist exploitation.
 
Augmented by Richard M. Wicker’s exquisite and revelatory photographs of sixty-five Konovalenko sculptures from museums, state agencies, and private collections around the world, Stories in Stone is a visually stunning glimpse into a unique corner of Russian art and cultural history, the craft and science of gem carving, and the life of a Russian artist and immigrant who loved people everywhere.
 
Co-published with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, home to the most significant collection of Russian gem-carving sculptures by Vasily Konovalenko in the world.
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The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells
Stacy I. Morgan
University of Alabama Press
A comprehensive and richly illustrated survey of one of the most significant and intriguing quilters of the 21st century, featuring 109 color plates of Wells's narrative quilts with intimate commentaries by Wells herself
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Storytellers of Art Histories
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life
Edited by Yasmeen Siddiqui and Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Intellect Books, 2021
An anthology amplifying the voices of the figures reshaping art histories across disciplines and a range of fluid practices. 

With a focus on gender, race (including whiteness), class, sexuality, and transnationality—all of which are often marginalized in dominant art histories—each individual has provided short, often personal contributions detailing how they become passionate about their practice. The contributors’ offerings are varied and surprising, appealing equally to people enmeshed in the field through their work as well as those with a beginner’s interest. Their pieces take various forms—epistolary, children’s fable, interview, coauthored narrative, pastiche, memoir, manifesto, and apology—and a number of the essays perform in their structure or content the theories they explore about publishing, curating, and archival work.
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Swimmers
Carole Feuerman
John Yau
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
Realist sculptor Carole A. Feuerman’s human-figure sculptures express a refreshing perspective on the mundane but intensely personal activities of modern life. Her powers of observation and versatility find unique expression through various materials that include marble, bronze, vinyl, and painted resins, while she incorporates both ancient and contemporary methods in the creation of her works. Swimmers: Carole Feuerman is a gorgeous and shimmering glimpse at transitory, contemplative moments in time, often captured in a veil of clear resin that replicates tumbling water droplets. In his astute and insightful essay, John Yau describes Feuerman’sexquisitely rendered figures as subjects “caught in a moment of transition that radiates an intense eroticism.” She evokes an inward life for her figures that invites our speculation, while revealing a mysterious chasm between them and the viewer that can never be plumbed. We cannot know their thoughts and perhaps that is exactly the point. Feuerman fuses the tactile nature of her sculpture with a visual verisimilitude that provides us a fleeting glimpse into private and isolated environments—women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming—that suggest a meditative bliss. Feuerman’s museum retrospectives have included exhibitions at the Venice Biennale; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; The State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation in Florence, Italy; and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, among others. Her work is featured in public, private, and corporate collections, including Grounds For Sculpture, Trenton, NJ; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; and art-st-urban, Lucerne, Switzerland. Her large-scale Olympic Swimmer was featured in the Olympic Fine Arts exhibition at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
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