A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
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98 books about Monographs
98 books about Monographs
Adolf Dehn
Midcentury Manhattan
Philip Eliasoph
The Artist Book Foundation, 2017
Adolf Dehn (1895–1968), American painter in multimedia and acclaimed master lithographer, left his Minnesota hometown after formal training at the Minneapolis Art Institute to study at the Art Students League in New York. He toured Europe in the early 1920s, quickly acclimating to the continental lifestyle and adeptly depicting its nuances and idiosyncrasies with prolific lithographs and sketches. His critical and satirical renderings of the political movements, social conventions, and governmental policies in post–World War I Europe during “Le Crazy Years” gave the Midwestern artist ample material for his growing body of work.
Sailing back to the United States in 1929, Dehn survived the Great Depression with commercial artwork and contributions to popular magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. His clever drawings that reflected the Jazz Age’s culture and fashionable society made him a favorite of Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair’s renowned editor.
During this time, while Dehn captured the heyday of Manhattan’s burlesque theaters, lively Harlem nightclubs, impressive skyline, and busy harbor, he was continuously drawn to Central Park—his predilection for the city’s magnificent green space was a sustaining source of inspiration and subject matter. Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan candidly examines the life and work of this exceptional, adventurous, and intrepid artist as he moved skillfully and capably between lithography, ink-wash drawings, gouache, casein painting, and watercolors. Combining numerous vintage photographs with newly discovered, Manhattan-inspired prints and drawings from the collections of, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan traces how Dehn’s art reflected the spirit, pulse, and uniquely American tonalities of The City of Dreams.
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Albrecht Dürer
Art and Autobiography
David Ekserdjian
Reaktion Books, 2023
An exploration of the life and works of German artist Albrecht Dürer and his self-obsession.
The Italian Renaissance birthed the modern sense of self, and no artist from the period compares with Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) in terms of the almost obsessive interest he displayed in his own life. Dürer’s works are filled with personal details from his day-to-day, his dreams, and his escapades. In this brief biography, David Ekserdjian explores Dürer’s life and times—his studies, travels, and influences—as well as his paintings, drawings, and prints. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance or Northern European art.
The Italian Renaissance birthed the modern sense of self, and no artist from the period compares with Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) in terms of the almost obsessive interest he displayed in his own life. Dürer’s works are filled with personal details from his day-to-day, his dreams, and his escapades. In this brief biography, David Ekserdjian explores Dürer’s life and times—his studies, travels, and influences—as well as his paintings, drawings, and prints. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance or Northern European art.
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Among Unknown Tribes
Rediscovering the Photographs of Explorer Carl Lumholtz
By Bill Broyles
University of Texas Press, 2014
Internationally renowned as an exciting guide to unknown peoples and places, Norwegian Carl Lumholtz was a Victorian-era explorer, anthropologist, natural scientist, writer, and photographer who worked in Australia, Mexico, and Borneo. His photographs of the Tarahumara, Huichol, Cora, Tepehuan, Southern Pima, and Tohono O’odham tribes of Mexico and southwest Arizona were among the very first taken of these cultures and still provide the best photographic record of them at the turn of the twentieth century. Lumholtz published his photographs in several books, including Unknown Mexico and New Trails in Mexico, but, because photographic publishing was then in its infancy, most of the images were poorly printed, badly cropped, or reworked by “illustrators” using crude techniques. Among Unknown Tribes presents more than two hundred of Lumholtz’s best photographs—many never before published—from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. The images are newly scanned, most from the original negatives, and printed uncropped, disclosing a wealth of previously hidden detail. Each photograph is fully identified and often amplified by Lumholtz’s own notes and captions. Accompanying the images are essays and photo notes that survey Lumholtz’s career and legacy, as well as what his photographs reveal about the “unknown tribes.” By giving Lumholtz’s photographs the high-quality reproduction they deserve, Among Unknown Tribes honors not only the Norwegian explorer but also the native peoples who continue to struggle for recognition and justice as they actively engage in the traditional customs that Lumholtz recorded.
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Antoni Gaudí
Michael Eaude
Reaktion Books, 2024
An accessible account of the contradictory life and work of the modernist Catalan architect.
The celebrated art nouveau architect Antoni Gaudí was a contradictory figure: a deeply religious, politically right-wing man who nevertheless built revolutionary buildings. This book explores Gaudí’s life, work, and influences from Catalan nationalism to the industrial revolution. Michael Eaude expertly guides readers through Gaudí’s dozen great works, including the Sagrada Família that attracts millions of tourists each year. Gaudí’s life is also chronicled from his provincial upbringing in Reus to his time in Barcelona. He later suffered a nervous breakdown, became obsessively religious, and fused Gothic, Baroque, and Orientalist architecture into his unique style. This brief biography offers an accessible introduction to this perplexing and fascinating life.
The celebrated art nouveau architect Antoni Gaudí was a contradictory figure: a deeply religious, politically right-wing man who nevertheless built revolutionary buildings. This book explores Gaudí’s life, work, and influences from Catalan nationalism to the industrial revolution. Michael Eaude expertly guides readers through Gaudí’s dozen great works, including the Sagrada Família that attracts millions of tourists each year. Gaudí’s life is also chronicled from his provincial upbringing in Reus to his time in Barcelona. He later suffered a nervous breakdown, became obsessively religious, and fused Gothic, Baroque, and Orientalist architecture into his unique style. This brief biography offers an accessible introduction to this perplexing and fascinating life.
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Arnold Newman
At Work
By Roy Flukinger
University of Texas Press, 2013
A driven perfectionist with inexhaustible curiosity about people, Arnold Newman was one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most prolific photographers. In a career that spanned nearly seven decades and produced many iconic works, Newman became renowned for making “pictures of people” (he objected to the term “portraits”) in the places where they worked and lived—the spaces that were most expressive of their inner lives. Refusing the label of “art photographer,” Newman also accepted magazine and advertising commissions and executed them to the same exacting standards that characterized all of his work. He spent countless hours training aspiring photographers, sharing his own vast experience, but allowing them the freedom to experiment and discover.
Rich with materials from Newman’s extensive archive in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Arnold Newman offers unprecedented, firsthand insights into the evolution of the photographer’s creativity. Reproduced here are not only many of Newman’s signature images, but also contact sheets, Polaroids, and work prints with his handwritten notes, which allow us to see the process by which he produced the images. Pages from his copious notebooks and calendars reveal Newman’s meticulous preparation and exhausting schedule. Adsheets and magazine covers from Holiday, LIFE, Newsweek, Look, Esquire, Seventeen, Time, and Sports Illustrated show the range of Newman’s largely unknown editorial work. Roy Flukinger provides a contextual overview of the archive, and Marianne Fulton’s introduction highlights the essential moments in the development of Newman’s life and work.
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Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe
Mary D. Garrard
Reaktion Books, 2023
An accessible introduction to the life of the seventeenth-century's most celebrated women artists, now in paperback.
Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars.
This book breaks new ground by placing Gentileschi in the context of women’s political history. Mary D. Garrard, noted Gentileschi scholar, shows that the artist most likely knew or knew about contemporary writers such as the Venetian feminists Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti. She discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works, and examines the artist anew in the context of feminist history. This beautifully illustrated book gives for the first time a full portrait of a strong woman artist who fought back through her art.
Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars.
This book breaks new ground by placing Gentileschi in the context of women’s political history. Mary D. Garrard, noted Gentileschi scholar, shows that the artist most likely knew or knew about contemporary writers such as the Venetian feminists Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti. She discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works, and examines the artist anew in the context of feminist history. This beautifully illustrated book gives for the first time a full portrait of a strong woman artist who fought back through her art.
[more]
Arthur Tress
Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows
James A. Ganz
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.
Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.
This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualizing the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.
Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.
This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualizing the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.
[more]
Aspects
Fred Sandback's Sculpture
Edward A. Vazquez
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.
Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.
Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.
[more]
Background Artist
The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong
Karen Fang
Rutgers University Press
You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know some of the images he created, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?
Background Artist shares the inspiring story of Tyrus Wong’s remarkable 106-year life and showcases his wide array of creative work, from the paintings and fine art prints he made working for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration to the unique handmade kites he designed and flew on the Santa Monica beach. It tells how he came to the United States as a 10-year-old boy in 1920, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act barred him from legal citizenship. Yet it also shows how Wong found American communities that welcomed him and nurtured his artistic talent. Covering everything from his work as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros. to the best-selling Christmas cards he designed for Hallmark and other greeting card companies, this book celebrates a multi-talented Asian-American artist and pioneer.
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Bloodflowers
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s
W. Ian Bourland
Duke University Press, 2019
In Bloodflowers W. Ian Bourland examines the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989), whose art is a touchstone for cultural debates surrounding questions of gender and queerness, race and diaspora, aesthetics and politics, and the enduring legacy of slavery and colonialism. Born in Nigeria, Fani-Kayode moved between artistic and cultural worlds in Washington, DC, New York, and London, where he produced the bulk of his provocative and often surrealist and homoerotic photographs of black men. Bourland situates Fani-Kayode's work in a time of global transition and traces how it exemplified and responded to profound social, cultural, and political change. In addition to his formal analyses of Fani-Kayode's portraiture, Bourland outlines the important influence that surrealism, neo-Romanticism, Yoruban religion, the AIDS crisis, experimental film, loft culture, and house and punk music had on Fani-Kayode's work. In so doing, Bourland offers new perspectives on a pivotal artist whose brief career continues to resonate with deep aesthetic and social meaning.
[more]
Botticelli
Artist and Designer
Ana Debenedetti
Reaktion Books, 2024
A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist.
In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.
In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.
[more]
Capturing the British Landscape
Alfred Augustus Glendening (1840–1921)
Alice Munro-Faure
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
The life and work of Victorian landscape painter Alfred Augustus Glendening, illustrating his rapid rise from railway clerk to an acclaimed artist.
Though critics often reviewed Alfred Augustus Glendening’s exhibitions, very little has been written about the artist himself. Here, new and extensive research removes layers of mystery and misinformation about his life, family, and career, accurately placing him amid the British art world during much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Glendening was a man from humble origins, working full-time as a railway clerk when he managed to make his London exhibition debut at the age of twenty—a feat that would have been almost impossible before the Victorian era ushered in new possibilities of social mobility. Although his paintings show a tranquil and unspoiled landscape, his environment was rapidly being transformed by social, scientific, and industrial developments, while advances in transport, photography, and other technical discoveries undoubtedly influenced him and his fellow painters.
Celebrating his uniquely Victorian story, the book places Glendening within his proper historical context. Running alongside the main text is a timeline outlining significant landmarks, from political and social events to artistic and technical innovations. Thoroughly researched, the narrative explores why and for whom he painted, his artistic training, and his various inspirations. The book uncovers new information about the Victorian art world and embraces such aspects as Royal Academy prejudices, the popularity of Glendening’s work at home and abroad, his use of photography, and the sourcing of his art materials.
Though critics often reviewed Alfred Augustus Glendening’s exhibitions, very little has been written about the artist himself. Here, new and extensive research removes layers of mystery and misinformation about his life, family, and career, accurately placing him amid the British art world during much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Glendening was a man from humble origins, working full-time as a railway clerk when he managed to make his London exhibition debut at the age of twenty—a feat that would have been almost impossible before the Victorian era ushered in new possibilities of social mobility. Although his paintings show a tranquil and unspoiled landscape, his environment was rapidly being transformed by social, scientific, and industrial developments, while advances in transport, photography, and other technical discoveries undoubtedly influenced him and his fellow painters.
Celebrating his uniquely Victorian story, the book places Glendening within his proper historical context. Running alongside the main text is a timeline outlining significant landmarks, from political and social events to artistic and technical innovations. Thoroughly researched, the narrative explores why and for whom he painted, his artistic training, and his various inspirations. The book uncovers new information about the Victorian art world and embraces such aspects as Royal Academy prejudices, the popularity of Glendening’s work at home and abroad, his use of photography, and the sourcing of his art materials.
[more]
Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity
Troy Thomas
Reaktion Books, 2016
Now in paperback, an accessible and beautifully illustrated account of Caravaggio as a catalyst for modernity.
Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius.
Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio’s early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio’s paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist’s final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy.
Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.
Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius.
Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio’s early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio’s paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist’s final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy.
Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.
[more]
The Coit Tower Murals
New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco
Robert W. Cherny
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Created in 1934, the Coit Tower murals were sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first of the New Deal art programs. Twenty-five master artists and their assistants worked there, most of them in buon fresco, Nearly all of them drew upon the palette and style of Diego Rivera. The project boosted the careers of Victor Arnautoff, Lucien Labaudt, Bernard Zakheim, and others, but Communist symbols in a few murals sparked the first of many national controversies over New Deal art.
Sixty full-color photographs illustrate Robert Cherny’s history of the murals from their conception and completion through their evolution into a beloved San Francisco landmark. Cherny traces and critiques the treatment of the murals by art critics and historians. He also probes the legacies of Coit Tower and the PWAP before surveying San Francisco’s recent controversies over New Deal murals.
An engaging account of an artistic landmark, The Coit Tower Murals tells the full story behind a public art masterpiece.
[more]
Creator of Nightmares
Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life
Christopher Baker
Reaktion Books, 2024
A critical biography of the eighteenth-century painter.
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which channeled a new form of gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus competitive exhibitions. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome, and ultimately London, Creator of Nightmares paints an image of Fuseli as an astute marketer and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which channeled a new form of gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus competitive exhibitions. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome, and ultimately London, Creator of Nightmares paints an image of Fuseli as an astute marketer and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.
[more]
Dialogues
Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov, Stories about Ourselves
Ksenia Nouril
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels, Kabakov and Pivovarov’s albums were also the basis for unique performance pieces, as the artists invited select audiences to their Moscow apartments for private readings and viewings of the albums, helping to cultivate an alternative artistic community in the process.
This exhibition catalog brings together Kabakov and Pivovarov’s key works for the first time, putting the two artists in dialogue and recreating their artistic community. It not only includes nearly hundred pages of full-color illustrations, but also provides complete English translations of the Russian texts that appear in the volume, plus new interviews with each artist. Taken together, they give viewers a new appreciation of the different aesthetic strategies each artist used to depict the absurdities of everyday life in the Soviet era. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
This exhibition catalog brings together Kabakov and Pivovarov’s key works for the first time, putting the two artists in dialogue and recreating their artistic community. It not only includes nearly hundred pages of full-color illustrations, but also provides complete English translations of the Russian texts that appear in the volume, plus new interviews with each artist. Taken together, they give viewers a new appreciation of the different aesthetic strategies each artist used to depict the absurdities of everyday life in the Soviet era. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
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Don Gummer
Peter Plagens
The Artist Book Foundation, 2021
The trajectory of Don Gummer’s career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks evolved into subtly inventive freestanding sculptures, often of monumental scale, that exhibit his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Don Gummer, a new monograph on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work.
Gummer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1946 and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University. He subsequently received both a BFA and an MFA from Yale University’s School of Fine Arts. In a 2001 interview with Peter Plagens, American artist and art critic, Gummer described his interest in sculpture as “the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing.” Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist is able to make durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space becomes an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature’s creations would be.
The artist’s works can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts; and Chase Manhattan Bank and Chemical Bank, both in New York City. He has received a number of awards from prestigious organizations such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Some of his most recent sculptures appeared around Indianapolis in conjunction with his 2016 exhibition, Back Home Again.
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Dream Street
W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project
W. Eugene Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2023
New edition of poignant selected images from famed Life photographer W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh project.
In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs.
In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,” presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.
In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs.
In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,” presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.
[more]
Epic Landscapes
Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor
Julia Sienkewicz
University of Delaware Press, 2011
Epic Landscapes is the first study devoted to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s substantial artistic oeuvre from 1795, when he set sail from Britain to Virginia, to late 1798, when he relocated to Pennsylvania. Thus, this book offers the only extended consideration of Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors, including a series of complex trompe l’oeil studies and three significant illustrated manuscripts. Though Latrobe’s architecture is well known, his watercolors have received little critical attention. Epic Landscapes rediscovers Latrobe’s watercolors as an ambitious body of work and reconsiders the close relationship between the visual and spatial sensibility of these images and his architectural designs. It also offers a fresh analysis of Latrobe within the context of creative practice in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century as he explored contemporary ideas concerning the form of art for Republican society and the social impacts of revolution.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Essential Paul Laffoley
Works from the Boston Visionary Cell
Paul Laffoley
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Paul Laffoley, who once worked for Frederick Kiesler and Andy Warhol, emerged in recent years as one of the leading visionary artists of our time. Lavishly illustrated, The Essential Paul Laffoley documents the evolution of his unique intellectual, spiritual, and artistic approaches.
Living and working in a tiny space in Boston he called the “Boston Visionary Cell,” Laffoley became best known for his large mandala-like paintings filled with symbols and texts. Their titles range from the paranormal and arcane, such as The Ectoplasmic Man and The Sexuality of Robots, to the organic, as with Das Urpflanze Haus, to the erudite, including De Rerum Natura, a reference to the Roman poet Lucretius. Whether focused on working with plants to create living architecture or centered on the process of alchemy, these detailed, brilliantly colored works reflect Laffoley’s utopian hopes and transdisciplinary interests: throughout, he aimed to unite the boundless freedom of human imagination with the mathematical precision of the physical world.
Nearly one hundred of Laffoley’s works are showcased here along with his accompanying “thought-forms,” texts specific to each painting that comment on its particular content. Together with an introduction by editor and gallerist Douglas Walla, a biography by fellow artist Steven Moskowitz, and essays by scholars Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Arielle Saiber, this book is a long-awaited celebration of the theories, writings, and artworks of an extraordinary mind.
Living and working in a tiny space in Boston he called the “Boston Visionary Cell,” Laffoley became best known for his large mandala-like paintings filled with symbols and texts. Their titles range from the paranormal and arcane, such as The Ectoplasmic Man and The Sexuality of Robots, to the organic, as with Das Urpflanze Haus, to the erudite, including De Rerum Natura, a reference to the Roman poet Lucretius. Whether focused on working with plants to create living architecture or centered on the process of alchemy, these detailed, brilliantly colored works reflect Laffoley’s utopian hopes and transdisciplinary interests: throughout, he aimed to unite the boundless freedom of human imagination with the mathematical precision of the physical world.
Nearly one hundred of Laffoley’s works are showcased here along with his accompanying “thought-forms,” texts specific to each painting that comment on its particular content. Together with an introduction by editor and gallerist Douglas Walla, a biography by fellow artist Steven Moskowitz, and essays by scholars Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Arielle Saiber, this book is a long-awaited celebration of the theories, writings, and artworks of an extraordinary mind.
[more]
Every Hour of the Light
The Paintings of Mary Sipp Green
Beth Venn
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
American landscape painter Mary Sipp Green, based in the bucolic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, has a superlative ability to engage the viewer in the emotive atmosphere of her landscapes and seascapes. The intensely saturated colors in her works evoke an immediate sense of place and a unique perspective on an intimate tableau. Sipp Green achieves an ethereal, nuanced quality in her paintings that imparts a refined and inimitable serenity. In Every Hour of the Light: The paintings of Mary Sipp Green, many of the subjects she paints—salt marshes, barns, meadows, rivers, and the occasional cityscape—are captured in the exquisite twilight of early evenings or a luminescent sunrise. The effect is dreamy yet grounded and familiar.
Sipp Green states, “While my preferred medium has always been oil on linen, my methods, techniques, and aesthetic aims have all undergone significant transformations since I first began. I learned my craft in the studio, painting still lifes and portraits, as well as landscapes drawn directly from nature. Over time, I became increasingly engaged with more abstract and spiritual aspects of the landscape form and I began to pursue a less representational, more expressive style.” When describing her “diffuse quality of color,” she explains, “I use many layers of paint, allowing each to dry before the next is applied. Along the way, the surface of the paint is often refigured in unpredictable ways, and there is much that has to be scraped, sanded, destroyed and reapplied before the essence of a place, its mood and atmosphere, finally emerges onto the canvas.”
Sipp Green’s work is widely collected in prominent private and public collections, including the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, part of the Springfield Museum of Art quadrangle in Springfield, Massachusetts, where her large oil painting Twilight Falls in South County hangs in the museum’s entryway, and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
[more]
Exist Otherwise
The Life and Works of Claude Cahun
Jennifer L. Shaw
Reaktion Books, 2017
Offering some of Cahun’s writings never before translated into English alongside a wide array of her artworks and those of her contemporaries, this book is a must-have for any fan of this iconic artist, now in paperback.
In the turmoil of the 1920s and ’30s, Claude Cahun challenged gender stereotypes with her powerful photographs, montages, and writings, works that appear to our twenty-first-century eyes as utterly contemporary, or even from the future. She wrote poetry and prose for major French literary magazines, worked in avant-garde theater, and was both comrade of and critical outsider to the Surrealists. Exist Otherwise is the first work in English to the tell the full story of Claude Cahun’s art and life, one that celebrates and makes accessible Cahun’s remarkable vision.
Jennifer L. Shaw embeds Cahun within the exciting social and artistic milieu of Paris between the wars. She examines her relationship with Marcel Moore—Cahun’s stepsister, lover, and life partner—who was a central collaborator helping make some of the most compelling photographs and photomontages of Cahun’s oeuvre, dreamscapes of disassembled portraiture and scenes that simultaneously fascinate and terrify. Shaw follows Cahun into the horrors of World War II and the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey off the coast of Normandy, and she explores the powerful and dangerous ways Cahun resisted it. Reading through her letters and diaries, Shaw brings Cahun’s ideas and feelings to the foreground, offering an intimate look at how she thought about photography, surrealism, the histories of women artists, and queer culture.
In the turmoil of the 1920s and ’30s, Claude Cahun challenged gender stereotypes with her powerful photographs, montages, and writings, works that appear to our twenty-first-century eyes as utterly contemporary, or even from the future. She wrote poetry and prose for major French literary magazines, worked in avant-garde theater, and was both comrade of and critical outsider to the Surrealists. Exist Otherwise is the first work in English to the tell the full story of Claude Cahun’s art and life, one that celebrates and makes accessible Cahun’s remarkable vision.
Jennifer L. Shaw embeds Cahun within the exciting social and artistic milieu of Paris between the wars. She examines her relationship with Marcel Moore—Cahun’s stepsister, lover, and life partner—who was a central collaborator helping make some of the most compelling photographs and photomontages of Cahun’s oeuvre, dreamscapes of disassembled portraiture and scenes that simultaneously fascinate and terrify. Shaw follows Cahun into the horrors of World War II and the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey off the coast of Normandy, and she explores the powerful and dangerous ways Cahun resisted it. Reading through her letters and diaries, Shaw brings Cahun’s ideas and feelings to the foreground, offering an intimate look at how she thought about photography, surrealism, the histories of women artists, and queer culture.
[more]
Eye Dreaming
Photographs by Anthony Barboza
Anthony Barboza
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
This richly illustrated book is the first monograph to explore the prolific career of the celebrated photographer Anthony Barboza.
Anthony Barboza (b. 1944) is a celebrated artist and writer who has made thousands of photographs in the studio and on the street since 1963. A member of the Kamoinge collective of photographers in New York, Barboza is largely self-taught and has an inimitable, highly intuitive vision that he refers to as “eye dreaming,” or “a state of mind that’s almost like meditation.” Throughout the years he has made countless commercial images, including celebrity portraits, advertisements, and album covers. His personal photographic projects illuminate his deep investment in the art and concerns of Black communities, not only in the United States but also around the globe.
This lavishly illustrated volume follows Barboza’s prolific career from his youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to his formative years in New York in the 1960s, to the present day. An introduction by renowned author and critic Hilton Als underscores Barboza’s importance and impact. An essay by curator Aaron Bryant contextualizes Barboza’s life and career as they map against major civil rights events in the United States. In an intimate interview between the artist and curator Mazie M. Harris, Barboza offers astute, humorous, and intimate musings on his long career, foundational influences, and artistic legacy. This monograph, the first on the artist, will appeal to aficionados of photography and Black art and culture.
Anthony Barboza (b. 1944) is a celebrated artist and writer who has made thousands of photographs in the studio and on the street since 1963. A member of the Kamoinge collective of photographers in New York, Barboza is largely self-taught and has an inimitable, highly intuitive vision that he refers to as “eye dreaming,” or “a state of mind that’s almost like meditation.” Throughout the years he has made countless commercial images, including celebrity portraits, advertisements, and album covers. His personal photographic projects illuminate his deep investment in the art and concerns of Black communities, not only in the United States but also around the globe.
This lavishly illustrated volume follows Barboza’s prolific career from his youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to his formative years in New York in the 1960s, to the present day. An introduction by renowned author and critic Hilton Als underscores Barboza’s importance and impact. An essay by curator Aaron Bryant contextualizes Barboza’s life and career as they map against major civil rights events in the United States. In an intimate interview between the artist and curator Mazie M. Harris, Barboza offers astute, humorous, and intimate musings on his long career, foundational influences, and artistic legacy. This monograph, the first on the artist, will appeal to aficionados of photography and Black art and culture.
[more]
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
J. Vanessa Lyon
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.
[more]
Filippino Lippi
An Abundance of Invention
Jonathan K. Nelson
Reaktion Books, 2022
Offering particular insight into Filippino Lippi’s artistic problem-solving, an innovative look at the Renaissance master.
The first focused study of Filippino Lippi in a generation, and the first in English in over eighty years, this book presents a new understanding of the Renaissance master-artist. Celebrated as “ingenious” by Vasari in 1550, Filippino was highly praised and influential, then fell out of favor and was forgotten for centuries. He was rediscovered by the poet Swinburne, who in 1868 celebrated the painter’s “inventive enjoyment and indefatigable fancy.” In a similar spirit, this volume explores Filippino’s creativity in solving artistic problems. If a Roman cardinal requested a classically inspired work or a Florentine humanist wanted to dazzle observers with his antiquarian interests, Filippino had the sensitivity to understand these diverse needs and express them with highly original solutions.
The first focused study of Filippino Lippi in a generation, and the first in English in over eighty years, this book presents a new understanding of the Renaissance master-artist. Celebrated as “ingenious” by Vasari in 1550, Filippino was highly praised and influential, then fell out of favor and was forgotten for centuries. He was rediscovered by the poet Swinburne, who in 1868 celebrated the painter’s “inventive enjoyment and indefatigable fancy.” In a similar spirit, this volume explores Filippino’s creativity in solving artistic problems. If a Roman cardinal requested a classically inspired work or a Florentine humanist wanted to dazzle observers with his antiquarian interests, Filippino had the sensitivity to understand these diverse needs and express them with highly original solutions.
[more]
First Meal
Julie Green
Oregon State University Press, 2023
Wrongful convictions haunt the American criminal justice system, as revealed in recent years by DNA and other investigative tools. And every wrongfully convicted person who walks free, exonerated after years or decades, carries part of that story. From those facts, artist Julie Green posed a seemingly simple question: When you have been denied all choice, what do you choose to eat on the first day of freedom?
In the small details of life at such pivotal moments, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal. Partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, Green and her coauthor, award-winning journalist Kirk Johnson, have created a unique melding of art and narration in the portraits and stories of twenty-five people on the day of their release.
Food and punishment have long been intertwined. The tradition of offering a condemned person a final meal before execution, for example, has been explored by psychologists, filmmakers, and others—including Green herself in an earlier series of criminal-justice themed paintings, The Last Supper. First Meal takes on that issue from the other side: food as a symbol of autonomy in a life restored. Set against the backdrop of a flawed American legal system, First Meal describes beauty, pain, hope and redemption, all anchored around the idea—explored by writers from Marcel Proust to Michael Pollan—that food touches us deeply in memory and emotion.
In Green’s art, state birds and surreal lobsters soar over places where wrongful convictions unfolded, mistaken witnesses shout their errors, glow-in-the-dark skylines evoke homecoming. Johnson’s essays take us inside those moments—from the courtrooms where things went wrong to the pathways of faith and resilience that kept people sane through their years of injustice. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also celebrate the humanity that unites us, and the idea that gratitude and euphoria—even as it mixes with grief and the awareness of loss—can emerge in places we least expect.
[more]
Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought
Jerome Klinkowitz
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
An iconic figure in American culture, Frank Lloyd Wright is famous throughout the world. Although his achievements in architecture are stunning, it is his importance in cultural history, Jerome Klinkowitz contends, that makes Wright the object of such avid and continuing interest. Designing more than just buildings, Wright offered a concept for living that still influences how people conduct their lives today. Wright's innovations in architecture have been widely studied, but this is the most comprehensive and sustained treatment of his thought.
Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on "the house beautiful" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living.
In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first.
Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on "the house beautiful" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living.
In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first.
Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
[more]
Frank Lloyd Wright's Forgotten House
How an Omission Transformed the Architect's Legacy
Nicholas D. Hayes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
While the grandiosity of Fallingwater and elegance of Taliesin are recognized universally, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first foray into affordable housing is frequently overlooked. Although Wright began work on his American System-Built Homes (ASBH, 1911–17) with great energy, the project fell apart following wartime shortages and disputes between the architect and his developer. While continuing to advocate for the design of affordable small homes, Wright never spoke publicly of ASBH. As a result, the heritage of many Wright-designed homes was forgotten.
When Nicholas and Angela Hayes became stewards of the unassuming Elizabeth Murphy House near Milwaukee, they began to unearth evidence that ultimately revealed a one-hundred-year-old fiasco fueled by competing ambitions and conflicting visions of America. The couple’s forensic pursuit of the truth untangled the ways Wright’s ASBH experiment led to the architect’s most productive, creative period. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten House includes a wealth of drawings and photographs, many of which have never been previously published. Historians, architecture buffs, and Wrightophiles alike will be fascinated by this untold history that fills a crucial gap in the architect’s oeuvre.
When Nicholas and Angela Hayes became stewards of the unassuming Elizabeth Murphy House near Milwaukee, they began to unearth evidence that ultimately revealed a one-hundred-year-old fiasco fueled by competing ambitions and conflicting visions of America. The couple’s forensic pursuit of the truth untangled the ways Wright’s ASBH experiment led to the architect’s most productive, creative period. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten House includes a wealth of drawings and photographs, many of which have never been previously published. Historians, architecture buffs, and Wrightophiles alike will be fascinated by this untold history that fills a crucial gap in the architect’s oeuvre.
[more]
Franklin D. Israel
A Life in Architecture
Todd Gannon
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This book examines the life and legacy of Franklin D. Israel, an influential member of the Los Angeles school of architects.
Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel (1945–1996) created innovative residential projects and office interiors that made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation. In this vivid account, architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel’s buildings, and recent interviews with the architect’s colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern. Gannon traces Israel’s development from his early years and career on the East Coast to his formative world travels and residence at the American Academy in Rome. The author guides readers through the Los Angeles architectural context, Israel’s influential teaching at UCLA, his dalliance with Hollywood, and the personal motivations behind his architecture and design work—all aspects of an influential career that was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of fifty.
Franklin D. Israel is a compelling work of architectural history and biography, chronicling one gay man’s engagement with the largely heteronormative world of American architectural culture. It explores the achievement of this central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture.
Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel (1945–1996) created innovative residential projects and office interiors that made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation. In this vivid account, architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel’s buildings, and recent interviews with the architect’s colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern. Gannon traces Israel’s development from his early years and career on the East Coast to his formative world travels and residence at the American Academy in Rome. The author guides readers through the Los Angeles architectural context, Israel’s influential teaching at UCLA, his dalliance with Hollywood, and the personal motivations behind his architecture and design work—all aspects of an influential career that was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of fifty.
Franklin D. Israel is a compelling work of architectural history and biography, chronicling one gay man’s engagement with the largely heteronormative world of American architectural culture. It explores the achievement of this central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture.
[more]
Frederic Remington and the West
With the Eye of the Mind
By Ben Merchant Vorpahl
University of Texas Press, 1978
Frederic Remington and the West sheds new light on the remarkably complicated and much misunderstood career of Frederic Remington. This study of the complex relationship between Remington and the American West focuses on the artist’s imagination and how it expressed itself. Ben Merchant Vorpahl takes into account all the dimensions of Remington’s extensive work—from journalism to fiction, sculpture, and painting. He traces the events of Remington’s life and makes extensive use of literary and art criticism and nineteenth-century American social cultural and military history in interpreting his work.
Vorpahl reveals Remington as a talented, sensitive, and sometimes neurotic American whose work reflects with peculiar force the excitement and distress of the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Remington was not a “western” artist in the conventional sense; neither was he a historian: he lacked the historian’s breadth of vision and discipline, expressing himself not through analysis but through synthesis. Vorpahl shows that, even while Remington catered to the sometimes maudlin, sometimes jingoistic tastes of his public and his editors, his resourceful imagination was at work devising a far more demanding and worthwhile design—a composite work, executed in prose, pictures, and bronze. This body of work, as the author demonstrates, demands to be regarded as an interrelated whole. Here guilt, shame, and personal failure are honestly articulated, and death itself is confronted as the artist’s chief subject.
Because Remington was so prolific a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and writer, and because his subjects, techniques, and media were so apparently diverse, the deeper continuity of his work had not previously been recognized. This study is a major contribution to our understanding of an important American artist. In addition, Vorpahl illuminates the interplay between history, artistic consciousness, and the development of America’s sense of itself during Remington’s lifetime.
[more]
Frida Escobedo
Split Subject
Ken Stewart
Harvard University Press
Split Subject, an early project by architect Frida Escobedo, deconstructs a fraught allegory of national identity and architectural modernism in Mexico. Unpacking this project and tracing its enduring influence throughout Escobedo’s career, Frida Escobedo: Split Subject reveals a multi-scalar and multi-medium practice whose creative output encompasses permanent buildings, temporary installations, public sculpture, art objects, publications, and exhibitions, and bares at its center a sensitivity to time and weathering, material and pattern, and memory. It includes essays by Julieta Gonzalez, Alejandro Hernández, Erika Naginski, Doris Sommer and José Falconi, and Irene Sunwoo, and a foreword by Wonne Ickx.
[more]
Giacomo Ceruti
A Compassionate Eye
Davide Gasparotto
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
A thoughtful look at representations of people experiencing poverty in early modern Europe.
The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low-income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar).
Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 18 to October 29, 2023.
The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low-income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar).
Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 18 to October 29, 2023.
[more]
Glassworks
The Art of Frederick Birkhill
Samantha De Tillio
The Artist Book Foundation, 2020
Glass as an art form has an ancient tradition; the archaeological record suggests that artisans in Egypt and Mesopotamia were fabricating glass vessels and ornaments during the fourth millennium BCE. Its durable nature, range of colors, malleability, and most of all, its optical transparency are qualities that have made glass a premiere art medium. Over a lifetime, Frederick Birkhill (1951–2023) has explored the unique qualities of glass and the numerous techniques and intricacies of working with it. The result of these decades of study is a body of work that is extraordinary in scope, technical expertise, and sheer virtuosity. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to present a new monograph honoring this gifted artist: Glassworks: The Art of Frederick Birkhill.
From his time in England at Burleighfield House, the studio of stained-glass artist Patrick Reyntiens, to his unprecedented visit to Lauscha, the village in the former East Germany famous for both its art and scientific glass production, and his subsequent career as an explorer, teacher, and master of the glass arts, Birkhill has devoted himself to furthering the appreciation of the medium and sharing his vast experience with colleagues, collectors, and students. His works appear in numerous museum collections, including those of The Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Smithsonian.
Complementing the scholarly contributions by authors with significant backgrounds in the glass arts, the book features in its extensive plate section the lavish photography of Henry Leutwyler, which offers readers an opportunity to examine the complex details and artistic mastery of Birkhill’s oeuvre. In addition, the monograph offers a glossary of glass-art terms, a detailed chronology of the artist’s life, his extensive exhibition history, and a list of the numerous awards he has received. For those who are passionate about the glass arts, this monograph is a feast for the eyes.
[more]
Grant Wood’s Secrets
Sue Taylor
University of Delaware Press, 2011
Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong oedipal guilt into his art. Presenting Wood’s abortive autobiography “Return from Bohemia” for the first time ever, Sue Taylor integrates the artist’s own recollections into interpretations of his art. As Wood dressed in overalls and boasted about his beloved Midwest, he consciously engaged in regionalist strategies, performing a farmer masquerade of sorts. In doing so, he also posed as conventionally masculine, hiding his homosexuality from his rural community. Thus, he came to experience himself as a double man. This book conveys the very real threats under which Wood lived and pays tribute to his resourceful responses, which were often duplicitous and have baffled art historians who typically take them at face value.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
[more]
Gustave Caillebotte
Painting Men
Scott Allan
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This richly illustrated volume paints a complex portrait of Caillebotte, masculinity, and identity in late nineteenth-century France.
More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood. Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s identity—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity—for both Caillebotte and the larger late nineteenth-century French world.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from March 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.
More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood. Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s identity—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity—for both Caillebotte and the larger late nineteenth-century French world.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from March 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.
[more]
Hans Holbein
The Artist in a Changing World
Jeanne Nuechterlein
Reaktion Books, 2020
Immensely skillful and inventive, Hans Holbein molded his approach to art-making during a period of dramatic transformation in European society and culture: the emergence of humanism, the impact of the Reformation on religious life, and the effects of new scientific discoveries. Most people have encountered Holbein’s work—think of King Henry VIII and Holbein’s memorable portrait springs to mind, forever defining the Tudor king for posterity—but little is widely known about the artist himself. This overview of Holbein looks at his art through the changes in the world around him. Offering insightful and often surprising new interpretations of visual and historical sources that have rarely been addressed, Jeanne Nuechterlein reconstructs what we know of the life of this elusive figure, illuminating the complexity of his world and the images he generated.
[more]
Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago
Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis
Edward W. Wolner
University of Chicago Press, 2011
When championing the commercial buildings and homes that made the Windy City famous, one can’t help but mention the brilliant names of their architects—Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. But few people are aware of Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931), the man responsible for an extraordinarily rich chapter in the city’s turn-of-the-century building boom, and fewer still realize Cobb’s lasting importance as a designer of the private and public institutions that continue to enrich Chicago’s exceptional architectural heritage.
Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is the first book about this distinguished architect and the magnificent buildings he created, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Fisheries Building for the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Chicago Federal Building. Cobb filled a huge institutional void with his inventive Romanesque and Gothic buildings—something that the other architect-giants, occupied largely with residential and commercial work, did not do. Edward W. Wolner argues that these constructions and the enterprises they housed—including the first buildings and master plan for the University of Chicago—signaled that the city had come of age, that its leaders were finally pursuing the highest ambitions in the realms of culture and intellect.
Assembling a cast of colorful characters from a free-wheeling age gone by, and including over 140 images of Cobb’s most creative buildings, Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is a rare achievement: a dynamic portrait of an architect whose institutional designs decisively changed the city’s identity during its most critical phase of development.
[more]
Hieronymus Bosch
Visions and Nightmares
Nils Büttner
Reaktion Books, 2016
An accessible biography of the celebrated early Netherlandish painter, now in paperback.
In his lifetime the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his phantasmagoric images, and today his name is synonymous with the infernal. The creator of expansive tableaus of fantastic and hellish scenes—where any devil not dancing is too busy eating human souls—he has been as equally misunderstood by history as his paintings have. In this book, Nils Büttner draws on a wealth of historical documents—not to mention Bosch’s paintings—to offer a fresh and insightful look at one of history’s most peculiar artists on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death.
Bosch’s paintings have elicited a number of responses over the centuries. Some have tried to explain them as alchemical symbolism, others as coded messages of a secret cult, and still others have tried to psychoanalyze them. Some have placed Bosch among the Adamites, others among the Cathars, and others among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, seeing in his paintings an occult life of free love, strange rituals, mysterious drugs, and witchcraft. As Büttner shows, Bosch was—if anything—a hardworking painter, commissioned by aristocrats and courtesans, as all painters of his time were. Analyzing his life and paintings against the backdrop of contemporary Dutch culture and society, Büttner offers one of the clearest biographical sketches to date alongside beautiful reproductions of some of Bosch’s most important work. The result is a smart but accessible introduction to a unique artist whose work transcends genre.
In his lifetime the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his phantasmagoric images, and today his name is synonymous with the infernal. The creator of expansive tableaus of fantastic and hellish scenes—where any devil not dancing is too busy eating human souls—he has been as equally misunderstood by history as his paintings have. In this book, Nils Büttner draws on a wealth of historical documents—not to mention Bosch’s paintings—to offer a fresh and insightful look at one of history’s most peculiar artists on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death.
Bosch’s paintings have elicited a number of responses over the centuries. Some have tried to explain them as alchemical symbolism, others as coded messages of a secret cult, and still others have tried to psychoanalyze them. Some have placed Bosch among the Adamites, others among the Cathars, and others among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, seeing in his paintings an occult life of free love, strange rituals, mysterious drugs, and witchcraft. As Büttner shows, Bosch was—if anything—a hardworking painter, commissioned by aristocrats and courtesans, as all painters of his time were. Analyzing his life and paintings against the backdrop of contemporary Dutch culture and society, Büttner offers one of the clearest biographical sketches to date alongside beautiful reproductions of some of Bosch’s most important work. The result is a smart but accessible introduction to a unique artist whose work transcends genre.
[more]
Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography
Karen Hellman
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
The first English-language volume about Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography who helped transform the burgeoning medium into an art form.
Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) is often characterized as an underdog in the early history of photography. From the outset, his contribution to the invention of the medium was eclipsed by others such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). However, Bayard had an undeniable role in the birth of photography and its subsequent evolution into a form of art. He was a pioneer in artistic style, innovator in terms of practice, and teacher of the next generation of photographers.
Alongside an exploration of Bayard’s decades-long career and lasting impact, this volume presents—for the first time in print—some of the earliest photographs in existence. An album containing nearly 200 images, 145 of those by or attributed to Bayard, is among the Getty Museum’s rarest and most treasured photographic holdings. Few prints have ever been seen in person due to the extreme light sensitivity of Bayard’s experimental processes, making this an essential reference for scholars and enthusiasts of the very beginning of photography.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from April 9 to July 7, 2024.
Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) is often characterized as an underdog in the early history of photography. From the outset, his contribution to the invention of the medium was eclipsed by others such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). However, Bayard had an undeniable role in the birth of photography and its subsequent evolution into a form of art. He was a pioneer in artistic style, innovator in terms of practice, and teacher of the next generation of photographers.
Alongside an exploration of Bayard’s decades-long career and lasting impact, this volume presents—for the first time in print—some of the earliest photographs in existence. An album containing nearly 200 images, 145 of those by or attributed to Bayard, is among the Getty Museum’s rarest and most treasured photographic holdings. Few prints have ever been seen in person due to the extreme light sensitivity of Bayard’s experimental processes, making this an essential reference for scholars and enthusiasts of the very beginning of photography.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from April 9 to July 7, 2024.
[more]
Hodermarsky
Duncan Christy
The Artist Book Foundation, 2024
Daniel Hodermarsky (1924–1999) was the son of Slovak immigrants who emigrated from Hačava to settle and work in the coal fields of Pennsylvania and later in the auto-manufacturing industries of Ohio. He served in World War II on the Western front and was awarded two presidential citations, two Croix de Guerre, and one combat star. He returned home with severe and persistent posttraumatic stress disorder that left an indelible mark on his life and art.
Hodermarsky had a distinguished teaching career at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1957 to 1969. Throughout the 1960s, he taught in Cleveland's public schools and started an art program for inner-city youth under the Federal Title 3 Act to promote integration through arts education. From 1969 to 1989 he taught at Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts, founding its art department and serving for several years as department chair and director of the school's Hilson Gallery (now the von Auersperg Gallery). He mentored notable artists, including Stephen Hannock and Michael Tracy.
Throughout his career, Hodermarsky's work embraced both the representational and the abstract. His early works experimented with new media (such as Dayglo paint) and new styles such as Op Art and performance. In the 1970s and beyond, he engaged landscape—rural, urban, and imaginary—wherein he explored the interplay of terrain (land or water, horizon, and sky). The human figure—Slovak farmers, wounded or dismembered soldiers, and mythical and historical figures—were among his favorite subjects. He was fascinated by how age, human nature, and personality combine to create the physical form. His eclectic themes mirror his own unique complexities and experiences. Later in his career, he focused on abstract works that reflect the intricate spaces of both his psyche and shared human experience.
A deeply spiritual man with a strong religious faith, Hodermarsky's abstract paintings ask the existential questions that have challenged humankind across millennia. By showing us his own experience of these great mysteries, his art underscores life's abiding beauty. Over his long career of interpreting the world in which he lived, Hodermarsky invites us to inhabit a realm filled with joy, reverence, and passion.
[more]
Hélio Oiticica
Folding the Frame
Irene V. Small
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) was one of the most brilliant Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a forerunner of participatory art, and his melding of geometric abstraction and bodily engagement has influenced contemporary artists from Cildo Meireles and Ricardo Basbaum to Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson. This book examines Oiticica’s impressive works against the backdrop of Brazil’s dramatic postwar push for modernization.
From Oiticica’s late 1950s experiments with painting and color to his mid-1960s wearable Parangolés, Small traces a series of artistic procedures that foreground the activation of the spectator. Analyzing works, propositions, and a wealth of archival material, she shows how Oiticica’s practice recast—in a sense “folded”—Brazil’s utopian vision of progress as well as the legacy of European constructive art. Ultimately, the book argues that the effectiveness of Oiticica’s participatory works stems not from a renunciation of art, but rather from their ability to produce epistemological models that reimagine the traditional boundaries between art and life.
From Oiticica’s late 1950s experiments with painting and color to his mid-1960s wearable Parangolés, Small traces a series of artistic procedures that foreground the activation of the spectator. Analyzing works, propositions, and a wealth of archival material, she shows how Oiticica’s practice recast—in a sense “folded”—Brazil’s utopian vision of progress as well as the legacy of European constructive art. Ultimately, the book argues that the effectiveness of Oiticica’s participatory works stems not from a renunciation of art, but rather from their ability to produce epistemological models that reimagine the traditional boundaries between art and life.
[more]
I Love My Selfie
Essay by Ilan Stavans / Auto-Portraits by ADÁL
Duke University Press, 2017
What explains our current obsession with selfies? In I Love My Selfie noted cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the selfie's historical and cultural roots by discussing everything from Greek mythology and Shakespeare to Andy Warhol, James Franco, and Pope Francis. He sees selfies as tools people use to disguise or present themselves as spontaneous and casual. This collaboration includes a portfolio of fifty autoportraits by the artist ADÁL; he and Stavans use them as a way to question the notion of the self and to engage with artists, celebrities, technology, identity, and politics. Provocative and engaging, I Love My Selfie will change the way readers think about this unavoidable phenomenon of twenty-first-century life.
[more]
Irina Nakhova
Museum on the Edge
Jane A. Sharp
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Throughout her extensive career, Russian conceptual artist Irina Nakhova has frequently pushed the limits of what constitutes art and how we experience the art museum. One of her famous early pieces, for instance, transformed a room in her very own Moscow apartment into an art installation.
Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
[more]
Isa Genzken
Sculpture as World Receiver
Lisa Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.
[more]
Jan van Eyck within His Art
Alfred Acres
Reaktion Books, 2023
A new assessment of the inventive and influential artist Jan van Eyck.
Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) was one of the most inventive and influential artists in the entire European tradition. The realism of his paintings continues to astound observers more than six centuries on, even though our world is saturated by high-resolution images. However, viewers today are as like to be absorbed by Van Eyck’s personality as his realism. While he sometimes directly painted himself into his works, he also suggested his presence through an array of inscriptions, signatures, and even a personal motto. Incorporating a wealth of new research and recent discoveries within a fresh exploration of the paintings themselves, this book reveals how profoundly Jan van Eyck transformed the very idea of what an artist could be.
Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) was one of the most inventive and influential artists in the entire European tradition. The realism of his paintings continues to astound observers more than six centuries on, even though our world is saturated by high-resolution images. However, viewers today are as like to be absorbed by Van Eyck’s personality as his realism. While he sometimes directly painted himself into his works, he also suggested his presence through an array of inscriptions, signatures, and even a personal motto. Incorporating a wealth of new research and recent discoveries within a fresh exploration of the paintings themselves, this book reveals how profoundly Jan van Eyck transformed the very idea of what an artist could be.
[more]
The Jazz Loft Project
Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965
W. Eugene Smith and Sam Stephenson
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Reissue of an acclaimed collection of images from photographer W. Eugene Smith’s time in a New York City loft among jazz musicians.
In 1957, Eugene Smith walked away from his longtime job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. The loft was the late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them. Here, from 1957 to 1965, he made nearly 40,000 photographs and approximately 4,000 hours of recordings of musicians. Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists, and he turned his documentary impulses away from work on his major Pittsburg photo essay and toward his new surroundings.
Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of this book, no one had seen his extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tales.
In 1957, Eugene Smith walked away from his longtime job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. The loft was the late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them. Here, from 1957 to 1965, he made nearly 40,000 photographs and approximately 4,000 hours of recordings of musicians. Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists, and he turned his documentary impulses away from work on his major Pittsburg photo essay and toward his new surroundings.
Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of this book, no one had seen his extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tales.
[more]
John Andrews
Architect of Uncommon Sense
Paul Walker
Harvard University Press
Though he garnered global praise at the peak of his career from 1960 to 1990, Australian architect John Andrews faced waning fame as postmodern cultural transformations challenged modernist design values, and wider social and economic changes led to a withdrawal of government-funded institutional commissions. Yet his body of work is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be better known.
Following a path from Australia to the United States and Canada and back again, John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense examines his most important buildings and reveals how the internationalization of architecture during this period was an unexpectedly dispersed geographical phenomenon, following more complex flows and localized progressions than earlier modernist ideas that travelled from center to periphery, metropole to outpost. Andrews negotiated the advent of postmodernism not by ignoring it, but by cultivating approaches that this new era foregrounded—identity, history, place—within the formal vocabularies of modernism. As Andrews assumed wider public roles and took appointments that allowed him to shape architectural education, he influenced design culture beyond his own personal portfolio. This book presents his legacy traversing local and international scenes and exemplifying late-modern developments of architecture while offering both generational continuities and discontinuities with what came after.
John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense features essays from Paul Walker, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Peter Scriver and Antony Moulis, Philip Goad, and Paolo Scrivano, along with nearly 100 new photographs from visual artist Noritaka Minami of existing buildings designed by Andrews in North America and Australia.
[more]
John Van Alstine
Sculpture, 1971–2018
Howard Fox
The Artist Book Foundation, 2019
For nearly fifty years, John Van Alstine has created abstract sculptures forged from steel and stone. In John Van Alstine: Sculpture, 1971–2018, three notable essayists explore the sculptor’s abstract landscapes that reveal the complex synergy between natural forces and man-made elements; by grappling with the challenges of balancing stone and steel, Van Alstine’s indoor, outdoor, and site-specific sculptures are measured and calculated, yet simultaneously poetic; their swooping angular lines create expansive spaces beyond the limits of their stone-and-steel frames to unveil our collective history and imagination, illuminating a deft interplay of natural energies and the human experience.
The artist weaves into his works elements of mythology, celestial navigation, implements, human figures, movement, urban forms, and found objects, while using motion, balance, and inertia to incorporate the eternal forces of gravity, tension, and erosion. In an essay on his drawings, Van Alstine details the critical role they play in the initiation and planning of his projects, offering the reader a firsthand perspective on the artist’s creative process. Van Alstine’s works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and are found in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, and the Phillips Collection, to name but a few. His works are also found in numerous public and private collections. The Artist Book Foundation is gratified to announce the publication of this lavishly illustrated monograph on an esteemed and prolific contemporary artist.
[more]
John Vinci
Life and Landmarks
Text by Robert Sharoff, Photographs by William Zbaren
Northwestern University Press, 2017
John Vinci: Life and Landmarks is the first authoritative survey of the life and work of one of Chicago’s most acclaimed architects and preservationists. Long awaited by scholars as well as by architecture aficionados, John Vinci provides an intimate look at an architect whose portfolio spans half a century and includes the restoration of some of the city’s most important historic structures as well as numerous award-winning original projects.
This illustrated biography traces Vinci’s origins as a child of Italian immigrants on Chicago’s South Side and his coming of age at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was then under the direction of the legendary Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It follows his career through his subsequent immersion in the historic preservation movement and the work of such early Chicago architects as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Wellborn Root.
Vinci’s pioneering restoration projects include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Home Studio, Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room and the Carson Pirie Scott Building, and Root’s Monadnock Building. His original work, meanwhile, includes notable buildings such as the Arts Club of Chicago, numerous award-winning residences, and more than fifty major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums.
John Vinci: Life and Landmarks also features portraits and profiles of Vinci’s friends and mentors over the years, including the architectural photographer Richard Nickel, the landscape designer Alfred Caldwell, the Art Institute curators James Speyer and Anne Rorimer, the architects Crombie Taylor and Myron Goldsmith, and the City of Chicago’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson.
The book includes new photos of twenty projects by noted architectural photographer William Zbaren as well as more than one hundred vintage photos and floorplans from Vinci’s personal archives, many never before published. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné rounds out this handsome and definitive work.
This illustrated biography traces Vinci’s origins as a child of Italian immigrants on Chicago’s South Side and his coming of age at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was then under the direction of the legendary Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It follows his career through his subsequent immersion in the historic preservation movement and the work of such early Chicago architects as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Wellborn Root.
Vinci’s pioneering restoration projects include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Home Studio, Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room and the Carson Pirie Scott Building, and Root’s Monadnock Building. His original work, meanwhile, includes notable buildings such as the Arts Club of Chicago, numerous award-winning residences, and more than fifty major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums.
John Vinci: Life and Landmarks also features portraits and profiles of Vinci’s friends and mentors over the years, including the architectural photographer Richard Nickel, the landscape designer Alfred Caldwell, the Art Institute curators James Speyer and Anne Rorimer, the architects Crombie Taylor and Myron Goldsmith, and the City of Chicago’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson.
The book includes new photos of twenty projects by noted architectural photographer William Zbaren as well as more than one hundred vintage photos and floorplans from Vinci’s personal archives, many never before published. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné rounds out this handsome and definitive work.
[more]
Journeys through the Russian Empire
The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
William Craft Brumfield
Duke University Press, 2020
At the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to document an empire that was undergoing rapid change due to industrialization and the building of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed a pioneering method of capturing color images on glass plates, scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II. Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward camera from the western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and central Asia, he created a singular record of Imperial Russia.
In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them.
William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
This lavishly illustrated volume—which features some 400 stunning full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes—is a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.
In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them.
William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
This lavishly illustrated volume—which features some 400 stunning full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes—is a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.
[more]
Keith Haring's Line
Race and the Performance of Desire
Ricardo Montez
Duke University Press, 2020
In the thirty years since his death, Keith Haring—a central presence on the New York downtown scene of the 1980s—has remained one of the most popular figures in contemporary American art. In one of the first book-length treatments of Haring’s artistry, Ricardo Montez traces the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Haring’s artistic practice and with which the artist marked canvases, subway walls, and even human flesh. Keith Haring’s Line unites performance studies, critical race studies, and queer theory in an exploration of cross-racial desire in Haring’s life and art. Examining Haring’s engagements with artists such as dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, graffiti artist LA II, and iconic superstar Grace Jones, Montez confronts Haring’s messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries, highlighting scenes of complicity in order to trouble both the positive connotations of inter-racial artistic collaboration and the limited framework of appropriation.
[more]
Lake|Flato Houses
Embracing the Landscape
Lake|Flato Architects
University of Texas Press, 2014
Lake|Flato Architects of San Antonio, Texas, is nationally and internationally acclaimed for buildings that respond organically to the natural environment. The firm uses local materials and workmanship, as well as a deep knowledge of vernacular traditions, to design buildings that are tactile and modern, environmentally responsible and authentic, artful and crafted. Lake|Flato won the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2013, and it has also received the American Institute of Architects’ highest honor, the National Firm Award. In all, Lake|Flato has won more than 150 national and state design awards. Residential architecture has always been a priority for the firm, and Lake|Flato Houses showcases an extensive selection of landmark homes built since 1999. Color photographs and architectural commentary create a memorable portrait of houses from Texas to Montana. Reflecting the firm’s emphasis on designing in harmony with the land, the houses are grouped by the habitats in which they’re rooted—brushland, desert, hillside, mountains, city, and water. These groupings reveal how Lake|Flato works with the natural environment to create houses that merge into the landscape, blurring boundaries between inside and outside and accommodating the climate through both traditional and cutting-edge technologies. The sections are opened by noted architect and educator Frederick Steiner, who discusses Lake|Flato’s unique responses to the forms and materials of the various landscapes. An introduction by journalist Guy Martin summarizes the history of Lake|Flato and its philosophy, and explores the impact of its work on sustainable architecture.
[more]
The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757)
The Queen of Pastel
Angela Oberer
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first scholarly investigation of the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications, and consequences that arose then -- and can also arise today -- when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society's expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies for achieving success, as well as autonomy in her professional life as a famed artist. Some of the questions that the author raises are: How did Carriera manage to build up her career? How did she run her business and organize her own workshop? What kind of artist was Carriera? Finally, what do her self-portraits reveal in terms of self-enactment and possibly autobiographical turning points?
[more]
Louis I. Kahn
The Nordic Latitudes
Per Olaf Fjeld
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
Louis I. Kahn: The Nordic Latitudes is a new and personal reading of the architecture, teachings, and legacy of Louis I. Kahn from Per Olaf Fjeld’s perspective as a former student. The book explores Kahn’s life and work, offering a unique take on one of the twentieth century’s most important architects.
Kahn’s Nordic and European ties are emphasized in this study that also covers his early childhood in Estonia, his travels, and his relationships with other architects, including the Norwegian architect Arne Korsmo.
The authors have gathered personal reflections, archival material, and other student work to offer insight into the wisdom that Kahn imparted to his students in his famous masterclass. Louis I. Kahn: The Nordic Latitudes addresses Kahn’s legacy both personally and in terms of the profession, documents a research trip the University of Pennsylvania’s Louis I. Kahn Collection, and confronts the affiliation of Kahn’s work with postmodernism.
Kahn’s Nordic and European ties are emphasized in this study that also covers his early childhood in Estonia, his travels, and his relationships with other architects, including the Norwegian architect Arne Korsmo.
The authors have gathered personal reflections, archival material, and other student work to offer insight into the wisdom that Kahn imparted to his students in his famous masterclass. Louis I. Kahn: The Nordic Latitudes addresses Kahn’s legacy both personally and in terms of the profession, documents a research trip the University of Pennsylvania’s Louis I. Kahn Collection, and confronts the affiliation of Kahn’s work with postmodernism.
[more]
Lucas Cranach
From German Myth to Reformation
Jennifer Nelson
Reaktion Books
A revealing new account of the life and work of this early modern German printmaker.
This captivating biography brings Lucas Cranach the Elder into the spotlight for the twenty-first century. The illuminating narrative unveils an artist whose vision transcended personal brilliance as he sought to elevate a nascent nation and foster a sense of community with his work. Perhaps Cranach’s most remarkable achievement lay in forging a robust Lutheran community, endowed with a resounding message of salvation. Using prints (the prevailing medium of mass communication) and multiple versions of paintings, he developed an intricate symbolism that resonated with the populace in early modern Germany. Jennifer Nelson also explores his extensive repertoire of female nudes and shows how these seductive artworks not only tantalized his patrons but constructed for them a deep history of Germany’s notional connections with ancient Greece and Rome.
This captivating biography brings Lucas Cranach the Elder into the spotlight for the twenty-first century. The illuminating narrative unveils an artist whose vision transcended personal brilliance as he sought to elevate a nascent nation and foster a sense of community with his work. Perhaps Cranach’s most remarkable achievement lay in forging a robust Lutheran community, endowed with a resounding message of salvation. Using prints (the prevailing medium of mass communication) and multiple versions of paintings, he developed an intricate symbolism that resonated with the populace in early modern Germany. Jennifer Nelson also explores his extensive repertoire of female nudes and shows how these seductive artworks not only tantalized his patrons but constructed for them a deep history of Germany’s notional connections with ancient Greece and Rome.
[more]
Lustron Stories
Charles Mintz
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
The Lustron Corporation manufactured porcelain-baked, enamel-coated all-steel houses between 1948 and 1950 in Columbus, OH. Virtually everything—exterior siding, roof, interior walls, cabinets, and ceilings—was made out of this material. The components were shipped to site on specially designed trailers and assembled by local contractors using only wrenches. About 2,500 Lustrons were sold, mostly in the eastern United States, but as far afield as Miami and Los Alamos. Roughly two-thirds are still being used today.
A remarkable cross section of individuals and families live in these modest (~1100 sq. ft.) homes. While certainly diverse in age and place in life, the homeowners are still firmly working class. Everyone who lives in a Lustron home has an opinion about it. The material is miserable to cut or drill into. Repairs are more about metalworking and enamel finishing than carpentry or house painting. And magnets tend to be a popular solution for hanging objects inside and outside the steel walls.
Four years ago, Charles Mintz set out to photograph the people living in these homes. The residents, owners, or both were photographed outside and occasionally inside. Mintz used a large format wooden camera and available light. This book features 65 of the resulting photographs and essays from Shannon Thomas Perich, Curator of the Photographic History Collection at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and Jeffrey Head, author and architecture critic.
A remarkable cross section of individuals and families live in these modest (~1100 sq. ft.) homes. While certainly diverse in age and place in life, the homeowners are still firmly working class. Everyone who lives in a Lustron home has an opinion about it. The material is miserable to cut or drill into. Repairs are more about metalworking and enamel finishing than carpentry or house painting. And magnets tend to be a popular solution for hanging objects inside and outside the steel walls.
Four years ago, Charles Mintz set out to photograph the people living in these homes. The residents, owners, or both were photographed outside and occasionally inside. Mintz used a large format wooden camera and available light. This book features 65 of the resulting photographs and essays from Shannon Thomas Perich, Curator of the Photographic History Collection at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and Jeffrey Head, author and architecture critic.
[more]
Mario Giacomelli
Figure/Ground
Virginia Heckert
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021
A new look at the work of Mario Giacomelli, one of Italy’s foremost photographers of the twentieth century.
Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy’s Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence.
Spanning the photographer’s earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 29 to October 10, 2021.
Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy’s Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence.
Spanning the photographer’s earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 29 to October 10, 2021.
[more]
Martín Ramírez
Framing His Life and Art
By Víctor M. Espinosa
University of Texas Press, 2015
Martín Ramírez, a Mexican migrant worker and psychiatric patient without formal artistic training, has been hailed by leading New York art critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. His work has been exhibited alongside masters such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. A landmark exhibition of Ramírez’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2007 broke attendance records and garnered praise from major media, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and Village Voice.
Martín Ramírez offers the first sustained look at the life and critical reception of this acclaimed artist. Víctor Espinosa challenges the stereotype of outsider art as an indecipherable enigma by delving into Ramírez’s biography and showing how he transformed memories of his life in Mexico, as well as his experiences of displacement and seclusion in the United States, into powerful works of art. Espinosa then traces the reception of Ramírez’s work, from its first anonymous showings in the 1950s to contemporary exhibitions and individual works that have sold for as much as a half-million dollars. This eloquently told story reveals how Ramírez’s three-decades-long incarceration in California psychiatric institutions and his classification as “chronic paranoid schizophrenic” stigmatized yet also protected what his hands produced. Stripping off the labels “psychotic artist” and “outsider master,” Martín Ramírez demonstrates that his drawings are not passive manifestations of mental illness. Although he drew while confined as a psychiatric patient, the formal elements and content of Ramírez’s artwork are shaped by his experiences of cultural and physical displacement.
[more]
Mary Nohl
A Lifetime in Art
Barbara Manger
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013
LOOK INSIDE THE LIFE — AND HOME — OF LEGENDARY 'OUTSIDER' ARTIST MARY NOHL
"Mary Nohl: A Lifetime in Art" by Barbara Manger and Janine Smith, tells the story of Milwaukee-born artist, Mary Nohl. A prolific and fanciful maker who worked in a variety of media, Nohl was both a mysterious figure and an iconic "outsider" artist. This new addition to the Badger Biographies series captures her life and will capture the imagination of readers, and artists, of all ages.
Nohl didn't just make art — she lived it. From the time she was young, Mary enjoyed making things, from the model airplane that won her a citywide prize to assignments in shop class, where she learned to work with tools.
Her interests in art blossomed during the years she spent training at the Art Institute of Chicago, leading to a lifetime of curiosity and ventures into new artistic media. From pottery to silver jewelry and oil painting to concrete sculpture, Mary explored new ways of making art. Many of her pieces were made from found objects that other people might think of as junk — like chicken bones, bedsprings and sand that she made into concrete.
Nohl, who made her home on the shores of Lake Michigan, decorated the interior of her cottage with bright colors and eye-catching figures in driftwood and glass. During her later years, her home became known as the "Witch's House" — a place of local legend known far beyond Fox Point. Though she died in 2001, Mary's legacy continues. Her art is held at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, and her home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The popular Badger Biographies series for young readers explores the lives of famous and not-so-famous figures in Wisconsin history. The Wisconsin Historical Society Press is proud to celebrate the release of this, the 21st book in the series.
[more]
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Behold
Carmen Hermo
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
This vibrantly illustrated survey of the career of contemporary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons delves into her diverse oeuvre of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and performance.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) makes powerful work that holds and beholds the stories of historically silenced peoples and urges societal change. Her journey as an artist, teacher, and activist has taken her from Cuba through the United States, and her autobiographical compositions honor her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors while also facing the future. With an artistic practice that crosses boundaries, intertwines media—from photography to sculpture, film to performance—and references traditions and beliefs ranging from feminism to Santería, Campos-Pons’s work is deeply layered and complex.
This volume, the first critical look at the artist’s oeuvre in nearly two decades, surveys the concerns, materials, and places invoked throughout her forty-year career. Thoughtful essays explore her vibrant, arresting artwork, which confronts issues of agency and the construction of race and belonging and challenges us to reckon with these issues in our own lives.
This volume, copublished with the Brooklyn Museum, accompanies an exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Museum from September 15, 2023, to January 14, 2024, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 15 to June 9, 2024, the Frist Art Museum from September 27, 2024, to January 5, 2025, and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from February 11 to May 4, 2025.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) makes powerful work that holds and beholds the stories of historically silenced peoples and urges societal change. Her journey as an artist, teacher, and activist has taken her from Cuba through the United States, and her autobiographical compositions honor her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors while also facing the future. With an artistic practice that crosses boundaries, intertwines media—from photography to sculpture, film to performance—and references traditions and beliefs ranging from feminism to Santería, Campos-Pons’s work is deeply layered and complex.
This volume, the first critical look at the artist’s oeuvre in nearly two decades, surveys the concerns, materials, and places invoked throughout her forty-year career. Thoughtful essays explore her vibrant, arresting artwork, which confronts issues of agency and the construction of race and belonging and challenges us to reckon with these issues in our own lives.
This volume, copublished with the Brooklyn Museum, accompanies an exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Museum from September 15, 2023, to January 14, 2024, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 15 to June 9, 2024, the Frist Art Museum from September 27, 2024, to January 5, 2025, and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from February 11 to May 4, 2025.
[more]
Matt Saunders
Parallel Plot
Matt Saunders
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders has in recent years captured the art world’s eye with a striking series of hybrid images and animated films produced using techniques from both photography and painting. Using movie stars such as German actress Hertha Thiele and British actor Patrick McGoohan as subjects, Saunders recasts historical film and television images into new discourses about portraiture, iconography, and spectatorship.
Matt Saunders: Parallel Plot is both an artist’s book and a catalog that documents and reflects on a 2010 exhibition held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Reproducing the stunning artwork from that show, the book also includes two conversations between Saunders and artist Josiah McElheny and an essay by experimental film scholar Bruce Jenkins that tackles the relationship among painting, photography, and film, as well as the dynamics of Saunders’s iconography. Offering insight into Saunders’s sophisticated working methods, this book is an evocative introduction to the work of this intriguing artist and the intertwined histories of film and photography.
[more]
Minor White
Manifestations of the Spirit
Paul Martineau
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2014
A beautifully illustrated tribute to one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.
Controversial, misunderstood, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (1908–1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose ideas exerted a powerful influence on a generation of photographers and still resonate today. His photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, with assignments for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). After serving in World War II and studying art history at Columbia University, White’s focus shifted toward the metaphorical. He began creating images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called equivalency, referring to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer.
This book brings together White’s key biographical information—his evolution as a photographer, teacher of photography, and editor of Aperture, as well as particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years. The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s life, his growth as an artist, as well as his spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt. He sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy.
Controversial, misunderstood, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (1908–1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose ideas exerted a powerful influence on a generation of photographers and still resonate today. His photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, with assignments for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). After serving in World War II and studying art history at Columbia University, White’s focus shifted toward the metaphorical. He began creating images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called equivalency, referring to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer.
This book brings together White’s key biographical information—his evolution as a photographer, teacher of photography, and editor of Aperture, as well as particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years. The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s life, his growth as an artist, as well as his spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt. He sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy.
[more]
Orozco's American Epic
Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race
Mary K. Coffey
Duke University Press, 2020
Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.
[more]
Paintbrush for Hire
The Travels of James and Emma Cameron, 1840–1900
Frederick C. Moffatt
University of Tennessee Press, 2018
Throughout the nineteenth-century, itinerant painters traveled the length and breadth of Europe and American in search of patronage. In the company of the his crupulous wife, Emma S. Cameron (1825–1907), the Scots-born James Cameron (1816–1882) sought to fulfill his ambitious dream of becoming an artist.
Working primarily as a landscapist and portraitist—he was also an inventor, a missionary, an ordained minister, a land agent, farmer, clothing merchant, and Sunday school teacher—Cameron produced a small collection of paintings during the ten-year period the couple resided in East Tennessee and the American South. Driven by the wife’s lively journals, correspondence, and Civil War diary, Moffatt’s narrative details the couple’s marriage, their extended honeymoon in revolutionary Italy and, following a brief excursion in the Adirondacks, their subsequent residencies in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Nashville, Augusta, central Mississippi, and New Orleans, between 1856 and 1868. While in Chattanooga, they settled near Col. James A. Whiteside’s fashionable summer resort, Lookout Mountain Hotel, where James reigned as resident artist and Emma, reluctantly, served as the house nurse and social entertainer. In the late 1860s they lived in Maine and, after 1874, in California, where they founded separate Presbyterian churches.
The book emphasizes Cameron’s painting career, the patrons who supported it, and discusses his best-known works, all of which are reproduced here. The study demonstrated how persisted while working under a cultural cloud that often devalued artistic achievement Emma’s journals reveal her to be a perceptive observer of Protestant middle class “life-on-the-run” and yields insight into historic events in the making, including the Italian Risorgimento, the American Civil War, and the settlement of America’s Western frontier. Moffatt’s detailed joint biography provides a valuable contribution to women’s studies, art history, nineteenth-century frontier expansionism, and social history.
[more]
Painting with Demons
The Art of Gerolamo Savoldo
Michael Fried
Reaktion Books, 2021
The achievements of Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo were, even during a period of unprecedented artistry, out of the ordinary. Born in Brescia around 1480, he radically reimagined Christian subjects. His surviving oeuvre of roughly fifty paintings—from the intensely poetic Tobias and the Angel to sober self-portraits—represents some of the most profound work of the period. In Painting with Demons, a beautifully illustrated book and the first in English devoted to the painter, Michael Fried brings his celebrated skills of looking and thinking to bear on Savoldo’s art, providing a stunning contribution to our understanding both of the early modern European imagination and of the achievement of this underappreciated artist.
[more]
Phantom Skies and Shifting Ground
Landscape, Culture, and Rephotography in Eadweard Muybridge's Illustrations of Central America
Byron Wolfe and Scott Brady
Temple University Press, 2017
In 1875, after being acquitted for the murder of his wife’s lover, Eadweard Muybridge spent a year photographing along the Central American Pacific Coast, particularly in Guatemala and Panamá. Upon his return to California in 1876, he published a very limited number of albums of the photographs (11 are known), each of which was unique in size and scope. In 2007, photographer Byron Wolfe (born 1967) tracked down and cataloged every known Muybridge Central American photograph. Then, with cultural geographer Scott Brady, he traveled to many of Muybridge’s sites to rephotograph them. Through photographic collage, interpretive rephotography, illustrations and essays, this book examines an exceptionally rare series by Muybridge. Also included is a catalogue of every known Muybridge Central American picture.
[more]
Photo-Attractions
An Indian Dancer, an American Photographer, and a German Camera
Ajay Sinha
Rutgers University Press, 2022
In Spring 1938, an Indian dancer named Ram Gopal and an American writer-photographer named Carl Van Vechten came together for a photoshoot in New York City. Ram Gopal was a pioneer of classical Indian dance and Van Vechten was reputed as a prominent white patron of the African-American movement called the Harlem Renaissance. Photo-Attractions describes the interpersonal desires and expectations of the two men that took shape when the dancer took pose in exotic costumes in front of Van Vechten’s Leica camera. The spectacular images provide a rare and compelling record of an underrepresented history of transcultural exchanges during the interwar years of early-20th century, made briefly visible through photography.
Art historian Ajay Sinha uses these hitherto unpublished photographs and archival research to raise provocative and important questions about photographic technology, colonial histories, race, sexuality and transcultural desires. Challenging the assumption that Gopal was merely objectified by Van Vechten’s Orientalist gaze, he explores the ways in which the Indian dancer co-authored the photos. In Sinha’s reading, Van Vechten’s New York studio becomes a promiscuous contact zone between world cultures, where a “photo-erotic” triangle is formed between the American photographer, Indian dancer, and German camera.
A groundbreaking study of global modernity, Photo-Attractions brings scholarship on American photography, literature, race and sexual economies into conversation with work on South Asian visual culture, dance, and gender. In these remarkable historical documents, it locates the pleasure taken in cultural difference that still resonates today.
Art historian Ajay Sinha uses these hitherto unpublished photographs and archival research to raise provocative and important questions about photographic technology, colonial histories, race, sexuality and transcultural desires. Challenging the assumption that Gopal was merely objectified by Van Vechten’s Orientalist gaze, he explores the ways in which the Indian dancer co-authored the photos. In Sinha’s reading, Van Vechten’s New York studio becomes a promiscuous contact zone between world cultures, where a “photo-erotic” triangle is formed between the American photographer, Indian dancer, and German camera.
A groundbreaking study of global modernity, Photo-Attractions brings scholarship on American photography, literature, race and sexual economies into conversation with work on South Asian visual culture, dance, and gender. In these remarkable historical documents, it locates the pleasure taken in cultural difference that still resonates today.
[more]
The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston
Maria Elizabeth Ausherman
University of Alabama Press, 2022
An illustrated account of the life and work of the pioneering photographer
The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) draws on original papers and photographs from the Library of Congress to document the extraordinary life and nearly seventy-year career of this pioneering photographer. Maria Elizabeth Ausherman illuminates the early origins of Johnston’s style and vision, and her attempts to change society through her art. One of the first women to work in an emerging field dominated by men, Johnston achieved acclaim as an accomplished photographer and photojournalist.
As the official White House photographer for five administrations, she was instrumental in defining the medium and inspiring women to train in and appreciate photography. But it is her monumental nine-state survey of southern American architecture that stands as her most significant contribution to the history and development of photography both as art and as documentary. Through her photography, Johnston showed reverence for the beautiful historic buildings she appreciated and also helped shape architectural and photographic preservation in the United States.
The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) draws on original papers and photographs from the Library of Congress to document the extraordinary life and nearly seventy-year career of this pioneering photographer. Maria Elizabeth Ausherman illuminates the early origins of Johnston’s style and vision, and her attempts to change society through her art. One of the first women to work in an emerging field dominated by men, Johnston achieved acclaim as an accomplished photographer and photojournalist.
As the official White House photographer for five administrations, she was instrumental in defining the medium and inspiring women to train in and appreciate photography. But it is her monumental nine-state survey of southern American architecture that stands as her most significant contribution to the history and development of photography both as art and as documentary. Through her photography, Johnston showed reverence for the beautiful historic buildings she appreciated and also helped shape architectural and photographic preservation in the United States.
[more]
Photographs from Detroit, 1975–2019
Bruce Harkness
Ohio University Press, 2022
A retrospective survey of Bruce Harkness’s striking social documentary photographs and an invaluable historical record that bears witness to irrevocably lost swaths of Detroit’s social and urban fabric.
In 1980, the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan, exercised eminent domain to develop nearly five hundred acres of land for a new industrial park and General Motors assembly plant. But the land was not vacant. Some thirty-five hundred people lived there in Poletown—some of them for their entire lives. They attended neighborhood schools and churches, worked for and patronized small businesses, walked the sidewalks, drove the streets, and tended to lawns and gardens. Harkness began photographing the area in February 1981. He recorded street scenes, intersections, panoramic views, homes, businesses, churches, and people. Ten months, ninety visits, and six hundred photographs later, it all disappeared forever.
The Poletown series established Harkness as a major Detroit documentarian. It came on the heels of late-1970s projects located in and around the city’s skid row: Cass Corridor. The images include gritty streetscapes, a portrait series depicting residents living in a crumbling apartment building, and the lively cultural milieu of a local gay and transgender bar. Most of this old portion of inner-city Detroit since has been supplanted by urban redevelopment and gentrification.
During the late 1980s, Harkness collaborated with urban historian John J. Bukowczyk on a major documentary project, Urban Interiors. While the Poletown project had documented the exteriors of buildings and streetscapes on Detroit’s East Side, Urban Interiors captured the insides of inner-city Detroit homes and businesses and included extended oral history interviews.
While Harkness has always found human dignity and resilience in his subjects, the tone of his work brightened in the 1990s alongside Detroit’s revival. Photographs from this era include blues musicians performing in clubs and at outdoor concerts and the distinctive, robust youth culture that flourished in Dearborn’s now-defunct Zone Coffee House.
Featuring images from these and other projects, Photographs from Detroit, 1975–2019 includes Harkness’s extensive notes, which describe and contextualize the encounters he shared with the people and places he photographed, and offer insight into his working methods and equipment. The volume and quality of Harkness’s work merits him recognition as one of Detroit’s most important documentary photographers during this pivotal, transitional era in the city’s history.
Harkness’s images depict the struggles and resilience of ordinary individuals and families in working-class communities who together have indelibly shaped the spirit of Detroit. This book is a must-have for Detroiters past and present as well as historians, anthropologists, social documentary advocates, and photobook collectors everywhere.
[more]
Photography and American Coloniality
Eliot Elisofon in Africa, 1942–1972
Raoul J. Granqvist
Michigan State University Press, 2017
This book is the first to question both why and how the colonialist mythologies represented by the work of photographer Eliot Elisofon persist. It documents and discusses a heterogeneous practice of American coloniality of power as it explores Elisofon’s career as war photographer-correspondent and staff photographer for LIFE, filmmaker, author, artist, and collector of “primitive art” and sculpture. It focuses on three areas: Elisofon’s narcissism, voyeurism, and sexism; his involvement in the homogenizing of Western social orders and colonial legacies; and his enthused mission of “sending home” a mass of still-life photographs, annexed African artifacts, and assumed vintage knowledge. The book does not challenge his artistic merit or his fascinating personality; what it does question is his production and imagining of “difference.” As the text travels from World War II to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Cold War, from Casablanca to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it proves to be a necessarily strenuous and provocative trip.
[more]
Picasso's Demoiselles
The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece
Suzanne Preston Blier
Duke University Press, 2019
In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.
[more]
Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist
Machtelt Brüggen Israëls
Reaktion Books, 2021
As one of the most innovative and enlightened painters of the early Italian Renaissance, Piero della Francesca brought space, luminosity, and unparalleled subtlety to painting. In addition, Piero invented the role of the modern artist by becoming a traveler, a courtier, a geometrician, a patron, and much else besides. In this nuanced account of this great painter’s life and art, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls reconstructs how Piero came of age. Successfully demystifying the persistent notion of Piero’s art as enigmatic, she reveals the simple and stunning intentions behind his work.
[more]
Piero di Cosimo
Eccentricity and Delight
Sarah Blake McHam
Reaktion Books, 2024
An original survey of the Renaissance painter’s life and work.
This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist’s deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor—eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.
This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist’s deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor—eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.
[more]
Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature
Elizabeth Alice Honig
Reaktion Books, 2022
A fresh account of the life, ideas, and art of the beloved Northern Renaissance master.
In sixteenth-century Northern Europe, during a time of increasing religious and political conflict, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel explored how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye and peerless paintbrush to mankind’s labors and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life, portraying landscapes, peasant life, and biblical scenes in startling detail. Much like the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. His work often represented mankind’s ignorance and insignificance, emphasizing the futility of ambition and the absurdity of pride.
This superbly illustrated volume examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. Published to coincide with the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Bruegel’s death, it will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance, and Flemish painting.
In sixteenth-century Northern Europe, during a time of increasing religious and political conflict, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel explored how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye and peerless paintbrush to mankind’s labors and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life, portraying landscapes, peasant life, and biblical scenes in startling detail. Much like the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. His work often represented mankind’s ignorance and insignificance, emphasizing the futility of ambition and the absurdity of pride.
This superbly illustrated volume examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. Published to coincide with the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Bruegel’s death, it will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance, and Flemish painting.
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Playing with Earth and Sky
Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp
James Housefield
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
Playing with Earth and Sky reveals the significance astronomy, geography, and aviation had for Marcel Duchamp—widely regarded as the most influential artist of the past fifty years. Duchamp transformed modern art by abandoning unique art objects in favor of experiences that could be both embodied and cerebral. This illuminating study offers new interpretations of Duchamp’s momentous works, from readymades to the early performance art of shaving a comet in his hair. It demonstrates how the immersive spaces and narrative environments of popular science, from museums to the modern planetarium, prepared paths for Duchamp’s nonretinal art. By situating Duchamp’s career within the transatlantic cultural contexts of Dadaism and Surrealism, this book enriches contemporary debates about the historical relationship between art and science. This truly original study will appeal to a broad readership in art history and cultural studies.
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The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran
An Archival and Photographic Adventure
Azadeh Fatehrad
Intellect Books, 2019
This volume explores the lives of women in Iran through the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of veiling, unveiling, and re-veiling. Through poetic writings and photographs, Azadeh Fatehrad responds to the legacy of the Iranian Revolution via the representation of women in photography, literature, and film. The images and texts are documentary, analytical, and personal.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran features Fatehrad’s own photographs in addition to work by artists Hengameh Golestan, Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Adolf Loos, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, and Alison Watt. In exploring women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran, Fatehrad considers the role of the found image and the relationship between the archive and the present, resulting in an illuminating history of feminism in Iran in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran features Fatehrad’s own photographs in addition to work by artists Hengameh Golestan, Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Adolf Loos, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, and Alison Watt. In exploring women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran, Fatehrad considers the role of the found image and the relationship between the archive and the present, resulting in an illuminating history of feminism in Iran in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
[more]
Rembrandt's Holland
Larry Silver
Reaktion Books, 2017
Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated introduction to the life and work of the exceptional Dutch painter.
Rembrandt van Rijn and the Netherlands grew up together. The artist, born in Leiden in 1606, lived during the tumultuous period of the Dutch Revolt and the establishment of the independent Dutch Republic. He later moved to Amsterdam, a cosmopolitan center of world trade, and became the city’s most fashionable portraitist. His attempts to establish himself with the powerful court at The Hague failed, however, and the final decade of his life was marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship.
Rembrandt’s Holland considers the life and work of this celebrated painter anew, as it charts his career alongside the visual culture of urban Amsterdam and the new Dutch Republic. In the book, Larry Silver brings to light Rembrandt’s problematic relationship with the ruling court at The Hague and reexamines how his art developed from large-scale, detailed religious imagery to more personal drawings and etchings, moving self-portraits, and heartfelt close-ups of saintly figures. Ultimately, this readable biography shows how both Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age ripened together.
Featuring up-to-date scholarship and in-depth analysis of Rembrandt’s major works, and illustrated beautifully throughout, it is essential reading for art students and anyone who enjoys the work of the Dutch Masters.
Rembrandt van Rijn and the Netherlands grew up together. The artist, born in Leiden in 1606, lived during the tumultuous period of the Dutch Revolt and the establishment of the independent Dutch Republic. He later moved to Amsterdam, a cosmopolitan center of world trade, and became the city’s most fashionable portraitist. His attempts to establish himself with the powerful court at The Hague failed, however, and the final decade of his life was marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship.
Rembrandt’s Holland considers the life and work of this celebrated painter anew, as it charts his career alongside the visual culture of urban Amsterdam and the new Dutch Republic. In the book, Larry Silver brings to light Rembrandt’s problematic relationship with the ruling court at The Hague and reexamines how his art developed from large-scale, detailed religious imagery to more personal drawings and etchings, moving self-portraits, and heartfelt close-ups of saintly figures. Ultimately, this readable biography shows how both Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age ripened together.
Featuring up-to-date scholarship and in-depth analysis of Rembrandt’s major works, and illustrated beautifully throughout, it is essential reading for art students and anyone who enjoys the work of the Dutch Masters.
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Richard Segalman Black & White
Muses, Magic & Monotypes
Susan Forrest Castle
The Artist Book Foundation, 2015
For many, the name Richard Segalman conjures up a vision of light-infused paintings of women gathered on a beach, gazing out the window of a New York City brownstone, or dressed in costumes from another era. But just as Edgar Degas, approaching his 60th year, surprised gallery goers with an exhibition not of ballerinas or race horses, but of highly atmospheric monotype landscapes, so too does Segalman surprise us with this exceptional collection of monotypes he began to produce in 1993, at nearly 60. “I reached a sort of a plateau and needed a new direction,” says the artist. “I came across a monotype… took a course… made one and I was hooked.”
The significance of Segalman’s shift into this medium is most powerfully conveyed through his arresting black-and-white prints that range from anonymous crowds on Coney Island beaches or New York City streets to a solitary figure in private contemplation. This monochromatic focus makes perfect sense: Segalman’s first gallery appearance in New York—a sold-out show that gave him the courage to embrace the life of an artist—consisted entirely of black-and-white charcoal drawings, several stunning examples of which open this book. Currently, Segalman’s work can be found in many public and private collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Author Susan F. Castle’s essay about the artist and his muses—the people, places, and things for which Richard Segalman has an abiding love—illuminates the exceptional work collected for this monograph. She combines excerpts from interviews with the artist and the three master printmakers with whom he has worked in Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition, Anthony Kirk’s insightful introduction provides an essential historical perspective on the artist and his printmaking process.
[more]
Robert Kipniss
Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964
Marshall N. Price
The Artist Book Foundation, 2013
A comprehensive look at a memorable period in the celebrated painter and printmaker’s life and career, Robert Kipniss: Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964 is the result of his many arduous months revisiting his more-than-half-a-century-ago writings, poems that were stashed away and essentially forgotten. “Some of the poems are straightforward, some are infused with surreal irony, and some are angry,” says Kipniss in his candid and honest preface. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings in this monograph’s contemplation of these influential and foundational fourteen years. “When I stopped writing [in 1961] my vision was no longer divided between word-thinking and picture-thinking: these approaches had merged and in expressing myself I was more whole,” reflects Kipniss in his retrospective musings.
This written and visual account of previously unpublished poems and critically acclaimed early paintings includes two astute and illustrative essays that further engage the reader in the evolution of the artist’s prolific oeuvre. His prints, drawings, and paintings are remarkable for their eloquence and refinement, earning him international recognition for his expansive landscapes and smalltown vistas, as well as quiet interiors and intimate still lifes. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings.
Readers of this seminal volume are all the richer for catching a glimpse of an intensely personal segment of this accomplished artist’s private history. In an unambiguous assessment, Kipniss elaborates, “The most significant insight that arose in this undertaking...came when I began to collate reproductions of my paintings of the 1950s. I could clearly see that my work in the two mediums were from very differing parts of my psyche, and that while they were both in themselves completely engaged, they were not in any way together.”
Kipniss’s work can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The British Museum, London, the Albertina, Vienna, Austria, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Morgan Library, New York, among others.
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Rod Penner
Paintings, 1987–2022
David Anfam
The Artist Book Foundation, 2022
The abandoned and forgotten landscapes of rural southwestern towns are the favored subjects of Rod Penner’s paintings. His deft use of contrasts in his
images—despondency and hope, isolation and nostalgia—evokes memories of The Last Picture Show and elicits complex responses from viewers. “I’m interested in the look of things and the quality of being there,” he says. “A moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass.”
Penner’s works are based on his photographs, digital video stills, and his experience of the rural landscapes of Texas and New Mexico. He depicts desolate, often deserted locations, the character of old houses and abandoned buildings, weather, and unique geography. His chosen scenes are infused with a cinematic quality that is the result of the exquisite light that he captures with his meticulous process. “The finished paintings should evoke contrasting responses of melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity,” he says.
Penner’s hyperrealistic technique meticulously records both the iconic imagery and the beauty in the ashes of these once-prosperous streets and neighborhoods that still endure. The incredibly poignant scenes evoke a universalism, a collective experience seen through the lens of Americana. “You won’t find any hidden or overt socio-political meaning in my work and at the same time I hope that by utilizing what I find in the American landscape I’m able to connect to viewers on a deeper psychological level.”
[more]
Rubens’s Spirit
From Ingenuity to Genius
Alexander Marr
Reaktion Books, 2021
Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity, and genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius. Ranging across the artist’s entire career, it explores Rubens’s engagement with these themes in his art and life. Alexander Marr looks at Rubens’s forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure. It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci, the spirit of the place.
[more]
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.
[more]
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
[more]
Surf Texas
By Kenny Braun
University of Texas Press, 2014
The urge to ride a wave, the search for the next perfect swell, is an enduring preoccupation that draws people to coastlines around the world. In recent decades, surfing has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry with over three million surfers in the United States alone and an international competitive circuit that draws top surfers to legendary beaches in Hawaii, California, and Australia. But away from the crowds and the hype, dedicated surfers catch waves in places like the Texas Gulf Coast for the pure pleasure of being in harmony with life, their sport, and the ocean. Kenny Braun knows that primal pleasure, as both a longtime Texas surfer and a fine art photographer who has devoted years to capturing the surf culture on Texas beaches. In Surf Texas, he presents an eloquent photo essay that portrays the enduring fascination of surfing, as well as the singular and sometimes unexpected beauty of the coast.
Texas is one of the top six surfing states in America, and Braun uses evocative black-and-white photography to reveal the essence of the surfers’ world from Galveston to South Padre. His images catch the drama of shooting the waves, those moments of skill and daring as riders rip across the breaking face, as well as the downtime of bobbing on swells like seabirds and hanging out on the beach with friends. Braun also photographs the place—beaches and dunes, skies and storms, surf shops, motels, and parking lots—with a native’s knowing eye for defining details. Elegant and timeless, this vision of the Texas Coast is redolent of sea breezes and salt air and the memories and dreams they evoke. Surfer or not, everyone who feels the primeval attraction of wind and waves will enjoy Surf Texas.
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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.
[more]
Tania El Khoury's Live Art
Collaborative Knowledge Production
Laurel V. McLaughlin
Amherst College Press, 2023
Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first book to examine the work of Tania El Khoury, a “live” artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. Since the 2011 Syrian uprisings, El Khoury has conceived and created works about lived experiences at and across international borders in collaboration with migrants, refugees, and displaced persons as well as other artists, performers, and revolutionaries. All of El Khoury’s works cross borders: between forms of artistic practice, between artists and audiences, and between art and activism. Facilitating critical dialogue about the politics of SWANA and the impact of globalization, her performances and installations also test the boundaries of aesthetic, political, and everyday norms. This interdisciplinary and multimedia reader features essays by artists, curators, and scholars who explore the dynamic possibilities and complexities of El Khoury’s art. From social workers to archeologists to archivists, contributing authors engage with the radical epistemological and political revolutions that El Khoury and her collaborators invite us all to join.
[more]
Theodore Wendel
True Notes of American Impressionism
Laurene Buckley
The Artist Book Foundation, 2019
One of the first American artists to bring French Impressionism home to develop on native soil, Theodore Wendel is likely the last to have a monograph that records his remarkable career and stunning oeuvre. His portraits and still lifes, and especially his landscapes, not only exemplify the joyous palette and vigorous brushwork of the genre, but they also mirror the idyllic, transient beauty of rural hamlets along the Massachusetts coast—Gloucester and Ipswich, the dual epicenters of his distinguished career.
One of the original “Duveneck boys” who studied in Munich at the Royal Academy, Wendel followed his mentor to Florence and Venice; he later went on to Paris and ultimately joined a colony of young artists at Giverny. The scenes and subject matter in the works he completed there are among the earliest by an American artist to adopt and evolve Impressionist strategies. Upon his return to America, he spent the next decades rendering scenes of the farmland and coast north of Boston that contemporary critics acclaimed as some of the best they had seen. Yet despite his talent and the significant accolades earned during his career, in the near-century following his death the recognition of his achievements has faded. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to have the opportunity to remedy this situation with its forthcoming monograph on the artist, Theodore Wendel: True Notes of American Impressionism.
Laurene Buckley’s years of exhaustive research inform an engaging and detailed narrative of Wendel’s time in Europe and his many years capturing the essence of the farms and fishing villages along the rural coast of Massachusetts. Thanks to her efforts, the book will feature many of his best works, a number of which are in private collections. An informative introduction by William H. Gerdts provides significant artistic context for Wendel and explains the artist’s deft ability to draw the viewer into a scene. Concluding the monograph, an extensive chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography complete the scholarship on this long overdue tribute to a master of American Impressionism.
[more]
Thomas Hirschhorn
A New Political Understanding of Art?
Christina Braun
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Thomas Hirschhorn, a leading installation artist whose work is owned and exhibited by modern art museums throughout Europe and the United States, is known for compelling, often site-specific and interactive environments tackling issues of critical theory, global politics, and consumerism. His work initially engages the viewer through sheer superabundance. Combining found images and texts, bound up in handcrafted constructions of cardboard, foil, and packing tape, the artworks reflect the intellectual scavenging and sensory overload that characterize our own attempts to grapple with the excess of information in daily life. Christina Braun, the first to compile and systematically analyze the extensive source material on this artist’s theoretical principles, sheds light on the complicated yet constitutive relations between Hirschhorn’s work and theory. Her study, now translated into English, makes a major contribution to the study of contemporary art.
[more]
Tom Blackwell
The Complete Paintings, 1970–2014
Linda Chase
The Artist Book Foundation, 2018
Tom Blackwell (1938–2020) is primarily known for his work in Photorealism, a stylistic movement noted for its ardent embrace of photographic source material. In 1969, he began a series of brashly beautiful motorcycle paintings that established him as one of the founders and foremost artists of the movement. The myriad painterly possibilities of urban store windows became another abiding interest. In his store-window paintings, Blackwell captures the counterpoint between the idealized reality within the store display and the bustling urban life reflected in the glass. As author Linda Chase remarks, “The magic of these paintings resides in the artist’s ability to transform the arbitrary photographic information into dynamic and complex artistic compositions, revealing and clarifying the image while preserving its mystery.”
In conjunction with his Photorealist paintings, Blackwell has produced a related body of work that is allegorical in its perspective. Combining photo-derived images, he addresses themes such as the passage of time, the fragility of nature, and the continuity that weaves through human history. The paintings, rich in symbolism and interpretive possibilities, fascinate and impress viewers with the breadth of Blackwell’s abilities. “As a painter, I have been interested in dealing with the formal issues involved in juxtaposed and overlapping images,” he explains. “In my Photorealism work, my goal is to reveal something about the actual world and to explore our photo-mediated perceptions of it.”
Blackwell, born in Chicago in 1938, has deftly captured the vibrancy and visual excitement of urban street life for the past four decades and has had solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Tom Blackwell: The Complete Paintings, 1970–2014 is a comprehensive study of the artist’s work as well as his artistic development and process, and includes a compilation of his early paintings through to his most recent works. His paintings are in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and the Huntington Art Museum, Austin, TX.
[more]
Tom Slaughter
David Marshall
The Artist Book Foundation, 2019
Of Tom Slaughter, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: “The quality of freshness, the familiar world re-seen, from the water towers of New York City to the rural pleasures of boating, is the most immediately arresting aspect of Tom Slaughter’s art. . . . Bold bright colors swiftly laid down echo with resonances: Léger and Stuart Davis, Raoul Dufy and Roy Lichtenstein.” Slaughter’s work, with its seemingly effortless whimsy rendered with a strong sense of line, color, and rhythm, has also been compared to Matisse. His Pop-inflected drawings, prints, paintings, and illustrations convey his love of life as he relentlessly explored the complexities of the urban scene or the simple pleasures of boating. The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to announce the publication of Tom Slaughter, an extensive monograph of the artist’s enormous body of work that celebrates his enduring optimism, personal and artistic honesty, and charming brashness in a landscape of pure joy.
[more]
Tom Slaughter
Glenn Lowry
The Artist Book Foundation, 2019
Of Tom Slaughter, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: “The quality of freshness, the familiar world re-seen, from the water towers of New York City to the rural pleasures of boating, is the most immediately arresting aspect of Tom Slaughter’s art. . . . Bold bright colors swiftly laid down echo with resonances: Léger and Stuart Davis, Raoul Dufy and Roy Lichtenstein.” Slaughter’s work, with its seemingly effortless whimsy rendered with a strong sense of line, color, and rhythm, has also been compared to Matisse. His Pop-inflected drawings, prints, paintings, and illustrations convey his love of life as he relentlessly explored the complexities of the urban scene or the simple pleasures of boating. The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to announce the publication of Tom Slaughter, an extensive monograph of the artist’s enormous body of work that celebrates his enduring optimism, personal and artistic honesty, and charming brashness in a landscape of pure joy.
[more]
Trucks
Recent Works by John Himmelfarb
Scott Griffin
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
With sculpture, paintings, prints, and drawings, award-winning artist John Himmelfarb explores the iconic American truck. An in-depth consideration of the vehicles that are intrinsically and culturally significant to the American landscape, TRUCKS: Recent Works by John Himmelfarb showcases the artist’s diverse and lighthearted approach, adeptly shifting between mediums, style, and message during his decade-long contemplation of trucks and their specific functions. Under his skillful hands, the utilitarian vehicles of commerce and construction become unique and provocative art forms.
In 2005 and 2006, the truck as narrative becomes center stage for Himmelfarb’s work. With his seamless, animated traverse of multiple mediums, viewers cannot help but smile as they appreciate the common truck through unique perspectives. In 2007, another tectonic change occurs in Himmelfarb’s pursuit of his theme: as a result of a three-month residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry program, he begins his first meaningful foray into three-dimensional works.
Himmelfarb’s artworks can be found in distinguished international collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Art Museum; the British Museum, London; the Boston Public Library Print Collection; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor.
[more]
Uta Barth
Peripheral Vision
Arpad Kovacs
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
This retrospective of the photographer Uta Barth traces her use of the camera to explore both how and what we see.
Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Uta Barth (b. 1958) has spent her decades-long career exploring the complexities and limits of human and mechanical vision. At first, her photographs appear to be deceptively simple depictions of everyday objects—light filtering through a window, tree branches bereft of leaves, a sparsely appointed domestic interior—but these images, visually spare yet conceptually rigorous, emerge from her investigation of sight, perception, light, and time.
In this richly illustrated monograph, curator Arpad Kovacs and contributors Lucy Gallun and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe chart Barth’s career path and discuss her most significant series, revealing how she has rejected the primacy of a traditional photographic subject and instead called attention to what is on the periphery. The book includes previously unpublished bodies of work made early in her career that add much to our understanding of this important artist. Also included is Barth’s most recent work, ...from dawn to dusk, an ambitious commission marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Getty Center.
Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Uta Barth (b. 1958) has spent her decades-long career exploring the complexities and limits of human and mechanical vision. At first, her photographs appear to be deceptively simple depictions of everyday objects—light filtering through a window, tree branches bereft of leaves, a sparsely appointed domestic interior—but these images, visually spare yet conceptually rigorous, emerge from her investigation of sight, perception, light, and time.
In this richly illustrated monograph, curator Arpad Kovacs and contributors Lucy Gallun and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe chart Barth’s career path and discuss her most significant series, revealing how she has rejected the primacy of a traditional photographic subject and instead called attention to what is on the periphery. The book includes previously unpublished bodies of work made early in her career that add much to our understanding of this important artist. Also included is Barth’s most recent work, ...from dawn to dusk, an ambitious commission marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Getty Center.
[more]
Van Gogh. Self-Portraits
Edited by Karen Serres
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
An exhibition catalog tracing the evolution of Van Gogh’s self-presentation in his art.
This volume accompanies an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, the first to explore the full chronological range of Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits.
The myth of Van Gogh today is linked as much to his extraordinary life as it is to his world-famous paintings. His biography has often shaped the way his self-portraits have been (mis)understood. Spanning his entire career, this volume explores these highly personal paintings, analyzing the artist’s self-representation in context to reveal the role it plays in his oeuvre. Of particular interest is the striking way the evolution of Van Gogh’s self-representation can be seen as a microcosm of his development as a painter.
In addition to the celebrated Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, the exhibition showcases a group of major masterpieces brought together from international collections, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, among others. Beautifully illustrated, this exhibition companion includes detailed entries on each work, an appendix illustrating all of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, and three insightful essays on the theme.
This volume accompanies an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, the first to explore the full chronological range of Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits.
The myth of Van Gogh today is linked as much to his extraordinary life as it is to his world-famous paintings. His biography has often shaped the way his self-portraits have been (mis)understood. Spanning his entire career, this volume explores these highly personal paintings, analyzing the artist’s self-representation in context to reveal the role it plays in his oeuvre. Of particular interest is the striking way the evolution of Van Gogh’s self-representation can be seen as a microcosm of his development as a painter.
In addition to the celebrated Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, the exhibition showcases a group of major masterpieces brought together from international collections, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, among others. Beautifully illustrated, this exhibition companion includes detailed entries on each work, an appendix illustrating all of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, and three insightful essays on the theme.
[more]
Watteau at Work
La Surprise
Emily A. Beeny
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Jean Antoine Watteau’s death, this publication takes a close, revealing look at his recently rediscovered painting La Surprise.
The painting La Surprise by Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) belongs to a new genre of painting invented by the artist himself—the fête galante. These works, which show graceful open-air gatherings filled with scenes of courtship, music and dance, strolling lovers, and actors, do not so much tell a story as set a mood: one of playful, wistful, nostalgic reverie. Esteemed by collectors in Watteau’s day as a work that showed the artist at the height of his skill and success, La Surprise vanished from public view in 1848, not to reemerge for more than a century and a half. Acquired by the Getty Museum in 2017, it has never before been the subject of a dedicated publication. Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau’s death, this book considers La Surprise within the context of the artist’s oeuvre and discusses the surprising history of collecting Watteau in Los Angeles.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from November 23, 2021, to February 20, 2022.
The painting La Surprise by Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) belongs to a new genre of painting invented by the artist himself—the fête galante. These works, which show graceful open-air gatherings filled with scenes of courtship, music and dance, strolling lovers, and actors, do not so much tell a story as set a mood: one of playful, wistful, nostalgic reverie. Esteemed by collectors in Watteau’s day as a work that showed the artist at the height of his skill and success, La Surprise vanished from public view in 1848, not to reemerge for more than a century and a half. Acquired by the Getty Museum in 2017, it has never before been the subject of a dedicated publication. Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau’s death, this book considers La Surprise within the context of the artist’s oeuvre and discusses the surprising history of collecting Watteau in Los Angeles.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from November 23, 2021, to February 20, 2022.
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William Bartram's Visual Wonders
The Drawings of an American Naturalist
Elizabeth A. Athens
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture
Robert Douglass Russell
University of Tennessee Press, 2017
William Strickland (1788–1854) was, in his day, among the most notable architects in the United States. An erstwhile student of Benjamin Henry Latrobe and a contemporary of Robert Mills, Strickland first entered the world of architecture at a young age in Philadelphia. But given that many of Strickland’s buildings have not survived, and considering the sparse and dispersed collection of primary sources Strickland left upon his death, little contemporary scholarship has appeared concerning Strickland’s significant contributions to the built environment of the early nineteenth century.
In William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture, Robert Russell does much to rectify this underrepresentation of Strickland’s notable architectural contributions in contemporary scholarship. In this first monograph detailing Strickland’s life and works since 1950 Russell examines the architectural production of Strickland during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Russell begins with the well-known Second Bank of the United States (Philadelphia)—the project that launched Strickland onto the national stage—eventually bringing his analysis to the south with an examination of the Tennessee State Capitol Building (Nashville). These two monuments bookended the American Greek Revival of the nineteenth century. Russell’s careful descriptions and insightful analyses of William Strickland’s work highlight the architect’s artistic skills and contributions to American material culture over the course of fifty years.
Ornamenting his examination with more than one hundred illustrations, Russell takes readers on a comprehensive journey through Strickland’s architecture. Part biography, part architectural history, William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture is an invaluable resource for scholars and artists alike, illustrating Strickland’s critical role in American architectural history and celebrating the icon behind buildings in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and beyond that are still admired and appreciated today.
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Zofia Kulik
Methodology, My Love
Edited by Agata Jakubowska
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019
Zofia Kulik’s rich artistic career has a dual nature. Between 1970 and 1987, she worked alongside Przemysław Kwiek as a member of the duo KwieKulik, after which she began to develop a successful individual career. While KwieKulik’s work has been well established as central to the East European neo-avant-garde art lexicon of the 1970’s and ’80s, Kulik’s solo work has yet to be examined in depth. The first publication devoted solely to her work, this monograph analyzes the themes of her rich and complex oeuvre, addressing the (post)communist condition, artistic labor, intermediality, and the conditions of working as a female artist. The book forms a portrait of Kulik as an artist whose work is both deeply focused and rich in variations that reflect the socio-political shifts in her native Poland. With contributions from leading art historians, including Edit András, Angela Dimitrakaki, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Suzana Milevska, and Tomasz Załuski.
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