Results by title
13 books match the query 'Painting, Modern'
Absorption and Theatricality
Painting and Beholder in the Age of DiderotMichael Fried
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike. . . . An exhilarating book."—John Barrell, London Review of Books
Adulterous Alliances
Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and PaintingRichard Helgerson
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Clyfford Still
The Artist’s MaterialsSusan F. Lake
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
Among the most radical of the great American Abstract Expressionist painters, Clyfford Still has also long been among the least studied. Still severed ties with the commercial art world in the early 1950s, and his estate at the time of his death in 1980 comprised some 3,125 artworks—including more than 800 paintings—that were all but unknown to the art world. Susan F. Lake and Barbara A. Ramsay were granted access to this collection by the estate and by the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which houses this immense corpus today.
This volume, based on the authors’ materials research and enriched by their unprecedented access to Still’s artworks, paints, correspondence, studio records, and personal library, provides the first detailed account of his materials, working methods, and techniques. Initial chapters provide an engaging and erudite overview of the artist's life. Subsequent chapters trace the development of his visionary style, offer in-depth materials analysis of selected works from each decade of his career, and suggest new approaches to the care and conservation of his paintings. There is also a series of technical appendices as well as a full bibliography.
Frank O'Hara
Poet Among PaintersMarjorie Perloff
University of Chicago Press, 1997
"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education
"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
Franz Kline
The Artist's MaterialsCorina E. Rogge
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
Although Franz Kline was one of the seminal figures of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, he is less well known than contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. This is partly because Kline, unlike most artists in his circle, did not like to write or talk about his own art. In fact, when asked in a panel to discuss abstract art, Kline said, “I thought that was the reason for trying to do it, because you couldn’t [talk about it].” Still, his impact was such that the critic and art historian April Kingsley wrote, “Abstract Expressionism as a movement died with him.”
This volume, the newest addition to the Artist’s Materials series from the Getty Conservation Institute, looks closely at both Kline's life and work, from his early years in Pennsylvania to his later success in New York City. Kline's iconic paintings are poised on a critical cusp: some have already undergone conservation, but others remain unaltered and retain the artist’s color, gloss, and texture, and they are surprisingly vulnerable. The authors’ presentation of rigorous examination and scientific analysis of more than thirty of Kline’s paintings from the 1930s through the 1960s provides invaluable insight into his life, materials, and techniques. This study provides conservators with essential information that will shape future strategies for the care of Kline’s paintings, and offers readers a more thorough comprehension of this underappreciated artist who is so central to American Abstract Expressionism.
Monochrome Multitudes
Art of One Color from Albers to ZeislerEdited by Orianna Cacchione and Christine Mehring
University of Chicago Press, 2027
A vividly illustrated volume tracing the monochrome as a fundamental yet expansive strategy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art.
Exploring a fantastic range of monochromatic artworks, Monochrome Multitudes upends traditional accounts of abstraction, revisits modernist ideas, and reveals the creative possibilities and global resonance of a seemingly reductive art form.
Bringing together examples spanning five continents, the book considers how artists such as El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, Lygia Clark, Lucio Fontana, Ellsworth Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Kasimir Malevich, Gerhard Richter, Betye Saar, Amanda Williams, Haegue Yang, as well as little-known early cartoonists have experimented with monochrome compositions. Scholars of art history, film, music, law, disability studies, astrophysics, neurobiology, mathematics, and more reflect on monochrome artworks that build on foundational components of modernism. Together, they illuminate often overlooked cultural, political, racial, and gendered meanings of artworks; reveal the significance of materials ranging from fiber, wall paint, and videotape, to footballs, pantyhose, and candy; and engage North American art in a global dialog extending into Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Artworks are presented in monochromatic groupings—yellow, blue, white, red, gray, and black—and thematic sections trace connections across topics such as the body, the environment, urban space, sound, and media.
Odilon Redon
Otherworldly VisionsDanielle Canter
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2026
Enigmatic and haunting, the work of the French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) intrigues and entrances all who encounter it. During the first half of his career, Redon created dramatically monochromatic charcoal drawings and lithographs, dreamily dark images that plumbed the depths of his wild imagination. Eventually, however, he also turned to pastels, adopting a bold colorful palette in fantastical explorations of the natural world.
Featuring more than seventy illustrations, this publication offers an overview of Redon's career. The informative, accessible essays examine his disparate influences from the worlds of religion, mythology, literature, and music, and demonstrate why Redon’s mysterious work is an important precursor to Surrealism.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 14 to October 18, 2026.
Painting the Difference
Sex and Spectator in Modern ArtCharles Harrison
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Arguing that the representation of women in art was crucial to the character of modernity, Harrison traces the history of female subjects as they began to gaze out of the picture to confront and engage their viewers. Combining sweeping conceptual history with telling investigations into the details of particular paintings, Painting the Difference deciphers the implications of sexual difference for the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Harrison shows how artists, reflecting the underlying anxieties of the time about gender, used female subjects' gazes both to create a sexualized relationship between these subjects and their viewers, and to simultaneously question that relationship. In considering works by artists such as Renoir, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as Rothko, Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Harrison incorporates elements of cultural criticism and social history into his arguments, and generous color illustrations permit the reader to test Harrison's claims against the works on which they are based. Rich with detail and compelling analysis, Painting the Difference offers cutting-edge interpretation grounded in the reality of magnificent works of art.
Portraits of Remembrance
Painting, Memory, and the First World WarEdited by Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trout
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Although photography and moving pictures achieved ubiquity during the First World War as technological means of recording history, the far more traditional medium of painting played a vital role in the visual culture of combatant nations. The public’s appetite for the kind of up-close frontline action that snapshots and film footage could not yet provide resulted in a robust market for drawn or painted battle scenes.
Painting also figured significantly in the formation of collective war memory after the armistice. Paintings became sites of memory in two ways: first, many governments and communities invested in freestanding panoramas or cycloramas that depicted the war or featured murals as components of even larger commemorative projects, and second, certain paintings, whether created by official artists or simply by those moved to do so, emerged over time as visual touchstones in the public’s understanding of the war.
Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War examines the relationship between war painting and collective memory in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United States. The paintings discussed vary tremendously, ranging from public murals and panoramas to works on a far more intimate scale, including modernist masterpieces and crowd-pleasing expressions of sentimentality or spiritualism. Contributors raise a host of topics in connection with the volume’s overarching focus on memory, including national identity, constructions of gender, historical accuracy, issues of aesthetic taste, and connections between painting and literature, as well as other cultural forms.
Prehistoric Future
Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the WarsRalph Ubl
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The Look of Reading
Book, Painting, TextGarrett Stewart
University of Chicago Press, 2006
We take for granted that words can describe pictures, but we don’t often consider that the reverse is also true: pictures can depict words, as well as the people reading them. In The Look of Reading, Garrett Stewart explores centuries of painted images of reading, arguing that they collectively constitute an overlooked genre in the history of art.
A stunning array of artists—including Rembrandt, Picasso, Cassatt, and Caravaggio, among many others—have worked in this genre during the past five hundred years. With innovative interpretations of their work, ranging from Bellini’s open Bibles to Bacon’s mangled newsprint, Stewart examines the give-and-take between reading matter depicted in painting and the “look of reading” on the portrayed face. He then traces this kind of interaction from the sixteenth century, when pictured reading generally illustrated people reading holy scriptures, to later periods, when secular painting started to represent the inwardness and absorption associated especially with novel reading. Ultimately, Stewart shows how the subject fell out of such paintings altogether in the late twentieth century, replaced by words, scrawls, and blurs that put the viewer in the place of the reader.
Lavishly illustrated with the paintings it discusses, The Look of Reading charts the life and death of an entire genre. Essential reading for art historians and literary theorists alike, it will become the definitive study of this overlooked aspect of the relationship between images and words.
The Pensive Image
Art as a Form of ThinkingHanneke Grootenboer
University of Chicago Press, 2020
While the philosophical dimension of painting has long been discussed, a clear case for painting as a form of visual thinking has yet to be made. Traditionally, vanitas still life paintings are considered to raise ontological issues while landscapes direct the mind toward introspection. Grootenboer moves beyond these considerations to focus on what remains unspoken in painting, the implicit and inexpressible that manifests in a quality she calls pensiveness. Different from self-aware or actively desiring images, pensive images are speculative, pointing beyond interpretation. An alternative pictorial category, pensive images stir us away from interpretation and toward a state of suspension where thinking through and with the image can start.
In fluid prose, Grootenboer explores various modalities of visual thinking— as the location where thought should be found, as a refuge enabling reflection, and as an encounter that provokes thought. Through these considerations, she demonstrates that artworks serve as models for thought as much as they act as instruments through which thinking can take place. Starting from the premise that painting is itself a type of thinking, The Pensive Image argues that art is capable of forming thoughts and shaping concepts in visual terms.
Unruly Tools
Contemporary Artists and the Reinvention of PaintingPia Gottschaller
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0
The first book to examine the role of unconventional tools in contemporary painting is required reading for anyone interested in painting’s recent past and future.
Painting, often regarded as the oldest of art forms, has been repeatedly declared “dead.” In this original and compelling study, technical art historian Pia Gottschaller thoroughly dismantles that notion, revealing how painters radically reimagined the medium in the years following World War II. No longer confined to the paintbrush, artists began to experiment with new methods, employing found, fabricated, and repurposed objects—as varied as an Afro comb, the human body, and a robotic airbrush—to create paintings unlike any seen before, revolutionizing the course of art history.
- Begins in 1945 with Jackson Pollock and the Gutai Art Association in Japan and traces the transformation of painting across the globe from the post-war period to the present.
- Explores the work of thirty-eight contemporary painters, including Amoako Boafo, Helen Frankenthaler, Yves Klein, Julie Mehretu, Beatriz Milhazes, Howardena Pindell, Kazuo Shiraga, and Andy Warhol.
- Richly illustrated with over 240 images of artists and their creations.
Unruly Tools is the first study of this kind and offers essential testimony to painting’s continued vitality and reinvention.