Search results for ""Museum of Modern Art""

"A family album preserves only carefully selected photographs. Out of an entire life, it stores only handpicked moments, privileging special occasions, displaying only happy moments. It tends to underline a group’s social links, to highlight a shared life. None of this figures in She: instead of a chronology, time is stopped. There is no group photo or desire to stage a collective destiny, only isolated models and individuals who do not seem to communicate amongst themselves; no happy moments or picturesque places, only indifferent moments in ordinary places. The models pose, but reservedly, often without looking into the camera. And even when we do see their faces, we don’t really seem to see them. When we close the book and think a bit about it, we cannot but see She as the anti-family album par excellence." —Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art

Read more less

In her thirty-fifth book, the eminent Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal (*1946 in Heemstede) explores the new language that Indian artist Nalini Malani (*1946 in Karachi) has been developing since early this century with her shadow plays. The result of Malani’s new art is an extremely powerful application of the idea of the (multiple) moving image—past, present, and future. An iconic, politically engaged art form that has made waves at exhibitions such as Paris, Delhi, Bombay at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2011), Documenta (13) in Kassel (2012), and Scenes for a New Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015–16). Mieke Bal conducts a unique dialogue between five of Malani’s shadow plays and theoretical issues concerning art. It examines the complexity, layering, and multiplicity of images, thoughts, sound, and movements: technologies and poetic fragments, narratives and archives, as effective politically as it is artistically.

Read more less

Takenobu Igarashi: The creative journey of a Japanese MasterAcclaimed Japanese designer Takenobu Igarashi's signature style demonstrates his mastery of three-dimensional forms as he pioneered 3D type exploration long before computers, turning letters into dimensional new elements.This elegant volume offers a long overdue comprehensive and unique overview of his professional life. The three chapters of the book (Chapter 1: The Unique World of Three-Dimensional Design, Chapter 2: The Epitome of Impromptu and Chapter 3: Building the Future of Hokkaido.) are about various stages of lgarashi's life as a multi award-winning graphic designer and later as a prominent sculptor.With 304 pages and more than 400 images, Takenobu Igarashi: Design and Fine Art is a biographical portfolio and visual reference book on Takenobu Igarashi and his dynamic and prolific artistic life. His work is in the permanent collection of over 30 museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Read more less

The first comprehensive English-language monograph on Keiichi Tanaami's kaleidoscopic oeuvre, which merges Japanese postwar culture and American-style comics with a genre-defining artistic output. Artist, illustrator, graphic designer, filmmaker, and art director, Keiichi Tanaami is best known for his psychedelic creations that reach to the farthest corners of the mind. Since the 1960s, he has been composing works on paper, magazine covers, and phantasmagoric large-scale paintings as a response to his traumatic experience of living through the United States' atomic attack on Japan during World War II. He's since made a mark on the world, exhibiting across the globe. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yokohama Museum of Art, M+, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among others. Tanaami's work is marked by an unexpectedly harmonic blend of eroticism, surrealism, psychedelia, and American comic art, combined with

Read more less

From the opening of The Louvre to the launch of Tate Modern and beyond, this accessible and succinct publication traces the development of the museum concept – encompassing curatorial, scholarly, political and cultural spheres – and its evolving role within society. In the first section, Schubert looks at the complex history of the museum in specific cities at critical moments, for instance New York between 1930 and 1950 as the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded and the Museum of Modern Art was founded. The second section focuses on the success and unprecedented development of the museum in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, highlighting the need for cities and institutions to revise their programmes in response to a surge of interest in the arts. The final section looks at the museum’s predicament nearly a decade after The Curator’s Egg was originally published in 2000, exploring the museum's evolution in a post-9/11 environment.

Read more less

Architect Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden, now considered one of the most influential architecture exhibitions of the 20th century, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and built in their garden in 1949. Exhibited to record attendance, the house featured the updated Bauhaus prescriptions for modern living—an airy, informal combination living room/dining room and a pass-through kitchen—and was intended to inspire the future of American housing. The project featured custom hardware produced by W.C. Vaughan in collaboration with Breuer, which included everything from mahogany door knobs to cabinet hinges. Vaughan also supplied hardware for Breuer’s iconic Frank House, the Geller House, Breuer’s own houses in Massachusetts and Connecticut plus houses by Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson and other modernist masters. An essay by historian Robert Wiesenberger, historical black-and-white and color photographs by Ezra Stoller plus shop drawings by Vaughan of the hardware complete this deeply engaging and important architectural publication.

Read more less

This volume examines the relationship between modern sculpture and architecture in the mid-twentieth century, an interplay that has laid the ground for the semisculptural or semiarchitectural works by architects such as Frank Gehry and artists such as Dan Graham. The first half of the book explores how the addition of sculpture enhanced several architectural projects, including Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook Campus (1934). The second half of the book uses several additional case studies, including Philip Johnson's sculpture court for New York's Museum of Modern Art (1953), to explore what architectural spaces can add to the sculpture they are designed to contain. The author argues that it was in the middle of the twentieth century – before sculptural and architectural forms began to converge – that the complementary nature of the two practices began clearly to emerge: figurative sculpture highlighting the modernist architectural experience, and the abstract qualities of that architecture imparting to sculpture a heightened role.

Read more less

For this new edition of Joseph Maida’s ongoing collaboration with Ansel Adams’ Manzanar archive, Maida pairs his first Act, the 2018 edition of his book Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _______________- Americans, with his second Act, Printed Media x Printed Justice: Exhibition-in-a-Box, an adaptable, modular, DIY exhibition of political posters in a box, from 2020, which he gifted as a call to action to institutions with a longstanding commitment to Adams’ work including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.Six months after the publication of Maida’s first edition of Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _______________- Americans, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned her dissent in the case Trump v. Hawaii, which restricted travel into the United States by people from several nations, or by refugees without valid travel documents. She stated that the Court's 5-4 ruling “redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu [v. United States, 1944, upholding the exclusion of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II] and merely replaces one gravely wrong decision with another.” Sotomayor’s words echo the perspective of Maida’s 2018 monographic work from earlier that year, which also parallels recent immigration bans based on nationality to the experiences of Japanese-Americans in the United States during World War II, reiterating the value of revisiting Ansel Adams' most political project in the present.In October 2020, on the eve of the U.S. Presidential election, Maida deployed political posters he created through the reworking of the pages of his first edition of this project by introducing political documents from all branches of the U.S. government. Maida mailed his posters directly to the institutions with a longstanding commitment to Adams’ work. Through this call to action, Maida extended his individual reconciliation of the history of the medium of photography to these museums and their own records and holdings.With Born Free, Born Equal, Maida continues to illuminate the past’s timely relationship to the current social and political climate, highlighting the importance of revisiting historic art and archives with the knowledge and resources of today.

Read more less

Historically, women architects were disappointingly absent in the news and at awards ceremonies, but now they are spearheading some of the most exciting and important projects in every corner of the globe. These profiles of fifty female architects bring to light some of those projects and highlight pioneering women architects. Each architect is introduced in double-page spreads that include a brief biography, an overview of her philosophy and vision, and stunning photographs of her most significant works. Interviews with several of the architects provide a global perspective on how women are changing the face of the world—including feminist icon, philanthropist, and Nigerian “starchitect” Olajumoke Adenowo; Tatiana Bilbao, who is leading the way in sustainable Mexican architecture; Rossana Hu, who is fighting to preserve Chinese village culture in her rapidly urbanizing country; and Elizabeth Diller, who created the High Line, one of New York City’s most beloved public spaces, and helped redesign the city’s Museum of Modern Art. This volume offers indisputable and inspiring evidence that the architectural profession is no longer just a man’s game.

Read more less

“WITTY, STARTLINGLY ASTUTUE." —People Bea Seger has spent a lifetime running from her childhood. The daughter of a famous photographer, she and her brothers were the subjects of an explosive series of images in the 1960s known as the Marx Nudes. Disturbing and provocative, the photographs shadowed the family long past the public outcry and media attention. Now, decades later, both the Museum of Modern Art and Hollywood have come calling, eager to cash in on Bea’s mother’s notoriety. Twice divorced from but still entangled with aging rock star Gary Going, Bea lives in Manhattan with her borrowed dog, Dory, and sort-of sister, Echo. After years of avoiding her past, Bea must make a choice: let the world in—and be compensated for the trauma of her childhood—or leave it all locked away in a storage unit forever.Carry the Dog sweeps readers into Bea’s world as the little girl in the photographs and the woman in the mirror meet at the blurry intersection of memory and truth, vulnerability and resilience.

Read more less

El-Gazzar, born in 1925 in Alexandria, is a leading figure in modern Egyptian art of the 20th century. He enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944 and then joined the Contemporary Art Group founded by Hussein Youssef Amin, his master. With an innovative and unique expressionist style, it portrays the people of Cairo in a folkloric way. Later, he tried his hand at abstraction by representing industrial machines and their effects on humans.Recognised during his lifetime, the production of El-Gazzar was exhibited in France from 1949, at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and at the São Paulo Museum in 1953. Today, his works are in private collections in Cairo, Alexandria, Rome, Paris and Brussels, but also in major institutions around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.This catalogue raisonné, published in English, comprises two volumes. The first is dedicated to the artist''s paintings and the seco

Read more less

The twins Gert & Uwe Tobias are among the most famous German artists in the field of printed graphics; their international success has taken them as far as New York and the Museum of Modern Art. To this day their inimitable signature has lost nothing of its radical approa ch. Their most recent group of works, GRISAILLE, matches up to the promises inherent in the artists’ reputation. Exuberant imagination, craftsmanlike perfection and humorous depth characterise the large - format woodcuts, luminous collages and delicately nu anced typewriter drawings of the artist duo Gert & Uwe Tobias. In their new group of works GRISAILLE, which was created exclusively for the Munich exhibition, the artists rediscovered the centuries - old technique of “grey - in - grey painting” and at the same t ime interpret it in a new manner through the medium of the woodcut. Via the twilight of a monochrome colour scheme hitherto unknown in their work, the realm of shadows in their fabulous pictorial inventions not only acquires ambiguity, but is also carried to extremes once more.

Read more less

In We Flew over the Bridge, one of the country’s preeminent African American artists—and award-winning children’s book authors—shares the fascinating story of her life. Faith Ringgold’s artworks—startling “story quilts,” politically charged paintings, and more—hang in the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and other major museums around the world, as well as in the private collections of Maya Angelou, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey. Her children’s books, including the Caldecott Honor Book Tar Beach, have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But Ringgold’s path to success has not been easy. In this gorgeously illustrated memoir, she looks back and shares the story of her struggles, growth, and triumphs. Ringgold recollects how she had to surmount a wall of prejudices as she worked to refine her artistic vision and raise a family. At the same time, the story she tells is one of warm family memories and sustaining friendships, community involvement, and hope for the future.

Read more less

I See a City: Todd Webb’s New York focuses on the work of photographer Todd Webb produced in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. Webb photographed the city day and night, in all seasons and in all weather. Buildings, signage, vehicles, the passing throngs, isolated figures, curious eccentrics, odd corners, windows, doorways, alleyways, squares, avenues, storefronts, uptown and downtown, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Harlem. He created a richly textured portrait of the everyday life and architecture of New York. Webb’s work is clear, direct, focused, layered with light and shadow, and captures the soul of these places shaped by the friction and frisson of humanity. A native of Detroit, Webb studied photography in the 1930s under the guidance of Ansel Adams at the Detroit Camera Club, served as a navy photographer during World War II, and then went on to become a successful postwar photographer. His work is in many museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.With 167 illustrations

Read more less

A major new monograph on the Cuban artist Agustín Fernández. 'As a painter I use a realist technique, but the emblems I invent are not real. They are purely imaginative... Painting is a thing of the mind. My realism is not nature, or landscape, or still life, but the psychological world.' - Agustín Fernández. At the time of his death in 2006, Agustín Fernández (b. 1928) ranked among Cuba's most outstanding artists. Defying simple categorisation, today his work is most recognisable for its ambiguous and precariously balanced forms, erotic overtones, surreal juxtapositions, and metallic palette. This superbly illustrated book is the first comprehensive study of Fernández's work, and includes contributions by renowned critic Donald Kuspit and a team of experts. Fernández's work has been exhibited throughout Europe and North and South America, and is represented in major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work found a wider audience when one of his larger paintings was featured in the 1980 Brian de Palma film, Dressed to Kill.

Read more less

A charming portrait of early-20th-century European society through the lens of Lartigue, with 55 unpublished photographs Despite becoming interested in photography when he was barely in double digits, French artist Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) didn’t achieve mainstream recognition until he was nearly 70 years old. A 1963 exhibition of his boyhood photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York prompted new appreciation for his pictures, which bore a clear affinity with the street photography of the great humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Though he mainly supported himself as a painter later on in life, Lartigue was devoted to the art of photography and continued to capture the world around him until he was in his 90s, beginning with domestic candid shots in his childhood and later depicting the upper crust of European society. With their motion-blur and frequently grinning, unposed subjects, Lartigue’s images convey the photographer’s genuine passion for life and a consistent interest in everyday moments. The book presents 120 images from Lartigue’s numerous personal photo albums, including 55 pictures that have never been published before.

Read more less

A new, redesigned edition of Gay Block and Malka Drucker’s classic photobook documenting those who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Holocaust First published in 1992 to widespread acclaim, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust is a landmark photobook on the commemoration of the Holocaust. Featuring photograph portraits, archives and interviews, it was the first book (and exhibition) by Houston-born photographer Gay Block (born 1942); the exhibition has been seen in over 50 venues in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Block spent more than three years traveling in eight countries, accompanied by rabbi and author Malka Drucker, documenting testimonies from more than 100 rescuers—people who risked their lives to rescue Jewish victims from the Holocaust. The stories range from those who saved one life to those who worked in the resistance and saved thousands, always with the threat of death and torture if they were discovered. This new edition features a complete redesign and new foreword by scholar of Jewish American art Samantha Baskind.

Read more less

In her hugely successful books Creatures of the Deep and What's in the Egg, as well as her enormously popular series of greeting cards for the Museum of Modern Art, Maike Biederstaedt has established herself as one of the preeminent paper artists working today. Now Biederstaedt takes book engineering to new heights as she immerses readers in five electrifying weather scenarios. As each spread unfolds, a meticulously designed landscape emerges--a freighter balances like a nutshell between high waves in the sea; a tornado takes terrifying aim at a truck trying to outrun it; a rain-spewing storm cloud towers like a skyscraper over a farm house. Nature's delicate beauty emerges in the intricate shapes of a snowflake and in the luminous arc of a rainbow. Each page features an informative description of its weather event and the book closes with sobering commentary on the effects of climate change. A wondrous introduction to weather for budding climatologists, this is also an artistic tour de force that collectors will treasure.

Read more less

Composers and musicians Matana Roberts and Tyshawn Sorey discuss the collaborative nature of solo music and composing as an embodiment of the self Published on the occasion of Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the book series Who Is Queen? adapts conversations between pairs of notable writers, theorists, philosophers and musicians into contrapuntal texts intertwined with archival photographs and additional writings. Matana Roberts (born 1975) is a sound experimentalist, musician, composer and alto saxophonist who works in many performance and sound mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry and theater. Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey (born 1980) is celebrated for his virtuosity, his mastery of highly complex scores and an ability to blend composition and improvisation. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles and with artists such as John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, George E. Lewis, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton and Myra Melford, among others.

Read more less

This absorbing biography, often conveyed through Peter Selz's own words, traces the journey of a Jewish-German immigrant from Hitler's Munich to the United States and on to an important career as a pioneer historian of modern art. Paul J. Karlstrom illuminates key historical and cultural events of the twentieth-century as he describes Selz's extraordinary career - from Chicago's Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), to New York's Museum of Modern Art during the transformative 1960s, and as founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Karlstrom sheds light on the controversial viewpoints that at times isolated Selz from his colleagues but nonetheless affirmed his conviction that significant art was always an expression of deep human experience. The book also links Selz's long life story - featuring close relationships with such major art figures as Mark Rothko, Dore Ashton, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, and Christo - with his personal commitment to political engagement.

Read more less

Despite being a benchmark for her peers, exhibited in the most important museums, Germain Richier has acquired only an ambiguous status that of being the least well-known of the great contemporary sculptors. Alain DreyfusGermaine Richier (19021959) is an important French sculptor. In 1956, she was the first woman to exhibit at the Musée d'Art Moderne [Museum of Modern Art] and her works are shown in the most prestigious museums around the world (Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Tate Gallery); despite this, no catalogue raisonné had yet been compiled.The release of this work therefore is a major event, because Germaine Richier is an artist who plays a leading role in modern sculpture. When she arrived in Paris, after leaving her native Provence, artistic circles and connoisseurs soon noticed and began following her work. She was the sole private student of Bourdelle, her teacher and friend, and her sculpture is recognised, exhibited and collected throu

Read more less

Over nearly eight decades, Louis Stettner (1922-2016) defined a singular poetic vision in photography, honing a style influenced by both American street photography and French humanism. Stettner began working in the 1930s, becoming a member of the Photo League in New York and befriending Lisette Model, Paul Strand, and Weegee. After serving in the U.S. Army as a combat photographer, he moved to Paris in 1947, where he met the influential street photographer Brassaï. The following decades were the most important in his career, as he traveled back and forth between Paris and New York and found inspiration in that geographical duality. Published to celebrate a major acquisition of Stettner’s prints by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this beautiful volume presents iconic photographs from the entirety of Stettner’s career, along with 19 essays about photography written by Stettner himself, originally published in the iconic magazine Camera 35 from 1971 to 1979, as well as a transcription of Stettner’s fundamental lecture, “Photography: Style & Reality,” delivered at the International Center of Photography in 2002.

Read more less

Anni Albers (1899 - 1994) was one of the most influential textile designers of the 20th century. Born in Berlin, in 1922 she became a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she met her husband, Josef Albers. From 1933 to 1949 Albers taught at Black Mountain College. The fifteen essays gathered here illustrate Anni Albers's concept of design as the pursuit of wholeness -- "the coalition of form answering practical needs and form answering aesthetic needs." This beautifully illustrated book addresses the artistic and practical concerns of modern design and considers the ever-changing role of the designer.Albers's work is in private collections and in those of leading museums both here and abroad. Among them are the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum Neue Sammlung in Munich, the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. Her previous books include On Weaving (1965) and On Designing (1961), both published by Wesleyan

Read more less

In Paris Calligrammes the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds Ulrike Ottinger links historical archival material with her own art and film works to create a sociogram of the era in which she came of age as an artist. In the grip of political upheavals, Paris of the 1960s attracted artists from all over the world and was a pulsating stream of energy hovering between trauma management and the utopia of Europe. From the Librairie Calligrammes, a meeting place of exiled German intellectuals, to the Cinémathèque française, which sparked her love of film, Ulrike Ottinger charts a city and its utopias. They live on in her collaged landscape of memories in a workshop exhibition complimenting her film Paris Calligrammes (2019).Ulrike Ottinger's (*1942 Konstanz, Germany) films were shown at the most important international festivals and honored at various major museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With her photographs she was represented at the documenta and the Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition: HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 23.8—13.10.2019

Read more less

The first comprehensive monograph on Mario Bellini, one of Italy's most versatile and influential designers.A key figure in the emergence of Italy as an important centre fore design in the 1960's, Mario Bellini is renowned for his elegant, dramatic and often poetic designs for, among others, Olivetti, Cassina, B&B Italia, Vitra and Artemide. He was the subject of a one man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987, the recipient of eight prestigious Compasso d'Oro industrial design awards, the Editor–in–Chief of the influential architecture and design magazine Domus (1986–91) and continues to produce architecture and design for clients and locations all over the world.Features:– Richly illustrated with over 500 images including sketches and photographs from Mario Bellini's archive, opened publicly for the first time.– A complete catalogue of Bellini's design work, thematically presented, from calculators, typewriters, office and banking machines, to chairs, tables, sofas, and lighting. Features a series of essays, including an interview with Mario Bellini, covering the various aspects of his career and design processes.

Read more less

A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery. —Rebecca Bengal In Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to pioneering artists and the personal and political stories surrounding their images. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative portraits and explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.

Read more less

Raised as a Quaker in Eastern Pennsylvania, designer and sculptor Paul Evans is known for his highly unusual and yet completely functional furniture designs. Evans produced more than a dozen lines of furniture and countless design variations during his thirty-year career as a mid- to late 20th century artist and designer. Regardless of his materials, whether metal, wood, or even cardboard, his work continues to defy easy categorization. It is modern and yet independent of recognizable influences. Other designers and manufacturers openly copied his work, though these copies lacked the presence Evans easily achieved. At the height of his popularity in the mid-1970s, Evans employed nearly ninety people. Several museums and galleries exhibited his work, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, his work is sought by collectors, who value its style and quality. His unusual furniture and sculpture stand the test of time and are displayed here in over 220 vivid photos. It appears classic and contemporary at the same time. This book will be treasured by all who have a passion for design.

Read more less

For Rebecca Bloomwood, life is peachy. She has a job on morning TV, her bank manager is actually being nice to her, and when it comes to spending money, her new motto is Buy Only What You Need - and she's really (sort of) sticking to it. The icing on the brioche is that she's been offered a chance to work in New York.New York! The Museum of Modern Art! The Guggenheim! The Metropolitan Opera House! And Becky does mean to go to them all. Honestly. It's just that it seems silly not to check out a few other famous places first. Like Saks. And Bloomingdales. And Barneys. And one of those fantastic sample sales where you can get a Prada dress for $10. Or was it $100? Is Becky too dazzled to care?Everybody loves Sophie Kinsella:"I almost cried with laughter" Daily Mail"Hilarious . . . you'll laugh and gasp on every page" Jenny Colgan"Properly mood-altering . . . funny, fast and farcical. I loved it" Jojo Moyes"A superb tale. Five stars!" Heat

Read more less

A reassessment of self-taught artist William Edmondson, exploring the enduring relevance of his work This richly illustrated volume reintroduces readers to American sculptor William Edmondson (1874–1951) more than 80 years after his historic solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Edmondson began carving at the onset of the Depression in Tennessee. Initially creating tombstones for his community, over time he expanded his practice to include biblical subjects, the natural world, and recognizable figures including nurses and preachers. This book features new essays that explore Edmondson’s life in the South and his reception on the East Coast in the 1930s. Reading the artist through lenses of African American experience, the authors draw parallels between then and now, highlighting the complex relationship between Black cultural production and the American museum. Countering existing narratives that have viewed Edmondson as a passive actor in an unfolding drama—a self-taught sculptor “discovered” by White patrons and institutions—this book considers how the artist’s identity and position within history influenced his life and work. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Schedule:The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (June 25–September 10, 2023)

Read more less

This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911–60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958–59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park’s full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park’s scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2–September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019–March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: October 4, 2020–January 18, 2021

Read more less

This book, published to accompany the recent ‘Works of Fire’ exhibition at the Céret Museum of Modern Art, presents Miquel Barceló’s ceramics work. Created in Majorca in a former tilery and brickyard transformed into a workshop, the terracotta figures are damaged or disturbed by the introduction of bricks in the still-fresh clay, which humanizes their familiar forms. The self-portrait is a recurrent theme: eyes and mouth engraved into vases, and amphorae in shapes inherited from Antiquity; skulls and heads explicitly evoke the idea of vanity, an ever-present theme in Barceló’s work, which appears in the fractures, cracks, and swelling that the clay undergoes before or during firing. Apart from the self-portraits, there are emanations of the animal or plant world, also disturbed by the bricks which come to inhabit or destroy them. Rosebuds bloom, fish live and fossilize, bricks form secret cavities. These spectacular works owe their presence to their apparent fragility as well as to their life force, and the struggle and dramas they welcome. All Barceló’s themes are present in his ceramic works. As ever, the passage of time and death are expressed in the most fragile and durable way.

Read more less

One of the most significant photographers of our time, Stephen Shore has often been considered alongside other artists who rose to prominence in the 1970s by capturing the mundane aspects of American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous images. But Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large-format cameras in the 1970s, pioneering the use of colour before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and in the 2000s taking up the opportunities of digital photography, digital printing and social media. Stephen Shore encompasses the entirety of the artist’s work of the last five decades, during which he has conducted a continual, restless interrogation of image making, from the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager to his current engagement with digital platforms. Published to accompany the major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the book allows for a fuller understanding of Shore’s work, and demonstrates his singular vision – defined by an interest in daily life, a taste for serial and often systematic approaches, a strong intellectual underpinning, a restrained style, sly humour and visual casualness – and uncompromising pursuit of photography’s possibilities.

Read more less

A revelatory consideration of the wide-ranging practice of one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century A pioneer of minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is best known for his monumental wall drawings. LeWitt’s broad artistic practice, however, also included sculpture, printmaking, photography, artist’s books, drawings, gouaches, and folded and ripped paper works. From the familiar to the underappreciated aspects of LeWitt’s oeuvre, this book examines the ways that his art was multidisciplinary, humorous, philosophical, and even religious. Locating Sol LeWitt contains nine new essays that explore the artist’s work across media and address topics such as LeWitt’s formative friendships with colleagues at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960s; his photographs of Manhattan’s Lower East Side; his 1979 collaboration with Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass and its impact on his printmaking; and his commissions linked to Jewish history and the Holocaust. The essays offer insights into the role of parody, experimentation, and uncertainty in the artist’s practice, and investigate issues of site, space, and movement. Together, these studies reveal the full scope of LeWitt’s creativity and offer a multifaceted reassessment of this singular and influential artist.

Read more less

This book brings together 29 projects from the past ten years, completed and ongoing, designed by Paris-based h2o Architects. The presentation is arranged by thematic categories that stem from the firm's singular approach. The tasks vary greatly in type, scale and individual context: From a housing development in Paris to a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, from a temporary school pavilion and a timber construction for a vineyard to the rehabilitation of Paris's Museum of Modern Art in the eastern wing of Palais de Tokyo and other large public spaces. h2o Architectes' proposals are united by an approach that is always both radical and sensitive. Interviews conducted by architect and writer Fanny Léglise and essays by architect and anthropologist Miguel Mazeri and architect Bernard Tschumi shed light on various aspects of the firm's practice, vision and philosophy. The book also features poems by French writer and poet Frédéric Forte, composed in situ at several of h2o Architectes' building sites. Photographs, renderings, and plans round out this first comprehensive monograph on one of France's leading up-and-coming architecture firms. Text in English and French.

Read more less

A sweeping selection of Donald Judd’s iconic and ambitious works alongside a diverse collection of newly commissioned writings. "One of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, Donald Judd rigorously experimented with color, form, material, and space. The works in this catalogue range from the artist’s expansive installations to self-contained single units, yielding valuable new insights into his process and approach. The survey includes one of the artist’s largest and most intricate installations of sixty-three wall-mounted plywood boxes, conceived in 1986. Other works include variations on some of Judd’s most recognizable forms, executed in materials such as Cor-ten steel, plexiglass, copper, plywood, brushed aluminum, and enameled aluminum. Brilliant and exacting reproductions bring these works to life on the page. Following the artist’s major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2020, this book serves as a companion volume. With contributions from a wide range of voices—art historians, critics, writers, and performers— this publication includes rich new writings on Judd’s oeuvre, art criticism, and enduring influence. Artworks: 1970–1994 is published on the occasion of the eponymous 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York."

Read more less

Collected poems from one of the Twentieth Century's most influential voices.Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, “which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition.”Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O’Hara’s untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, “the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.”.This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O’Hara’s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, “you just go on your nerve.”

Read more less

The perfect primer on acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle. Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. Her work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is renowned for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives, which she has deployed in her acclaimed works Suite Venitienne, The Hotel and Address Book. She has had major exhibitions all over the world, including at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and has worked closely with the writer Paul Auster. The Guardian called her ‘the Marcel Duchamp of dirty laundry’, and she was among the names in Blake Gopnik's list 'The 10 Most Important Artists of Today', with Gopnik arguing, 'It is the unartiness of Calle's work — its refusal to fit any of the standard pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa — that makes it deserve space in museums.'

Read more less

“I was thrilled”, was Andy Warhol’s enthusiastic reaction to the pictures of Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944). Many of the elements of her work inspired his Pop Art. During Stettheimer’s life her sensuous and ironic paintings with their numerous figures were valued highly by artists and curators, although the general public remained largely unaware of their merits. Only after her death did her close friend Marcel Duchamp organise a retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art. The art and literature scene of Roaring Twenties New York gathered at Florine Stettheimer’s extravagant parties. Surrounded by the cultivated and yet unconventional “Dada flair”, the artist staged her pictures as a performance – and was thereby well ahead of her time. As an outstanding painter she was not only at the heart of the American art business, but also attracted attention with her eccentric, subversive and often humorous poems, as well as demonstrating her talent as a stage and costume designer in the theatre. This bibliophile monograph about the multitalented artist is lavishly illustrated and tells a new, exciting history of the modern age through her artworks.

Read more less

Contemporary art is now inclusive of geographies that until recently had escaped the attention of Western art centres such as Paris and New York. A vast area commonly referred to as the Middle East constitutes part of an "emerging geography" whose art has finally become globally visible. The region's artists, however, are neither fixed inside its territories nor permanently diasporic. Often on the move, they define themselves and the world according to their personal visions. Safar: Voyage (voyage being the translation of its equivalent in Persian) is a visual essay, bringing together a selection of these artists and displaying fragments of their itineraries. AUTHOR: Fereshteh Daftari received her PhD in art history from Columbia University. She worked in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1988 to 2009, and curated a number of exhibitions, including "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking."Jill Baird is the curator of education and public programs at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research and writing interests include arts and cultural education that challenge museums to respond to diverse communities. ILLUSTRATIONS: 50 colour images

Read more less

With a career spanning more than sixty years, Anthony Caro (b. 1924) is one of Britain's most acclaimed and best-known sculptors. Caro: Close Up accompanies the first survey exhibition of his work in an American museum since his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. Although celebrated for his large, brightly painted abstract sculptures, Caro has also produced drawings and small-scale works of a more private nature throughout his career. The full range of his oeuvre includes works on paper, sculptures constructed in paper and cardboard, and abstract works of steel, bronze, and clay.Featuring new photography of more than sixty works drawn almost entirely from Caro's studio and family collections, this publication examines the critical responses that Caro's work has elicited from the 1950s to the present and considers his role in current artistic practice. The authors explore the ways the sculptor has used the physical properties of his materials, while Caro himself discusses his exhibition and installation practices.Published for the Yale Center for British ArtExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(10/18/12–12/30/12)

Read more less

American photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) is best known for The Brown Sisters, his ongoing series of annual portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters (recently exhibited and published by The Museum of Modern Art). But Nixon's wider oeuvre has been less well documented. Long overdue, Nicholas Nixon: About Forty Years will be the first publication to focus on the broader swath of Nixon's more than 40-year career. In a published statement about photography written in 1975, Nixon remarked, "The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it." To present the world as he sees it--in fascinating, precise and often startling detail--Nixon has consistently used unwieldy large-format cameras, with negatives measuring 8 x 10 inches or 11 x 14 inches. His recurring subjects--cities seen from above, people on their porches, landscapes, portraits of the very young and the very old--are woven together throughout his career like the cords of a cable. Nixon's large-format black-and-white photography is simultaneously intimate, technically precise and somehow relaxed. Beautifully designed and with exquisitely reproduced images, About Forty Years presents the most thorough view yet of this important artist's career.

Read more less

The first book devoted solely to Bruce Nauman’s corridors and other architectural installations, Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters deftly explores the significance of these works in the development of his singular art practice, examining them in the context of the period and in relation to other artists like Dan Graham, Robert Morris, Paul Kos, and James Turrell. Designed for viewer participation, Bruce Nauman’s architectural installations often confound expectations and induce physical and psychological unease. The essays in this book consider these works, which begin in 1969 and continue into the 1970s and beyond, in terms of the physical, perceptual, and psychological pressures they exert on the participant. Three interlocking perspectives on the topic—Constance M. Lewallen’s historical overview, Dore Bowen’s case study of Nauman’s 1970 Corridor Installation with Mirror—San Jose Installation (Double Wedge Corridor with Mirror), and a supplementary essay by Ted Mann on Nauman’s drawings—provide a comprehensive and in-depth approach. The book coincides with the major retrospective exhibition Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts at the Schaulager Museum, Basel, Switzerland (March 17–August 26, 2018) and the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York (October 21, 2018–March 17, 2019).

Read more less

A new form of still life: the first full survey of Lucas Blalock’s humorous and mesmerizing manipulated photographs The acclaimed New York-based photographer Lucas Blalock (born 1978) creates surreal still lifes, often digitally manipulated. From bundles of raw hot dogs to watermelons smothered by plastic wrap to cactus leaves duplicated many times over, Blalock’s eye-catching tableaux reveal more bizarre details the longer one looks. The intentionally ham-fisted photographic manipulations are created in Photoshop after Blalock shoots with a large-format camera on film and then scans the images. The result is a layered network of colorful visual references, careening from the tragicomic to the absurd as they depict everyday objects in unfamiliar contexts. Underlying all of his work is Blalock’s eagerness to revel in the inherent failure connected to any attempt to revive the avant-garde. The artist’s first full survey, this publication accompanies a solo exhibition at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany. The exhibit’s curator, Susanne Figner, provides commentary alongside essays by professor Russell Ferguson, Institute of Contemporary Art LA curator Jamillah James and Museum of Modern Art curatorial assistant Phil Taylor. The book is available in three different colors.

Read more less

The story of Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson, two young men, now acknowledged as giants in the history of modernism, who changed the course of design in the United States. The 1920s and 1930s saw the birth of modernism in the United States, a new aesthetic, based on the principles of the Bauhaus in Germany: its merging of architecture with fine and applied arts; and rational, functional design devoid of ornament and without reference to historical styles. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the then 27-year-old founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, and 23-year-old Philip Johnson, director of its architecture department, were the visionary young proponents of the modern approach. Shortly after meeting at Wellesley College, where Barr taught art history, and as Johnson finished his studies in philosophy at Harvard, they set out on a path that would transform the museum world and change the course of design in America. The Museum of Modern Art opened just over a week after the stock market crash of 1929. In the depths of the Depression, using as their laboratories both MoMA and their own apartments in New York City, Barr and Johnson experimented with new ideas in museum ideology, extending the scope beyond painting and sculpture to include architecture, photography, graphic design, furniture, industrial design, and film; with exhibitions of ordinary, machine-made objects (including ball bearings and kitchenware) elevated to art by their elegant design; and with installations in dramatically lit galleries with smooth, white walls. Partners in Design, which accompanies an exhibition opening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in April 2016, chronicles their collaboration, placing it in the larger context of the avant-garde in New York - 1930s salons where they mingled with Julien Levy, the gallerist who brought Surrealism to the United States, and Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet; their work to help Bauhaus artists like Josef and Anni Albers escape Nazi Germany - and the dissemination of their ideas across the United States through MoMA’s traveling exhibition program. Plentifully illustrated with icons of modernist design, MoMA installation views, and previously unpublished images of the Barr and Johnson apartments - domestic laboratories for modernism, and in Johnson’s case, designed and furnished by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - this fascinating study sheds new light on the introduction and success in North America of a new kind of modernism, thanks to the combined efforts of two uniquely discerning and influential individuals.

Read more less

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask. With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.

Read more less

A compact survey of the photographer Frank Horvat, best known for his fashion photography published between the mid 1950s and the late 1980s. Frank Horvat (1928-2020) changed the course of fashion photography forever. The Italian-born photographer made his debut as a photojournalist in France, where he continued to live and work for the rest of his life. It was here he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, who encouraged him to continue his marvellous photojournalism. By the mid-1950s Horvat was collaborating with the biggest fashion magazines in the world, such as Elle, Vogue and Jardin des Modes – revolutionizing fashion photography through a more realistic lens, photographing models on the streets, in the squares and alongside the locals of post-war Europe. Horvat’s fresh and often imitated style, which brought reportage techniques and the 35mm film camera to the forefront of fashion photography, impressed designers and inspired fashion photographers for generations to come. Frank Horvat’s work can now be found in permanent collections in prestigious institutions around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. With a foreword by Virginie Chardin, this title in the renowned Photofile series exhibits Horvat’s photographic opus through sixty full-page reproductions in a handsome and collectible pocket format.

Read more less

A necessary reference for any library on modernism in 20th-Century Europe. Personal reminiscences along with historical anecdotes never before published. Exhibition and conference schedule includes Texas Tech in April and New York. Ezio Gribaudo is an Italian artist, art collector, and art publisher whose life and work took him to the very centre of European modern art in the 20th century. His work has been shown internationally and is included in the permanent collections of many museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, among others. This volume is a visual biography that presents the life of this celebrated art-lover through a collection of texts and pictures that include rarely seen images of Gribaudo's partners in art, including Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Joan Miró, and Henry Moore. Documents, letters, and photographs round out this portrait of a man who was at once central to modernism and yet not a "known name" to the mainstream. A must-have for art historians and collectors of 20th-century modern art, this book gives an account of the cultural history around one of the few contemporary artists who had personal contact with the great names of art history as art publisher, collector, and friend.

Read more less

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask. With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.

Read more less