Search results for ""museum of modern art""

The first comprehensive, posthumous monograph and retrospective on Bernd and Hilla Becher, best known for their photographs of industrial structures in Europe and North America For more than five decades, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher collaborated on photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features the Bechers’ quintessential pictures, which present water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and more as sculptural objects. Beyond the Bechers’ iconic Typologies, the book includes Bernd’s early drawings, Hilla’s independent photographs, and excerpts from their notes, sketchbooks, and journals. The book’s authors offer new insights into the development of the artists’ process, their work’s conceptual underpinnings, the photographers’ relationship to deindustrialization, and the artists’ legacy. An essay by award-winning cultural historian Lucy Sante and an interview with Max Becher, the artists’ son, make this volume an unrivaled look into the Bechers’ art, life, and career. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (July 11–October 30, 2022)San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (December 17, 2022–April 2, 2023)

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In April 1937, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted an exhibition that served as a catalyst for the appropriation of prehistoric rock art in postwar abstract painting. With the title "Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa", it displayed a range of copies from the influential collection of the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. Largely disregarded in modern American art history up until now, this book highlights the importance of this exhibition to artists such as Josef Albers, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, and The American Abstract Artists group, who sought inspiration from the prehistoric images’ primordial creativity. With a transnational scope, this book reveals new facts about the connections between Paris and New York, and the importance of communication and collaboration between them for these artists. In doing so, Seibert shows that this debate was about more than just legitimizing abstract art forms from the past, but about recognizing an autonomous American abstract art. Presenting unseen archival material, letters, and exhibition documentation, Prehistoric Pictures and American Modernism offers a new reading of the development of modern American abstraction, and will hold an important place in the historiography of the movement, its global traditions, and its legacy.

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Taking the form of a composition book – a classic style of American notebook – Written English is an Allen Jones RA artwork in book form. Over 40 pages, Jones playfully explores the English language, and its use… and misuse.“Conquest and trade allowed the English language to become the World’s lingua franca, perhaps because its phonetic and grammatical structure is more pliable than most languages,” says Jones. “Global, popular culture, advertising and newspapers have shown a creativity that has enriched and extended our English usage.”Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.Written English is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.

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Through a close look at the history of the modernist hooked rug, this book raises important questions about the broader history of American modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. Although hooked rugs are not generally associated with the avant-garde, this study demonstrates that they were a significant part of the artistic production of many artists engaged in modernist experimentation. Cynthia Fowler discusses the efforts of Ralph Pearson and of Zoltan and Rosa Hecht to establish modernist hooked rug industries in the 1920s, uncovering a previously undocumented history. The book includes a consideration of the rural workers used to create the modernist narrative of the hooked rug, as cottage industries were established throughout the rural Northeast and South to serve the ever increasing demand for hooked rugs by urban consumers. Fowler closely examines institutional enterprises that highlighted and engaged the modernist hooked rugs, such as key exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1930s and '40s. This study reveals the fluidity of boundaries among art, craft and design, and the profound efforts of a devoted group of modernists to introduce the general public to the value of modern art.

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Follow along as we tour the west coast from San Diego to Vancouver and discover 100 of the most important artists of our time. Each will share with you, in his or her own words, the thoughts and feelings expressed in their work. These 100 artists have struck a particular chord with the public and their work is sure to become the masterpieces of tomorrow. Each of the almost 400 full color photographs of vividly hued, conceptually stimulating artworks in this book is sure to delight your eyes and imagination. This stunning collection includes art from private as well as public collections and installations, including the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle to name just a few. Painting, sculpture, mixed media, photography, found object art, ceramics, collage, enhanced video art, sound art, and more are all included in this fine art compendium. This book is for all who want to educate themselves about contemporary art and artists, whether they are collectors, frequent museum and gallery visitors, or merely curious.

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Explores the scope that there is for Indigenous curatorial agency in the relationship of Indigenous contemporary art with the 'art world'. This monograph focuses on the current boom in Indigenous contemporary art in Brazil, exploring in particular the way that this work interfaces with the art world through exhibitions, and the scope that there is for Indigenous curatorial agency in this relationship. After a brief introduction to Indigenous art, it gives an overview of the evolving relationship between Indigenous art and the art world, exploring in particular the nature of decolonial and/or Indigenous curatorial practice both in Brazil and elsewhere in the world. It then hones in on a recent exhibition: 'Arte Eletrônica Indígena' [Indigenous Electronic Art], held at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia in Salvador in August 2018. Based on participant observation and interviews, it provides an ethnographic reading of the opening weekend of the exhibition, looking at the alternative modalities of Indigenous curatorial agency that were exercised by the Indigenous people present. The conclusion explores the legacy of the 'Arte Eletrônica Indígena' exhibition, particularly for the Indigenous communities involved, and looks to the evidence provided by the exhibition for lessons to be learned for future exhibitions.

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Lee Mullican (1919-98) was best known for his inimitable West Coast-inspired explorations in abstraction, infused with mysticism and the transcendent. First exhibited as part of the pivotal exhibition of the Dynaton Group, which Mullican co-founded with fellow artists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen, his works are today widely collected and held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others. The first book in more than a decade to focus on this important figure in twentieth-century American art, Cosmic Theatre: The Art of Lee Mullican surveys a key theme running through the artist's career, framing his unusual hybridisation of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond. The book explores the development of the Mullican's work in the context of his time and his biography, looking also at the implications of Jungian philosophy in relation to his admiration of pre-Columbian and Native American cultures. Michael Auping's essay is complemented by fifty full-colour illustrations, featuring major rare paintings and drawings by Mullican from the 1940s to the 1970s.

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The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum’s story comes from the artist himself—and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891–1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a “spiritual unfoldment”? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities. With hundreds of beautiful color reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography.Distributed for the Art Institute of ChicagoExhibition Schedule:The Art Institute of Chicago (June 12–October 18, 2021)Museum of Modern Art, New York (November 28, 2021–March 18, 2022)Menil Collection, Houston (April 22–August 7, 2022)

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"Rohrer has an enchanting willingness to look outward, a willingness not to grasp the world using old means which have failed us, even if no new means present themselves ready-made."--Judges' citation, the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Matthew Rohrer illuminates the modern plight: trying to figure out how to be a thoughtful citizen, parent, and person as the landscape of terror and history worms its way into our everyday existence. Unnervingly humorous, casual, and tender, Rohrer's poems help us investigate our lives as he investigates his--openly and with a generous presence. From "Dull Affairs": How am I to concentrate on the heavy and dull affairs of state with the sound of a baby having a dream in the other room Matthew Rohrer is the author of five previous books of poetry, including A Plate of Chicken, Rise Up, Satellite, and A Green Light, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also co-author of Nice Hat. Thanks. with Joshua Beckman, with whom he has participated in performances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. He received the Pushcart Prize and his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at New York University.

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Issue 34 Includes • Poetry Translation Folios with work by Guatemalan K’iche Maya poet Humberto Ak’ab’al, translated by Michael Bazzett; Lithuania superstar poet Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry; Spanish poet Sandra Santana, translated by Geoffrey Brock; and Venezuelan poet-in-exile Jesüs Amalio, translated by David Brunson, Jr. Plus a Fiction Translation Folio with two stories by nternationally renowned Portuguese writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, translated by Alexis Levitin. • Poetry by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón; Guggenheim Fellows Paul Guest and Mark Halliday; Ruth Lilly Fellow Marcus Wicker; William Carlos Williams Awardwinner Martha Collins; Rilke Prize winner David Keplinger; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett, Brian Henry, Lance Larsen, Alex Lemon, Jenny Molberg, and Corey Van Landingham; as well as Kelli Russell Agodon, Abdul Ali, Sean Cho A., Michael Dumanis, Chanda Feldman, Melissa Ginsburg, Matty Layne Glasgow, Niki Herd, Alicia Mountain, Lis Sanchez, Indriani Sengupta, and many others. • Fiction by Madeline Haze Curtis, Maria Poulatha, Alyssa Quinn, Kate Weinberg, and Tara Isabel Zambrano. • Nonfiction by Brooke Barry and Robert Long Foreman. • The cover features a recent piece by Minneapolis-based artist Dyani White Hawk, whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Walker Art Center, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, theSmithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and elsewhere.

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A must-have for the core contemporary art audience: Robert Storr's singular and long-awaited book is unprecedented in treating the full range of Louise Bourgeois's artistic achievement. In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

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A fascinating exploration of the introduction of Vincent van Gogh’s work to the United States one hundred years later Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is one of the most iconic artists in the world, and how he became a household name in the United States is a fascinating, largely untold story. Van Gogh in America details the early reception of the artist’s work by American private collectors, civic institutions, and the general public from the time his work was first exhibited in the United States at the 1913 Armory Show up to his first retrospective in an American museum at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1935, and beyond. The driving force behind this project, the Detroit Institute of Arts, was the very first American public museum to purchase a Van Gogh painting, his Self-Portrait, in 1922, and this publication marks the centenary of that event. Leading Van Gogh scholars chronicle the considerable efforts made by early promoters of modernism in the United States and Europe, including the Van Gogh family, Helene Kröller-Müller, numerous dealers, collectors, curators, and artists, private and public institutions, and even Hollywood, to frame the artist’s biography and introduce his art to America.Distributed for the Detroit Institute of ArtsExhibition Schedule:Detroit Institute of Arts (October 2, 2022–January 22, 2023)

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Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly is the first book to catalog the entire career of the Guerrilla Girls from 1985 to present. The Guerrilla girls are a collective of political feminist artists who expose discrimination and corruption in art, film, politics, and pop culture all around the world. This book explores all their provocative street campaigns, unforgettable media appearances, and large-scale exhibitions. Each copy comes with a punch-out gorilla mask that invites readers to step up and join the movement themselves. Captions by the Guerrilla Girls themselves contextualize the visuals. Explores their well-researched, intersectional takedown of the patriarchy In 1985, a group of masked feminist avengers—known as the Guerrilla Girls—papered downtown Manhattan with posters calling out the Museum of Modern Art for its lack of representation of female artists. They quickly became a global phenomenon, and the fearless activists have produced hundreds of posters, stickers, and billboards ever since. More than a monograph, this book is a call to arms. This career-spanning volume is published to coincide with their 35th anniversary. Perfect for artists, art lovers, feminists, fans of the Guerrilla Girls, students, and activists Add it to the shelf with books like Wall and Piece by Banksy, Why We March: Signs of Protest and Hope by Artisan, and Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents by Nicholas Ganz

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What is the place of architecture in the history of art? Why has it been at times central to the discipline, and at other times seemingly so marginal? What is its place now? Many disciplines have a stake in the history of architecture – sociology, anthropology, human geography, to name a few. This book deals with perhaps the most influential tradition of all – art history – examining how the relation between the disciplines of art history and architectural history has waxed and waned over the last one hundred and fifty years. In this highly original study, Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams point to a decline in the importance attributed to the role of architecture in art history over the last century – which has happened without crisis or self-reflection. The book explores the problem in relation to key art historical approaches, from formalism, to feminism, to the social history of art, and in key institutions from the Museum of Modern Art, to the journal October. Among the key thinkers explored are Banham, Baxandall, Giedion, Panofsky, Pevsner, Pollock, Riegl, Rowe, Steinberg, Wittkower and Wölfflin. The book will provoke debate on the historiography and present state of the discipline of art history, and it makes a powerful case for the reconsideration of architecture.

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The first comprehensive collection in English of Antonin Artaud’s writings on his artworks. The many major exhibitions of Antonin Artaud’s drawings and drawn notebook pages in recent years—at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst, and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou—have entirely transformed our perception of his work, reorienting it toward the artworks of his final years. This volume collects all three of Artaud’s major writings on his artworks. “The Human Face” (1947) was written as the catalog text for Artaud’s only gallery exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, focusing on his approach to making portraits of his friends at the decrepit pavilion in the Paris suburbs where he spent the final year of his life. “Ten years that language is gone” (1947) examines the drawings Artaud made in his notebooks—his main creative medium at the end of his life—and their capacity to electrify his creativity when language failed him. “50 Drawings to assassinate magic” (1948), the residue of an abandoned book of Artaud’s drawings, approaches the act of drawing as part of the weaponry deployed by Artaud at the very end of his life to combat malevolent assaults and attempted acts of assassination. Together, these three extraordinary texts—pitched between writing and image—project Artaud’s ferocious engagement with the act of drawing.

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Architecture and design exhibitions have long been important public sites of broadcasting, experimentation, position-taking, and the interrogation of fundamental aspects of the designed environment. Just as individual exhibitions have constituted key benchmarks within the disciplinary history of architecture, the representation and display of space through exhibitions has operated historically as a crucial medium for shaping and embodying broader cultural attitudes toward the design of the built world. In recent years, the specific formats and challenges of exhibiting architecture and design, both built and speculative, have often been used as critical devices for identifying, communicating, and convening publics around shared matters of concern. These have increasingly included urgent questions of equity and justice, labor, gender, race, class, community, and lifestyle in relation to spatial issues of density, economy, policy, infrastructure, climate, and sustainability. Futures of the Architectural Exhibition records a discussion of critical approaches to the representation of architecture through conversations with seven contemporary curators working inside and outside of the museum. Mario Ballesteros (Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura, Mexico City), Giovanna Borasi (Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal), Ann Lui (Future Firm, Chicago), Ana Miljački (Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT), Zoë Ryan (ICA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Martino Stierli (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and Shirley Surya (M+, Hong Kong) speculate on the specific challenges and potentials of exhibiting space.

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Traffic signs, sandwich boards and posters: Friedlander’s portrait of words in the world For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s photographs record a kind of found poetry of desire and commerce. Focusing on one of the artist’s key motifs, Lee Friedlander: Signs presents a cacophony of wheat-paste posters, Coca-Cola ads, prices for milk, road signs, stop signs, neon lights, movie marquees and graffiti. The book collects 144 photographs made in New York and other places across the US, and features self-portraits, street photographs and work from series including The American Monument and America by Car, among others. Illegible or plainspoken, crude or whimsical, Friedlander’s signs are an unselfconscious portrait of modern life. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his many monographs are Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work, among others. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Among the most important living photographers, Friedlander is in the collections of museums around the world.

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Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book. Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph’s College. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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Accompanying the artist’s first major US overview in 15 years, this volume celebrates over four decades of Wall’s uncanny everyday dramas Vancouver-based artist Jeff Wall (born 1946) has been making arresting, conceptually and politically complex pictures for over four decades. Using large-format photography that embraces both the deliberateness of painting and the immediacy of the moving image, he is known for immersive, sharply detailed scenes featuring figures enacting everyday dramas. Departing from the convention of street photography and its aspirations of authenticity, Wall instead favors the artificial and the cinematic; he meticulously plans and constructs his pictures, scouting locations, casting actors as subjects and organizing the shoots with the rigor of a movie production. Jeff Wall accompanies the artist’s monographic exhibition at Glenstone, a survey of works made between 1978 and 2018. It is also his largest exhibition in the US since his widely acclaimed 2007 midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art. Comprising nearly 30 artworks, the catalog appraises the full range of the artist’s pioneering oeuvre, from early pictures displayed in backlit lightboxes and black-and-white silver gelatin prints to more recent large-scale inkjet color prints. Jeff Wall also features an introduction by Glenstone cofounder and director Emily Wei Rales and an essay by art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky.

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This volume brings to light what is American about American design. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and 5 Continents Editions present a new series dedicated to industrial and graphic design. Each volume, beautifully designed and with superbly printed reproductions, offers an overview of a single country's design achievements and illustrates its particular design history and aesthetic, showcasing prominent architects and designers through exemplary works drawn from MoMA's unmatched collection. Each volume contains an introduction by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, and an illustrated essay by a distinguished design critic, accompanied by a visual timeline of significant events and a comprehensive bibliography. American design, like much of American culture, perennially oscillates between populism and elitism, between the revolutionary beauty and availability of Tupperware and the elusive exclusivity of Tiffany's. This book traces the development of American design from the 'armory practice' of early American machinists, through mid-century 'design for modern living', to the branded, consumer-oriented design of the present day. Paola Antonelli's lively introduction provides an overview of United States' design culture; an essay by Russell Flinchum illuminates the masterpieces of modern American design reproduced in the volume's plate section. They are accompanied by an illustrated chronology of important events that have influenced American design as well as a comprehensive bibliography.

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“A great and unlikely success story, Da Corte creates funny and therapeutic works in the hope of easing the ‘exquisite pain’ of modern life.” –New York Times This comprehensive monograph celebrates the acclaimed Philadelphia-based installation artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980), famed for his show-stopping 2021 Roof Garden Commission for the Met, As Long as the Sun Lasts. Da Corte’s Day-Glo works are distinctly rooted in traditional American arts and culture—tellingly, as a teenager he planned to become an animator for Disney—and the artist himself often appears in his films, impersonating iconic figures such as Popeye, the Statue of Liberty, Fred Rogers or Eminem. Throughout, the pop flavor of Da Corte’s aesthetics is mixed with a satirical existentialism: his works often combine sadness and effortless play, connecting our sense of self with consumer culture—from the films we watch to the objects we buy, give and throw away. Published for a major retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and documenting all of his major works to date, Alex Da Corte: Mr. Remember matches the artist’s high-production, ultra-chromatic sensibility in its gorgeous production, with a three-color cloth binding, silver foil on the cover, a paperback volume sewn into the book and an abundance of riotous color throughout, with more than 100 pages of installation views from previous exhibitions.

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The Museum of Drawers is the world's smallest museum of twentieth-century art. This unique piece has been conceived and put together by the Swiss-born artist Herbert Distel in 1970-77. It consists of an old cabinet made to hold reels of sewing silk whose twenty drawers each contain twenty-five compartments. Each of the 500 compartments houses an original miniature work of art, many of which were made especially for the Museum of Drawers. The list of artists represented includes such influential pioneers as Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. Following a first presentation as a work-in-progress at the documenta 5 in Kassel (Germany) in 1972, the Museum of Drawers caused sensation internationally. It has been shown several times in New York, including a presentation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1999, and at many museums around the world. After its restoration it is now part of the permanent collection of the Kunsthaus, Zurich. This new book is a comprehensive documentation of this extraordinary object. It shows all twenty drawers with their content as well as each of the 500 miniature art works individually and in true size. Essays on the history and importance of the entire work and concept complement the images.

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Why have some of the most interesting artists of our time committed themselves to some of the most devastating conflicts on Earth? Why are some of the most interesting artists of our time committed to engaging with conflict and exploitation around the world? Beautiful, Gruesome, and True tells the stories of three of them: Amar Kanwar makes riveting films about the destruction of rural India in the drive to extract natural resources. Teresa Margolles creates haunting installations from the traces of crime scenes and drug-related violence in Mexico. The anonymous collective Abounaddara has produced more than four hundred short films chronicling the uprising and civil war in Syria. Drawing on years of research and extensive reporting, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie vividly recounts how a group of “political” artists found ways to produce remarkable works of art that demand deliberate and methodical ways of thinking—works that are contemplative, thoughtful, even redemptive. Named one of the best art books of the year by Holland Cotter of the New York Times “A gifted critic and a compelling journalist, Wilson-Goldie offers many important insights into the challenges these artists face in their confrontation with authority, repressive regimes, death, and violence. The story she tells could not be more timely.” —Glenn D. Lowry, David Rockefeller Director, Museum of Modern Art

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Flatbed Press, a collaborative publishing workshop in Austin, Texas, has become one of the premier artists’ printshops in America and an epicenter for the art form. Founded in 1989 by Mark Lesly Smith and Katherine Brimberry, Flatbed provides studio spaces for visiting artists to work with the press’s master printers to create limited editions of original etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and monotypes. The roster of artists who have worked at Flatbed includes Robert Rauschenberg, John Alexander, Dan Rizzie, Terry Allen, Michael Ray Charles, Luis Jimenez, Julie Speed, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and James Surls. Prints produced at Flatbed have been collected by major museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.Lavishly illustrated and printed, Flatbed Press at 25 presents a quarter-century retrospective of the press’s productions. The book features the prints of thirty-five prominent artists who have collaborated with the press, each represented by full-color plates and a lively reminiscence by Smith and Brimberry that describes the process of working with the artist. Eighty additional artists are also included with a single print and documentary details. Susan Tallman’s introduction places Flatbed in a national context, defines its uniqueness, and discusses many of the outstanding artworks that have been created there. Photographs of the facilities and equipment, technical processes, and artists and printers at work, as well as a chronology and glossary, complete the volume.

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This stunning volume represents a major photo-historical discovery: it is the first book on Homer Page (1918–1985), a brilliant but overlooked photographer active in the late 1940s and 50s. It focuses on his previously unpublished photographs of New York taken while a Guggenheim Fellow from 1949 to 1950. First recognized by Ansel Adams in 1944, California-born Page exhibited in a major show of young artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. Four years later, he was invited to participate in MoMA’s seminal photography symposium, alongside 10 other prominent photographers, including Walker Evans, Irving Penn, and Aaron Siskind. In photographs that echo those of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank, Page uniquely synthesized documentary and artistic concerns. His work as a Guggenheim Fellow––which depicts pedestrians in motion, friends and family members conversing, commuters, children playing, political rallies and protests, and isolated figures resting and watching––offers a fascinating look at New York during the late 1940s and represents the culmination of Page’s most important work. The Photographs of Homer Page features a plate section of these compelling and often poignant images together with texts by the artist, a bibliography, and an essay by noted scholar Keith F. Davis examining Page’s life and career––including his connections with Lange, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, and Edouard Steichen. Distributed for The Nelson-Atkins Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (February 14–June 7, 2009)

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The untold story behind one of the most controversial album releases in modern music history, for fans of the Wu-Tang Clan, hip-hop music, and all those interested in the music industry. Take a kid with a dream. A legendary hip hop group. 6 years of secret recordings. A casing worthy of a king. A single artifact. Hallowed establishment institutions. An iconoclastic auction house. The world's foremost museum of modern art. A bidding war. Endless crises of conscience. An angry mob. A furious beef. A sale. A villain of Lex Luthor-like proportions. Bill Murray. The FBI. The internet gone wild. In 2007, the innovative Wu-Tang producer, Cilvaringz, feeling that digitisation increasingly supported the perception of music as disposable, took an incendiary idea to his mentor, hip hop legend, RZA: create a unique physical copy of a secret Wu-Tang album, to be encased in silver and sold through auction as a work of contemporary art. The plan raised a number of complex questions: Would selling one album for millions be the ultimate betrayal of music? How would fans react to an album that's sold on condition it could not be commercialised? And could anyone justify the ultimate sale of the album to the infamous pharmaceutical mogul Martin Shkreli? "An epic battle between colorful, creative maniacal heroes and one of the blandest beta-villains of our time. Couldn't put it down."Patton Oswalt, comedian and bestselling author of Silver Screen Fiend

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In his engaging and penetrating observations of major modern and contemporary visual art, Shiff has written about an impressive range of artists, including Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, and Peter Saul. A leading scholar and powerful voice, Shiff’s insight into prominent artistic practices spans generation, place, and approach, as seen in this considered selection of essays on twenty-seven artists. These writings first appeared in exhibition catalogues for institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern. Shiff supplements his unquestionable fluency in art history with insights cultivated from his readings in philosophy, phenomenology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, among other fields. Shiff’s writing—conceptually rich, meditative, and enjoyable to read—is attuned to the nuances of artistic style and technique, drawing out art’s social implications not merely from broad histories but also directly from artists’ mark making and technical gestures. Actively engaged as a viewer and a writer, Shiff has transformed the act of looking at art into contemplative and captivating writing. Writing After Art includes essays on Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Georges Braque, Jim Campbell, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Suzan Frecon, Lucian Freud, Ellen Gallagher, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Peter Saul, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Jack Whitten, and Zeng Fanzhi.

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During the 1950s a few painters in the San Francisco Bay Area began to stage personal, dramatic defections from the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism, creating what would come to be known as Bay Area Figurative Art. In 1949 David Park destroyed many of his nonobjective canvases and began a new style of consciously naive figuration. Soon Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn joined Park and other painters such as Nathan Oliveira, Theophilus Brown, James Weeks, and Paul Wonner in the move away from abstraction and toward figurative subject matter. When artists such as Bruce McGaw, Manuel Neri, and Joan Brown emerged as a second generation of figurative artists, the momentum grew for a powerful new development in American painting. The achievement of Bay Area Figurative painters and sculptors has become directly relevant to current debates regarding abstraction and representation, as well as to discourses on modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, the historical phenomenon of the movement is an important case study in the evolution of modernism in America, serving as an early example of rupture in the formalist 'mainstream.' "Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965" was written to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it is the first study of the movement as a whole and is the broadest and most accurate account of the careers and interactions of ten Bay Area artists who worked in this new style.

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Collaborations during the Great Depression between the Mexican artist and Communist activist Diego Rivera and institutions in the United States and Mexico were fraught with risk, as the artist occasionally deviated from course, serving and then subverting his patrons. Catha Paquette investigates controversies surrounding Rivera’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, his Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads, and the Mexican government’s commissioning of its reconstruction at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She proposes that both the artist and his patrons were using art for extraordinary purposes, leveraging clarity and ambiguity to weigh in on debates concerning labor policies and speech rights; relations between the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union; and the viability of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Rivera and his patrons’ shared interest in images of labor—a targeted audience—made cooperative ventures possible.In recounting Rivera’s shifts in strategy from collaboration/exploitation to antagonism/conflict, Paquette highlights the extent to which the artist was responding to politico-economic developments and facilitating alignment/realignment among leftist groups for and against Stalin. Although the artwork that resulted from these instances of patronage had the potential to serve conflicting purposes, Rivera’s images and the protests that followed the destruction of the Rockefeller Center mural were integral to a surge in oppositional expression that effected significant policy changes in the United States and Mexico.

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This book features exclusive photography by the renowned artist Allen Jones RA. These images enable the shadows of his celebrated sculptures to become works of art in their own right, revealing a viewpoint previously unseen or unnoticed. Intermingled with views of the Jones’s own home and household objects, Shadows is an intimate, beautiful and playful 60-page publication featuring previously unseen work by the artist.“Light can transform a solid object into an insubstantial shadow, not a copy but a unique slant on the real thing,” says Jones. “Domestic shadows are anchored to their place but out of doors they can come alive seemingly of their own volition. Dependent on the sun and moon for their existence these shadow drawings will exactly repeat themselves only once a year – weather permitting.”Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, whose paintings and sculptures are held in many important international collections, including: Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.Shadows is one of a collection of four artist’s books by Allen Jones that Black Dog Press is releasing in September 2022.

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The democracy of the image in the social landscape The saturation of our social landscape by photographs and photographers is apparent from any public point of view. Photography is arguably the most democratic of mediums, even more accessible today across culture and class than language. In some regards, this has been Lee Friedlander’s most enduring subject—the way that average citizens interact with the world by making pictures of it, as well as how those pictures and the pictures constructed for advertising or political purposes define the public space. In Lee Friedlander: The People’s Pictures we see photographs spanning six decades, most of the geographic United States and parts of Western Europe and Asia. These pictures are uniquely Friedlander photographs: as much about what’s in front of the camera as they are about the photographer’s lifelong redefining of the medium. Like his exploration of words, letters and numbers in the social landscape, these photographs of photography’s street presence seem inevitable to Friedlander’s vast visual orchestration of what our society looks like. But make no mistake, Friedlander’s photographs are not objective documents; they are intentional, authored, playful, intelligent creations made through his unprecedented collaboration with time and place. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 50 monographs since 1969, and has exhibited extensively around the world for the past five decades, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2005. Friedlander lives in New York.

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Observing our contemporary culture, the distinguished critic Roger Kimball sees that the avant-garde assault on tradition has long since degenerated into a sclerotic orthodoxy. He finds that the "cutting edge," as defined by the established tastemakers, turns out time and again to be a stale remainder of past impotence. And he locates a pretense that the traditional is the enemy rather than a springboard to originality. In Art's Prospect, Mr. Kimball observes that most of the really invigorating action in the art world today is a quiet affair. It takes place not at the Tate Modern in London or at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, not in the Chelsea or TriBeCa galleries but off to one side, out of the limelight. It usually involves not the latest thing but permanent things—they can be new or old, but their relevance is measured not by the buzz they create but by silences they inspire. With reviews and essays composed over the last twenty years and revised for this book, Art's Prospect illuminates some of the chief spiritual itineraries of modern art. It provides, in Mr. Kimball's words, "a collage whose elements, when seen from one perspective, add up to a diagnosis of a malady, and, when seen from another perspective, offer hints of where effective remedies can be found."

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Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls had its premiere at the Film-Maker’s Cinémathèque on 15 September 1966. It sold out a 200-seat theatre and went on to become the first film to move from the underground to commercial cinema. Since 1972, when Warhol pulled all of his films out of distribution, the public has had extremely limited access to The Chelsea Girls , outside of museum screenings. In honour of the 20th Anniversary of The Andy Warhol Museum and what would have been Warhol’s 85th birthday, hundreds of Warhol’s films – some never seen before – have been converted to a digital format with the partnership of The Andy Warhol Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Moving Picture Company (MPC), a Technicolor Company. This book is an in-depth look at Warhol’s most famous film. It includes all newly digitized film stills, never-before-published transcripts, unpublished archival materials, and expanded information about each of the individual films that comprise the three- plus hour film. As the film alternates sound between the left and right screens, the book reproduces the transcript in complete form as one hears it, with imagery from the corresponding reels. There is also a full transcription of the unheard reels in the back of the book. This is a substantial contribution to the scholarship on Warhol’s complex and most commercial film.

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A comprehensive survey of rarely seen collages from the master of abstraction Over the course of more than 50 years, renowned American artist Ellsworth Kelly made approximately 400 postcard collages, some of which served as exploratory musings and others as studies for larger works in other mediums. They range from his first monochrome in 1949 through his last postcard collages of crashing ocean waves, in 2005. Together, these works show an unbounded space of creative freedom and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced and translated the world in his art. Many postcards illustrate specific places where he lived or visited, introducing biography and illuminating details that make these pieces unique among his broader artistic production. Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards is the most extensive publication of Kelly’s lifelong practice of collaged postcards. Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was born in Newburgh, New York. In 1948 he moved to France, where he came into contact with a wide range of classical and modern art. He returned to New York in 1954 and two years later had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized his first retrospective in 1973. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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As the focal point of numerous high-profile exhibitions, the sculpture of Richard Serra (b. 1939) has drawn international acclaim. Yet even those who have marveled at Serra's intellectually rigorous and large works of sculpture may not be familiar with his equally intriguing drawings. This handsome book brings together for the first time Serra's drawn work, considering the artist's investigation of medium as an activity both independent from and linked to his pioneering sculptural practice. First working in ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon on paper, Serra originally used drawing as a means to explore form and perceptual relations between his sculpture and the viewer. Over time, his drawings underwent significant shifts in concept, materials, and scale and became fully realized and autonomous works of art. The grand, bold forms he created with black paintstick in his monumental Installation Drawings were designed to disrupt and complement existent spaces and eventually began to occupy entire rooms. In the late 1980s, Serra explored the tension of weight and gravity through layering, and his most recent work experiments with surface effects, using mesh screens as intermediaries between the gesture and the transfer of pigment to paper.Distributed for The Menil CollectionExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art(04/11/11-08/28/11)San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (10/15/11-01/16/12)The Menil Collection (03/02/12–06/10/12)

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The definitive story of a game so great, even the Cold War couldn't stop itTetris is perhaps the most instantly recognizable, popular video game ever made. But how did an obscure Soviet programmer, working on frail, antiquated computers, create a product which has now earned nearly 1 billion in sales? How did a makeshift game turn into a worldwide sensation, which has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, inspired a big-budget sci-fi movie, and been played in outer space?A quiet but brilliant young man, Alexey Pajitnov had long nurtured a love for the obscure puzzle game pentominoes, and became obsessed with turning it into a computer game. Little did he know that the project that he laboured on alone, hour after hour, would soon become the most addictive game ever made.In this fast-paced business story, reporter Dan Ackerman reveals how Tetris became one of the world's first viral hits, passed from player to player, eventually breaking through the Iron Curtain into the West. British, American, and Japanese moguls waged a bitter fight over the rights, sending their fixers racing around the globe to secure backroom deals, while a secretive Soviet organization named ELORG chased down the game's growing global profits. The Tetris Effect is an homage to both creator and creation, and a must-read for anyone who's ever played the game- which is to say everyone.

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San Francisco based photographer Michael Jang spent nearly four decades working as a successful commercial portrait photographer. Unbeknownst to the world, however, he was simultaneously assembling a vast archive of thousands of remarkable images documenting, variously: college days, Hollywood celebrities, would-be weather-presenters, San Francisco street scenes, his family, Bay Area punks and adolescent garage bands. Jang revealed nothing of his ever-expanding, eclectic archive for almost 40 years until 2003, when he submitted a number of images for consideration to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. Jang's work attracted immediate acclaim, and for the past decade he has continued to unveil his considerable oeuvre in national and international exhibitions and monographs. The photographer's first major monograph, Who Is Michael Jang? highlights the photographer's most important bodies of work. Introduced by Jang's longtime collaborator and SFMoMA curator emerita of photography, Sandra Phillips, this volume offers readers a long-overdue introduction to Jang's incredible images.Michael Jang (born 1951) has practiced photography in San Francisco for more than 50 years. Expanding the medium's perceived parameters from the very outset of his engagement, Jang's eclectic images, many of which were authored throughout America's photographic golden age, have more recently drawn broad renown. After decades of successful commercial portraiture, Jang began to revisit the vast archive of unseen, spontaneous images he has amassed, many of which betray the influence of celebrated street photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Lisette Model.

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The American artist's much-imitated memoir, described by Paul Auster as "one of the few totally original books I have ever read.” Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.

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'Milton Glaser's designs changed the way we see the world.' - Gloria Steinem An overview of the work of illustrator and designer Milton Glaser during the 1960s and 70s From 1954, when he co-founded the legendary Push Pin Studios, to the late ’70s, Milton Glaser was one of the most celebrated graphic designers of his day, whose work graced countless book and album covers, posters, magazine covers, and advertisements, both famous and little-known. Glaser largely defined the international visual style for illustration, advertising, and typeface design and interest in his legacy continues unabated, with modern creatives acknowledging his influence; for example, in 2014 Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner enlisted Glaser to design the ad campaign and branding for the show’s final season. His renowned work garnered solo exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Creator of the iconic ‘I love NY’ logo (featuring a heart symbol in place of the word ‘love’) and cofounder of New York magazine, Glaser received numerous accolades and lifetime achievement awards. Across thousands of works across all print media, he invented a graphic language of bright, flat color, drawing and collage, imbued with wit. This collection of work from Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of his design that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

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A major reassessment of a critical moment in the work of one of the 20th century’s most important artists The works that Henri Matisse (1869–1954) executed between late 1913 and 1917 are among his most demanding, experimental, and enigmatic. Often sharply composed, heavily reworked, and dominated by the colors black and gray, these compositions are rigorously abstracted and purged of nearly all descriptive detail. Although they have typically been treated as unrelated to one another, as aberrations within the artist’s oeuvre, or as singular responses to Cubism or World War I, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 reveals the deep connections among them and their critical role in an ambitious, cohesive project that took the act of creation itself as its main focus.This book represents the first sustained examination of Matisse’s output from this important period, revealing fascinating information about his working method, experimental techniques, and compositional choices uncovered through extensive new historical, technical, and scientific research. The lavishly illustrated volume is published to accompany a major exhibition consisting of approximately 125 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. It features in-depth studies of individual works such as Bathers by a River and The Moroccans, which Matisse himself counted as among the most pivotal of his career, and facilitates a greater understanding of the artist’s innovative process and radical stylistic evolution.Distributed for the Art Institute of ChicagoExhibition Schedule:Art Institute of Chicago (March 20 – June 6, 2010)Museum of Modern Art, New York (July 18 – October 11, 2010)

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Internationally acclaimed for paintings, collages, and prints that draw inspiration from sources as diverse as twentieth-century modernism, the geometry of Cubism and Minimalism, nineteenth-century English botanical illustrations, and the floral and geometic forms of traditional Indian and Egyptian art, Dan Rizzie is an artist with a seemingly endless capacity to absorb visual information and transform it into a unique iconography of the natural world. Since the mid-1970s, he has had some ninety solo exhibitions and has been included in over one hundred group exhibitions. Rizzie’s work is in the permanent collections of leading art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art.Dan Rizzie is the first monograph on this major American artist. It presents a hundred works to showcase an artistic career trajectory that has been both broad-ranging and consistent over four decades. Jane Livingston sets Rizzie’s work in context with an introduction that traces his artistic influences and production from his formative years in Egypt, Jordan, Jamaica, India, and Texas to his mature work created in New York. An extensive interview between Rizzie and editor Terrie Sultan further explores his artistic journey and creative philosophy, while Mark Smith highlights Rizzie’s development and importance as a printmaker. Praising Rizzie’s achievements across painting, collage, and printmaking, as well as the innovative ways in which he often blends these media, Smith proclaims that Rizzie’s art “is ‘decorative’ in the very best way, in that it possesses a timeless beauty. And it is, above all, authentically his own.”

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This lavishly illustrated study tells the remarkable story of the work of one of Canada's great artists. David B. Milne (1882–1953) left rural Ontario for New York City in 1903. After training at the Art Students' League, he emerged as an exceptional modernist, one of the "American extremists" whose work was well-represented at the famous 1913 Armory Show and won a major prize at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. Milne's studio at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue was a regular forum for artists to debate art and aesthetics. In 1916 Milne moved to Boston Corners, in upstate New York, devoting his whole time to painting. As he wandered over the years to the deserted battlefields of France and Belgium, to the Adirondacks, then back to Canada – Temagami, Palgrave, Muskoka, Toronto, Uxbridge, and Baptiste Lake – his work continued to evolve and change. Critics and other artists hailed him as one of the most original, intelligent, and innovative artists in Canada. His work is in the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and public galleries in Canada. Silcox's biography, based on many years of research for the Milne　Catalogue Raisonné, has been described as "a near-perfect dialectic between biography and aesthetic analysis."It stands both as a definitive study of Milne and as a model for future biographies of Canadian artists. This gorgeous book, in a large format with 190 images in colour and 240 black-and-white illustrations throughout, will astonish and delight all those interested in art history, and in the life of a unique individual.

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In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression - the art collection, the anthology, and the archive - and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. "Collecting as Modernist Practice" demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.

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Cultural diplomacy—“winning hearts and minds” through positive portrayals of the American way of life—is a key element in U.S. foreign policy, although it often takes a backseat to displays of military might. Americans All provides an in-depth, fine-grained study of a particularly successful instance of cultural diplomacy—the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), a government agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller that worked to promote hemispheric solidarity and combat Axis infiltration and domination by bolstering inter-American cultural ties.Darlene J. Sadlier explores how the CIAA used film, radio, the press, and various educational and high-art activities to convince people in the United States of the importance of good neighbor relations with Latin America, while also persuading Latin Americans that the United States recognized and appreciated the importance of our southern neighbors. She examines the CIAA’s working relationship with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Society of the Americas; its network and radio productions in North and South America; its sponsoring of Walt Disney, Orson Welles, John Ford, Gregg Toland, and many others who traveled between the United States and Latin America; and its close ties to the newly created Museum of Modern Art, which organized traveling art and photographic exhibits and produced hundreds of 16mm educational films for inter-American audiences; and its influence on the work of scores of artists, libraries, book publishers, and newspapers, as well as public schools, universities, and private organizations.

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Ralph Gibson's diptych portrayal of Israel, a land at once deeply modern and incredibly ancient The American photographer Ralph Gibson traveled throughout Israel and the surrounding region to create a portrait of a land where the past is vividly part of the present. He contrasts these in two-page spreads in which color and black-and-white images face one another: ancient language in a visual dialogue with contemporary human experience. As architect Moshe Safdie writes in his accompanying text: “This is the promise and paradox of Israel, a new country in an ancient land, modernity next to regression, with abundant and creative energy and cultural output. The high-tech world of invention next to Torah studies. It is still a young country, not even yet past its Centennial. With an optimistic eye, one sees the promise yet to be.” For this project, Gibson visited many of the well-known sites of the Holy Land, including the ancient city of Petra in Jordan as well as Masada and the Sea of Galilee flowing into the River Jordan. Sacred Land is a sumptuous study in the aesthetics of time. Ralph Gibson was born in Los Angeles in 1939. In 1956 he enlisted in the navy, where he began studying photography. Since he published his first photobook The Somnambulist in 1970, his work has been the subject of over 40 monographs. His work is widely exhibited and held in public collections around the world, such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

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When you step into the headquarters of the Republic of Fritz Hansen in Allerød, northwest of Copenhagen, you are breathing in the spirit of a company that has made design history. The showroom, which is a mecca for design and architecture students, displays pieces that have become icons: the Series 7 chair, the Swan lounge chair, the Lissoni sofa. Again and again, the Danish furniture maker has teamed up with big-name visionary designers including Arne Jacobsen, Poul Kjærholm and Piero Lissoni. With these influxes of fresh energy and an unwavering commitment to the core values of Fritz Hansen-creativity, the finest craftsmanship, and careful attention to even the smallest details-the company has succeeded in placing its product into humanity's collective consciousness as well as the offices of the President of the UN General Assembly, the Crown Plaza Hotel in Bangkok, the Banquet Hall of Oxford's venerable St. Catherine's College, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and in private homes all over the world. With over 150 breathtaking photos, this thoughtfully-designed coffee table book tells you about the history of an exclusive brand, the marvellous pieces of furniture that has made it so revered, and provides examples of how a single piece of furniture can beautify an entire room or building and spur the imagination of the people who live there. After closing this book, you'll have a wealthy of new creative ideas and realise that before sustainability became a trendy buzzword, Fritz Hansen was already practicing it in its purest sense, true to its motto: "Crafting Timeless Design."

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In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, one of the first major international exhibitions to present the avant-garde dramatist and poet's paintings and drawings. Derrida's original title, "Artaud the Moma," is a characteristic play on words. It alludes to Artaud's calling himself Momo, Marseilles slang for "fool," upon his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years in various asylums while playing off of the museum's nickname, MoMA. But the title was not deemed "presentable or decent," in Derrida's words, by the very institution that chose to exhibit Artaud's work. Instead, the lecture was advertised as "Jacques Derrida ...will present a lecture about Artaud's drawings." For Derrida, what was at stake was what it meant for the museum to exhibit Artaud's drawings and for him to lecture on Artaud in that institutional context. Thinking over the performative force of Artaud's work and the relation between writing and drawing, Derrida addresses the multiplicity of Artaud's identities to confront the modernist museum's valorizing of originality. He channels Artaud's specter, speech, and struggle against representation to attempt to hold the museum accountable for trying to confine Artaud within its categories. Artaud the Moma, as lecture and text, reveals the challenge that Artaud posed to Derrida-and to art and its institutional history. A powerful interjection into the museum halls, this work is a crucial moment in Derrida's thought and an insightful, unsparing reading of a challenging writer and artist.

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When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence—even something of a legend—among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972— along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art—offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented. The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation. Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it. This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.

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