Search results for ""author richard shiff""

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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A Pop Art predecessor, Peter Saul is known for his luridly coloured, contrarian depictions of popular culture and political history. In the 1950s and 60s, reacting against Abstract Expressionism s seriousness and influenced by Surrealist Roberto Matta, Saul began to paint everyday objects like iceboxes, steaks, and toilets in bright colours, along with political works like his series of graphic, cartoonish Vietnam paintings (1960s), which, though they had no clear moral message or political agenda, were evidently anti Vietnam War. Jumbling references like Mickey Mouse, Ethel Rosenberg, and Willem de Kooning, his work also includes darkly humorous self-portraits. His work is often compared to the riotous palettes and caustic wit of artists such as Robert Colescott, Raymond Pettibon, and R. Crumb. The book includes several contributions: Richard Shiff, renowned art historian, writes about the work from a more formalist and historical perspective; Annabelle Teneze provides a substantive essay on every period of the artist s long career; and critic Bruce Hainley addresses the satirical aspect of the artist s work.

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Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cézanne's painting. He shows how Cézanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cézanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.

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Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

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Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

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This book covers the last three years of work by Los Angeles–based painter Michael Williams (born 1978), focusing on exhibitions in New York, Zurich and Brussels. For Williams, reinventing the formalism of painting is a vehicle for understanding his experience in the world.

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In every generation of artists, there are a few who propose a new set of ques- tions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. This handsome monograph considers the painter's entire career, beginning with the early work produced in the 1990s when Doig's enigmatic but wholly new conception of painting was first introduced to audiences. Doig was born to Scottish parents, spent several years as a child in Trinidad, later settling in Canada for his formative early teen years. He found his voice while at art school in London, albeit one that was out of step with the work of the time (much of it installation-based and dripping with neo-conceptualist leanings). He had developed a small following of fellow artists and critics when the rest of the art world caught up and took notice. In 2002, he left London for Trinidad, where he has remained. The small Caribbean island-with its own distinctive light and landscape-has deeply influenced his recent work. This volume was designed in close collaboration with the artist, with a cover and various interior elements created especially by the artist.

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A celebration of the stunning collection of artworks donated in honor of the creation of The Menil Drawing Institute Featuring outstanding 20th-century drawings promised or bequeathed to the Menil Collection for the opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, this elegant volume is a testament to the growing significance of drawings as stand-alone artworks over the past century. The drawings come from the private collections of well-known connoisseurs Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney, and include works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Its chief curator Edouard Kopp profiles the Drawing Institute’s nature and scope, and noted scholars John Elderfield and Richard Shiff discuss historical aspects of drawing, while Terry Winters muses from an artist’s viewpoint.Distributed for the Menil Collection

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"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's Fountain. But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology.Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but crucial. Like its predecessor, this new edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art. For example, Richard Shiff discusses "Originality" in Vija Celmins's To Fix the Image in Memory, a work made of eleven pairs of stones, each consisting of one "original" stone and one painted bronze replica. In addition to the twenty-two original essays, this edition includes nine new ones—performance, style, memory/monument, body, beauty, ugliness, identity, visual culture/visual studies, and social history of art—as well as new introductory material. All help expand the book's scope while retaining its central goal of stimulating discussion of theoretical issues in art history and making that discussion accessible to both beginning students and senior scholars.Contributors: Mark Antliff, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Stephen Bann, Homi K. Bhabha, Suzanne Preston Blier, Michael Camille, David Carrier, Craig Clunas, Whitney Davis, Jas Elsner, Ivan Gaskell, Ann Gibson, Charles Harrison, James D. Herbert, Amelia Jones, Wolfgang Kemp, Joseph Leo Koerner, Patricia Leighten, Paul Mattick Jr., Richard Meyer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, William Pietz, Alex Potts, Donald Preziosi, Lisbet Rausing, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Kristine Stiles, David Summers, Paul Wood, James E. Young

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The fourth volume in the Essays by Leo Steinberg series, focusing on the artist Pablo Picasso. Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis but always put into the service of interpretation. This volume brings together Steinberg’s essays on Pablo Picasso, many of which have been studied and debated for decades, such as “The Philosophical Brothel,” as well as unpublished lectures, including “The Intelligence of Picasso,” a wide-ranging look at Picasso’s enduring ambition to stretch the agenda of representation, from childhood drawings to his last self-portrait. An introduction by art historian Richard Shiff contextualizes these works and illuminates Steinberg’s lifelong dedication to refining the expository, interpretive, and rhetorical features of his writing. Picasso is the fourth volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.

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This publication spotlights the celebrated modern artist Piet Mondrian’s early career, a prolific period that saw the artist focus on figurative landscape painting. Primarily made during the artist’s time in Amsterdam at the turn of the twentieth century, Mondrian's dense, small-scale paintings depict the surrounding Dutch landscape – notably irrigation ditches, canals and farm buildings. The compositions are characterised by complex interactions of light and dark planes, which the artist forms through thick, pigmented strokes of green and brown paint. Marking the last decade of the artist’s engagement with figurative painting, Mondrian's exploration of the interrelationships between colour and space during this period forms the basis for his subsequent abstract works, whilst reflecting the artist’s lifelong interest in nature.

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Inspired by the 1976 exhibition Drawing Now at The Museum of Modern Art, Drawing Then investigates revolutionary developments in the practice of drawing that emerged in the United States during a decade of radical social and political upheaval. With more than 70 works by 39 artists--almost half of whom were not represented in the 1976 exhibition--Drawing Then includes works by Josef Albers, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, among other greats. The volume also includes newly commissioned work by poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in addition to rare archival material, artists’ biographies and a comprehensive chronology linking developments in the art world with the larger social and political events of the decade.

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Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)--including artists, critics, and writers--that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cezanne's own letters. In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cezanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print. Cezanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians--indeed to all students of modern art.

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