Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take

Authors: Constance Lewallen, Greil Marcus, Tim Griffin, John Slyce, Margaret Sundell, Frederic Paul,Elsa Longhauser

Santa Monica Museum of Art, California

The publication was conceived by the artist as an artwork in itself, and is a cross between a traditional catalog and an artist's book. A facsimile of a 1956 travel guide of the type found in hotel rooms, it is spiral bound and cardboard-covered. The original pages are seen behind collaged photographs taken by the artist and the news texts replaced the original advertising copy and travel information.

 

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915
Authors: Carrie Rebora Barratt, Margaret C. Conrads, Bruce Robertson, and H. Barbara Weinberg
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, contact is Gwen Roginsky, General Manager of Publications
This beautiful volume explores American paintings of people engaged in the tasks and pleasures of everyday life between the colonial era and World War I. Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 12, 2009 – January 24, 2010; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 28 – May 23, 2010
October 2009

Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures

Authors: Stephanie Barron, and Sabine Eckmann, ed; with additional essays by  Eckhart Gillen, Svea Braunert, Andreas Huyssen, Astrid Ihle, Paul Kaiser, Lutz Kopeknick, Karen Lang, Richard Langston, Susanne Leeb, Barbara McClosky, Christine Mehring, Ursula Peters, Roland Pruegel, Peter Weibel

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures" accompanied the groundbreaking international exhibition that revealed for the first time the contribution of both Germanys to the development of post war art. With seventeen essays by major historians and cultural critics from the United States and Germany (former East as well) , this is  book challenges familiar notions of  East and West Germany. With essays organized thematically, it examines the scope of post war German painting, sculptures, photography, video, and performance art. It provides entries on artists and works in the show (for many the first in English), is profusely illustrated, has extensive chronology, is well indexed, and imaginatively designed (even to the point of using a typeface designed for East German telephone directories, but never utilized).

 

Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600

Authors: Soyoung Lee, JaHyun Kim Haboush, Sunpyo Hong, Chin-Sung Chang

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This notable exhibition catalogue‚ the first English-language publication on the subject‚ presents a compelling and eloquent account of the artistic and cultural renaissance in Korea during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Within the first two hundred years, the rulers of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) institutionalized the reorganization of civil and religious society, informed on every level by Neo-Confucian ideals.  They supported the production of important genres of art, like landscape painting, inspired by past traditions both native and from the broader East Asian world. Just as significantly, the new social climate enabled bold artistic innovations, especially in ceramics, to emerge during this period. The exquisite paintings, porcelain and other ceramics, metalware, and lacquer featured in the book are drawn from the holdings of major museums in Korea, Japan, Germany, and the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum, and private collections, and attest to the rich complexity of the early Joseon culture.

 

Bauhaus 1919- 1933: Workshops for Modernity

Authors: Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll. With essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Brigid Doherty, Hal Foster, Charles W. Haxthausen, Andreas Huyssen, Michael Jennings, Juliet Kinchin, Ellen Lupton, Christine Mehring, Detlef Mertins, Marco De Michelis, Peter Nisbet, Paul Paret, Alex Potts, Frederic J. Schwartz, T Smith, Adrian Sudhalter, Klaus Weber, Christopher Wilk, and Matthew S. Witkovsky

The Museum of Modern Art

Rethinking the very form of modern life, the Bauhaus school became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. Bauhaus 1919 -1933: Workshops for Modernity, MoMA’s first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, offers an important reconsideration of the school’s significance through a wealth of fresh scholarship and a new generational perspective. Featuring approximately 400 full-color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, the volume includes two comprehensive essays that synthesize new perspectives on the Bauhaus, shorter object-specific essays by over twenty leading scholars that apply contemporary viewpoints to thirty key Bauhaus products, and an illustrated narrative chronology that provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus’s lived history.

Beyond Golden Clouds: Japanese Screens from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum

Authors: Janice Katz, Philip Hu, Tamamushi Satoko, Alicia Volk, Fumiko E. Cranston, Melissa McCormick, Hans Bjarne Thomsen, Elizabeth Lillehoj, Yukio Lippit

Art Institute of Chicago, Saint Louis Art Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum have presented together the folding screens that constitute  the masterpieces of their collection.  Unlike exhibitions of screens in the past, Beyond Golden Clouds includes a range of works from 16th century ink paintings to late 20th century installation works.  The catalogue essays and lengthy entries for individual works in the show reveal the dynamism of the screen format- its lasting meaning in Japan and persistent appeal abroad.

The Book of Omens 

Authors: Massumeh Farhad with Serpil Bağcı With contributions by Maria Mavroudi, Kathryn Babayan, Cornell H. Fleischer, Julia Bailey, Wheeler M. Thackston Jr., and Sergei Tourkin 

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 

Falnama: The Book of Omen is the first ever study of these manuscripts. Written by an inter-disciplinary team of scholars, it offers an in-depth analysis of the illustrated manuscripts and places them with the artistic, cultural, and religious context of the period. The first translations of three of the four texts also provide invaluable insight into some of the most vivid concerns that shaped the world of the Ottoman and Safavids at the dawn of a new Islamic millennium

The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480-1650

Authors: Emily J. Peters, with contributions by Evelyn Lincoln and Andrew Stein Raftery

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design

156 pages, 147 black and white images; introduction, 3 essays, annotated checklist and bibliography. Engraving and its technical transformations.

 

Cézanne and American Modernism

Authors: Gail Stavitsky, Katherine Rothkopf with essays by Ellen Handy, Jill Anderson Kyle, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Jerry N. Smith, Jayne S. Warman

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ and The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland

Cézanne and American Modernism is the first book devoted specifically to the father of modern art's impact on American art. It shows how American painters and photographers cemented his legacy by spreading their respect and admiration for his vision through their own art, writings, and exhibitions.  Examining Cézanne's influence on more than a generation of American modernists, this fully illustrated, 376 page book features painting and photography by Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Arshile Gorky, Max Weber, and many others. Cézanne’s transformative impact on 34 artists is explored by a team of 23 authors, while extensive essays shed new light on a wide range of subjects, from American collectors of his work and his shaping of modernism in the American West to the lasting resonance of his art on Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

Cézanne and Beyond

Authors: Joseph J. Rishel and Katherine Sach

Philadelphia Museum of Art

An ambitious and wide-ranging catalogue with contributions by an array of authors that takes on the rich and complex legacy of Cézanne's art in the twentieth century and beyond.  This catalogue constitutes the most significant and complex contribution to the field of modern art history produced this year and its influence will be felt by scholars and curators for generations to come.  It is the culmination of a massive effort by Rishel and Sachs which has finally come to fruition as a historical exhibition and its essays reflect the myriad perspectives which the authors considered in the formation of this uniquely important show.

Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection

Authors: Cornelia Butler and Christian Rattemeyer

The Museum of Modern Art 

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005, is an extraordinary collection of over 2,500 works on paper. Compass in Hand presents more than 300 of these works and examines the back-and-forth conversations of styles, methods, and emotional temperature that take place between works, artists, and generations. Following the precedents set by other important drawings exhibitions and catalogues from MoMA, Compass in Hand chronicles the state of the medium at the beginning of the twenty-first century; it speaks first and foremost of the vitality of drawing today, and attests to the singular attention, innovation, and depth that artists bring to the medium.

Cutters

Author: Mary Birmingham

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College/The Hunterdon Art Museum

Full Color exhibition catalogue, 51 pgs., to accompany the exhibition "Cutters" on view at Hunter College 1/29 - 3/14/09 and Hunterdon Art Museum 2/8 - 6/7/09 with essay by curator Mary Birmingham.  ISBN 1-885998-82-1.  The introductory essay elaborates on the ways artists transform materials, objects and surfaces through the act of cutting with an emphasis on process.

Dike Blair: Now and Again

Authors: Essays by Xandra Eden and Gary Indiana

Weatherspoon Art Museum

"Dike Blair: Now and Again" is published on the occasion of the artist's first major solo museum exhibition. It focuses on Dike Blair's work from 2001-09, including fifty of his trademark gouache paintings and fourteen sculptures. Designed by the award-winning design firm Purtill Family Business, the 96-page, full-color publication is the first substantial monograph on the artist. It features essays by curator Xandra Eden and author and art critic Gary Indiana, with an introduction by Nancy Doll.

 

Drawn to Italian Drawings: The Goldman Collection

Author: Nicholast Turner, with contributions by Jean Goldman

Art Institute of Chicago

This handsome book features exquisite Italian drawings from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, including works by Raphael, Parmigianino, the Carracci, Guercino, and other masters--all from the distinguished collection of Jean and Steven Goldman. These 135 sheets--many published here for the first time--range from working drawings and preparatory sketches to finished compositions, offering insights into the varied approaches to drawing, the artists' developing styles, the different regional approaches to the medium.

 

Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick

Authors: Deborah L. Krohn and Peter N. Miller, Editors with Marybeth De Filippis; Essays: Natalie Zemon Davis, Marybeth De Filippis, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Jaap Jacobs, Els Kloek, Ruth Piwonka, David William Voorhees, Kees Zandvliet; Catalogue Entries: Gieneke Arnolli, Debra Schmidt Bach, Carrie Rebora Barratt, Monika Bincsik, Charissa Bremer-David, Anne Callahan, Peter Carravetta, Karina H. H. Corrigan, Genevieve Cortinovis, Marybeth De Filippis, Hi’ilei Julia Dye, Stephen R. Edidin, Erin E. Eisenbarth, Titus M. Eliëns, Leslie Gerhauser, Colleen Marie Germain, Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, Margaret K. Hofer, Robert Wilson Hoge, Ashley Hopkins-Benton, Jeroen van den Hurk, Jaap Jacobs, Deborah L. Krohn, Spice Maybee, Roberta J. M. Olson, Kimberly Orcutt, Paul Otto, Ruth Piwonka, Linda Rosenfeld Pomper, Melissa Riebe, Sarah B. Sherrill, Allison Stielau, Michael Thornton, David William Voorhees, Lodewijk J.Wagenaar, Deborah Dependahl Waters, Beth Carver Wees, Anne T. Woollett, Suze Zijlstra

New-York Historical Society and The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage and the lasting legacy of Dutch culture in New York, this book explores the life and times of a fascinating woman, her family, her possessions, and her legacy. Margrieta was born in the Netherlands but lived at the extremes of the Dutch colonial world, in Malacca on the Malay Peninsula and in Flatbush, Brooklyn. When she came to New York in 1686 with her husband and set up a shop, she brought an astonishing array of Eastern goods, many of which were documented in an inventory made after her death in 1695. Extensive archival research has enabled a collaborative team to reconstruct her story and establish the depth of her connection to Dutch trading establishments in Asia. This is a groundbreaking contribution to the histories of New York City, the Dutch overseas empire, women, and material culture.

Gabriel Orozco

Authors: Ann Temkin. Essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Briony Fer, Ann Temkin, Paulina Pobocha, and Anne Byrd

The Museum of Modern Art

Gabriel Orozco emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation. He roams freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting, producing work that is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor. This volume, designed in collaboration with the artist, offers a comprehensive examination of Orozco's career from the late 1980s to the present. Critical essays provide new approaches to grounding Orozco's work in the larger landscape of contemporary art; they are complemented by a richly illustrated chronology that combines biographical information with focused discussions of selected objects. Each entry pays particular attention to Orozco's material practice and introduces the artist's own reflections on the work he has created.

 

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

Authors: Barbara Haskell, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Bruce Robertson, Sasha Nicholas

Whitney Museum of American Art; The Phillips Collection, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

The catalogue accompanies the exhibition, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction,"2009, and it reproduces the exhibition's more than 100 works.  Its essays explore a previously little-known but critical component of O'Keeffe's art: the fascination with and life-long commitment to abstraction on the part of an artist primarily known for her depictions of representational forms.  These essays and the exhibition they support establish reposition of O'Keeffe as the innovative and important American abstract artist she was and make her abstract work accessible in an entirely new way. The catalogue essays chronicle the shifts and changes in subject matter and style of O'Keeffe's art over the span of her long career (1915-84) and shed new light on the meaning and significance of O'Keeffe's art and life, and her place in the history of American abstract art in particular.  It also publishes for the first time excerpts of recently unsealed letters from O'Keeffe to photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, her advocate and dealer as of 1916, and her husband from 1924 to his death in 1946, that are housed at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. These letters, along with other primary documents referenced by the catalogue authors, offer an intimate glimpse into O'Keeffe's creative methods and intentions as an artist and provide an entirely new perspective from which to come to terms with her achievement.

Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Chrales Burchfield

Authors: Cynthia Burlingham, Robert Gober, Dave Hickey, Tullis Johnson, and Nancy Weekly

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

The catalogue is a major scholarly addition to the study of Burchfield and includes illustrations of both paintings and historical material from the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo.

In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976

Authors: By Christophe Cherix. With essays by Christophe Cherix, Rini Dippel, Christian Rattemeyer, and Phillip van den Bossche

The Museum of Modern Art

During the 1960s and 1970s, Amsterdam was a nexus of creative activity, attracting artists from around the world. Reciprocally, some of the most influential Dutch artists traveled abroad extensively before establishing themselves in Amsterdam. As a result, a dynamic cross-pollination of ideas and influences developed there, and many artists produced works directly related to the notion of travel and to Amsterdam, the city that fostered them. In & Out of Amsterdam presents more than 120 works‚ including works on paper, installations, films, and photographs‚ by artists who were part of this remarkable creative culture, including Bas Jan Ader, Stanley Brouwn, Hanne Darboven, Sol LeWitt, and Lawrence Weiner, among many others. The volume illuminates these artists’ significance and explores the unprecedented role that prints, bulletins, posters, mail art, artists’ books, and other ephemera played in the artists’ discourse.

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture

Authors: Anne Collins Goodyear, James W. McManus, Janine A. Mileaf, Francis M. Naumann, Michael R. Taylor

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Edited by Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus, Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, co-published in 2009 by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and the MIT Press, explores the role of portraiture in the construction of Marcel Duchamp’s career and reputation. The fully illustrated catalogue incorporates five substantial essays by leading scholars, detailed entries on each of the exhibited works, a chronology of Duchamp’s life, and a bibliography. Contributors include organizing curators Anne C. Goodyear (Reflections on A Made-Up History‚: Documenting Duchamp’s Impact on Recent Portraiture‚) and James W. McManus  (not seen and/or less seen: Hiding in Front of the Camera‚); Janine A. Mileaf, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Swarthmore College (Bachelorettes,); Francis M. Naumann, independent scholar and dealer (Depicting Duchamp‚); Michael R. Taylor, Muriel and Philip Berman, Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Duchamp and Portraiture‚). The catalogue is fully indexed.

 

James Ensor

Authors: By Anna Swinbourne. With essays by Susan Canning, Michel Draguet, Robert Hoozee, Anna Swinbourne, and Herwig Todts

The Museum of Modern Art

James Ensor was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to Expressionism, yet his work has been too little seen outside of his native country. This catalogue, the most comprehensive volume on Ensor in English, presents approximately one hundred paintings, prints, and drawings by Ensor. Essays by an array of scholars investigate the diverse aspects of Ensor’s career, including his embrace of spectacle and theatricality, his exploration of landscape, the materiality of his work, and his place in the art-historical canon. Works are organized chronologically into three parts and interspersed between the essays, representing Ensor’s prodigious diversity of subject, size, style, and technique. Complete with an illustrated chronology and selected bibliography, James Ensor provides a complete picture of the artist’s daring and experimental nature and highlights key aspects of his art.

Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia

Authors: Alan Chong, Noriko Murai, Christine Guth, Louise Cort, Greg Thomas, Stanley Abe, Hazel Hahn, Pedro Moura Carvalho

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

An exploration of Isabella Gardner's lifelong fascination with Asia, and the role of Asian culture in the Gardner Museum. Themes range from her travels through Asia in 1883-84, her collecting of Asian art, her close friendship with Okakura Kakurzo, and her formation of a Buddhist temple room in the museum, broken up and sold in 1971.

Kandinsky

Authors: Edited by Tracey Bashkoff. Essays by Vivian Endicott Barnett, Christian Derouet, Matthias Haltemann, Annegret Hoberg, and Gillian McMillan

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

No other artist epitomizes the character of the Guggenheim Museum quite like Vasily Kandinsky, who is closely linked to the history of the museum and has been collected in depth in the permanent collection since its founding. Kandinsky is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s career to be exhibited in the United States since 1985, when the Guggenheim culminated its trio of groundbreaking exhibitions of the artist’s life and work in Munich, Russia, and Paris. This presentation of nearly 100 paintings brings together works from the three institutions that have the greatest concentration of Kandinsky’s work in the world, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Stadische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; as well as significant loans from private and public holdings. This traveling exhibition’s final iteration at the Guggenheim Museum will investigate both Kandinsky’s formal and conceptual contributions to the course of abstraction in the 20th century, concentrating on his innovations in painting. Kandinsky traces the artist’s vision through thematic motifs such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes, tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery, and other religious subjects.

 

The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874

Authors: Carole McNamara, Sylvia Aubenas, Stephen Bann, Dominique de Font-Reaulx, Dean MacCannell

University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same title shown at UMMA in Ann Arbor (Oct. '09-Jan. '10) and the Dallas Museum of Art (Feb.-May '10).  Book explores the impact of photography executed in Normandy on nascent Impressionism.  Photographers: Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq and others; painters: Courbet, Bonington, Isabey, Manet, Monet, Degas, Boudin, Jongkind.

 

Long Island Moderns:  Art and Architecture on the North Shore and Beyond

Authors: Kenneth Wayne, Erik Neil, Sandy Isenstadt

Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, Long Island

This catalogue addresses the important yet overlooked role of Northern Long Island in the history of American art.  It celebrates the many major artists who worked in the area (Louis Comfort Tiffany, Edward Steichen, Arthur Dove, Fernand Leger, Irving Penn...) and architects (Frank LLoyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, Phillip Johnson, Richard Meier...).

 

Paint Made Flesh

Authors: Emily Braun, Susan Edwards, Mark Scala, Richard Shiff

Frist Center for the Visual Arts

In "Paint Made Flesh," figure painting is considered in terms of individual vulnerability and as symptoms of Western attitudes since World War II. Susan Edwards’s essay, "The Influence of Anxiety‚” considers works by American artists from the 1950s-1970s, such as Willem de Kooning and Alice Neel, as expressions of humanism and alienation. Emily Braun’s ‚”Skinning the Paint‚” discusses British painters like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Jenny Saville, who use palette knives to ‚”strip” the skin of the figure and then build new layers, a dialectic of destruction and creation. Richard Shiff’s ‚”Drawn on the Body,” discusses such Germans as Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck, whose rough paint application links the inner self to the postwar transformation in national identity. Mark Scala’s‚ ”Fragmentation and Reconstitution‚” examines ways that contemporary artists like Wangechi Mutu and Daniel Richter  posit a transmutation of identity through in images of the body in flux.

 

Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs of Mexico and California, 1948-1955

Author: Phillip Prodger, Graham Howe, William Ewing

Getty Gallery at Los Angeles Public Library

Explores newly discovered works by one of America's acknowledged pioneers of color photography; selected from some 500 photographs most of which have never before been reproduced. Provides art historical context and analysis about the beginning of color photography's acceptance as a fine art medium, enriching our understanding of an important but under-explored aspect of photographic history. Also provides priceless documentation of culture above and below the US/Mexican border.

 

Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance

Author: Paul Martineau

J. Paul Getty Museum

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1958) burst onto the photographic art scene in the early 1920s with images that were visually fresh, technically adept, and decidedly Modernist. He applied his talent for composition to the commercial world, introducing an artist's sensibility to advertisements for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. An early master of the technically complex carbro color process, he used it to photograph nudes, often shown with a variety of props--images that skirted the limits of propriety in their day. This catalogue is produced for the first exhibition of Outerbridge's work since 1981, held March 31 through August 9, 2009, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. It brings together one hundred photographs from all periods and styles of the photographer's career, including his Cubistic still-life images, commercial magazine photography, and nudes. The book includes an essay by the curator and a chronology of the artist's work.

 

Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages,

Authors: Melanie Holcomb; with contributions by Lisa Bessette, Barbara Drake Boehm, Evelyn M. Cohen, Kathryn Gerry, Ludovico V. Geymonat, Aden Kumler, Lawrence Nees, William Neld, Wendy A. Stein, Faith Wallis, Karl Whittington, Elizabeth Williams and Nancy Wu

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Pen and Parchment:  The Art of Drawing in the Middle was the first exhibition to focus on the remarkable and long-overlooked achievements of the medieval draftsman.  Some sixty important leaves and manuscripts dating from the ninth to the early fourteenth century were brought together from public and private collections in the United States and abroad to demonstrate the aesthetics, uses, and techniques of medieval drawings.  It emphasized the quality and range of drawings produced in the medieval west through the inclusion of masterful finished drawings, manuscripts that creatively combined painting and drawing, maps and diagrams, as well as model-books and preliminary sketches.

 

Picasso and the Allure of Language

Author: Susan Greenberg Fisher, Mary Ann Caws, Jennifer R. Gross, Patricia Leighten, and Irene Small

Yale University Art Gallery

This publication, which accompanied an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University charts Pablo Picasso's relationships and creative interactions with the writers of his day through objects by Picasso in Yale's collections.  The publication begins with the close friendships between the artist and writers at the Bateau-Lavoir and concludes with the postwar period, when Picasso became a worldwide celebrity and could be said to have become a "text" himself.  The richly illustrated catalogue, written by an expert group of authors in accessible language, signifcantly contributes to a more scholarly understanding of Picasso's longstanding fascination with the expressive capacities of language.  It also well and accessibly illustrates through over 30 extensive object entries his very immediate desire to achieve language's expressive capacitiess in his own work.

 

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984

Author: Douglas Eklund

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984," on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from April 21 to August 2, 2009. The Pictures Generation is representational of a loosely knit group of artists working in New York from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, which included Robert Longo, Richard prince, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman to name a few. Collectively, they focused on the concept of imagery itself—how pictures not only depict but also shape perceptions of ourselves and the world. At this time, mass media and consumer culture was immersing itself into society, and the Pictures Generation sought to address the rhetorical and psychological functions of the image across all media (photography, painting and sculpture, drawings and prints, film and video, and music and performance). Eklund’s The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 delves into the achievements of these artists as a whole and how they made an impact on contemporary art.

 

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage

Authors: Elizabeth Siegel (primary author); essays by Patrizia Di Bello and Marta Weiss; contributions by Miranda Hofelt

Art Institute of Chicago 

With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale, Victorian photocollage flouted the serious conventions of photography in the 1860s and 1870s. Often made by women for albums, they reveal the educated minds and accomplished hands of their makers, taking on the new theory of evolution, addressing the changing role of photography, and challenging the strict conventions of aristocratic society. Although these photocollages may seem wonderfully odd to us now, the authors argue that they are actually perfectly in keeping with the Victorian sensibility that embraced juxtaposition and variety. This delightful book, the first to examine comprehensively this little-known phenomenon, presents imagery that has rarely‚ and, in many cases, never‚ been displayed or reproduced. Illuminating text provides a history of Victorian photocollage albums, identifies common motifs, and demonstrates the distinctly modern character of the medium, which paved the way for the future avant-garde potential of both photography and collage.

Prendergast in Italy

Authors: Nancy Mowll Mathews, Elizabeth Kennedy, Olga Plaszczewska, Alessandro Del Puppo, Jan Andreas May, Carol Clark

Williams College Museum of Art 

Taking Maurice Prendergast's two trips to Italy (1898-9 and 1911) as its focus, this book explores the international significance of Italy and Venice in particular to modern art.  Essays explore Prendergast's response to modern Italy, his experimental monotypes, travel literature, 19th century response to Carpaccio as a realist, the early history of the Venice Biennale, and Prendergast's elegaic second trip.  Also included is a map of Prendergast's sites in Venice and a catalogue raisonné of Prendergast's Italian works.

 

The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works 

Authors: Harry Cooper 

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Ten themes--Scrape, Concentricity, Line, Gesture, Art on Art, Drip, Stripe to Zip, Figure or Ground, Monochrome, and Picture the Frame--provide a framework for considering postwar American art through the brilliant stable of Meyerhoff artists that includes Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and many others. 

 

Rona Pondick: The Metamorphosis of an Object

Authors: Susan L. Stoops with contributions by George Fifield, Dakin Hart, Nancy Princenthal

Worcester Art Museum

Since achieving international prominence in the early 1990s, Rona Pondick (b. 1952) has become one of the most accomplished sculptors of her generation. Over the past decade, she has combined ancient sculptural methods and the latest computer technologies to produce a powerful group of sculptures that fuse human and animal or flora forms. Unlike other considerations of her sculpture, this volume presents Pondick's art as a lens for looking at centuries of world sculpture from the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, focusing on three aspects of interest‚ the communicative capacity of gesture and posture, the representation of hair, and the effects of repetition. Essays consider Pondick’s hybrids in detail, illuminating their historical relations to art's originating impulses and offering an alternative model for understanding sculpture.

 

Sacred Spain. Art and Belief in the Spanish World

Authors: Ronda Kasl, Alfonso Rodriguez G. de Ceballos, Javier Portus, Luisa Elena Alcala, William  A. Christian Jr., Maria Cruz de Carlos Varona, Jaime Cuadriello

Indianapolis Museum of Art

The catalogue preserves, explicates and expands an exhibition of devotional art, mostly of the 17th century, from Spain and the Spanish colonies in the Americas.  The media include not only painting and sculpture by major masters such as Zurburan, Murillo , Pedro de Mena, and Pedro Roldan, but prints,  goldsmith work, and cult images in various materials by anonymous artists.    The aim is to examine these compelling works "through the lens of belief and its lived experience," pursuing a "cultural interpretation based on a deeper understanding of the creation, reception and uses of art.

 

Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978

Authors: Michael Darling, Elizabeth Mangini, Mika Yoshitake, Graham Bader

Seattle Art Museum

Target Practice is an international, historical survey of the attacks that painting endured in the years following World War II. For the artists in the catalogue, painting had become a trap, and they devised numerous ways to escape the conventions and break the traditions that had been passed down to them over hundreds of years. This phenomenon occurred in all parts of the world, and the exhibition documents why artists felt compelled to shoot, rip, tear, burn, erase, nail, unzip and deconstruct painting in order to usher in a new way of thinking.  The exhibition shows how well-known artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as lesser-known peers around the globe, worked to undermine the supremacy and sanctity of painting. Comprised of more than 70 objects including documentary photographs and video, Target Practice presents a compelling way to appreciate the breakthroughs made by a new generation of artists in the fertile years between 1949 and 1978.

 

The Third Mind: Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989

Authors: Edited by Alexandra Munroe. Text by: Vivien Greene, Harry Harootuni, Richard King, Alexandra Munroe, Ikuyo Nakagawa, David Patterson, Kathleen Pyne and D. Scott Atkinson, J. Thomas Rimer, Kristine Stiles, and Bert Winther-Tamaki

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 illuminates the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literary texts and philosophical concepts on American artistic practices from the late 19th-century through the present. Released to accompany a major survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Third Mind traces how the classical arts of India, China, and Japan and the systems of Hindu, Taoist, Tantric Buddhist, and Zen Buddhist thought that were collectively admired as “the East” were known, reconstructed, and transformed by American cultural, intellectual, and political forces. Featuring 270 objects in array of media, including painting, works on paper, books and ephemera, sculptures, video art, and installations, this richly illustrated catalogue also includes scholarly essays by museum curators and academics specializing in art history, intellectual history, Asian studies and postcolonial religious and cultural studies and representing a range of interdisciplinary perspectives.

 

Time and Tide: The Changing Art of the Asmat of New Guinea

Authors: Molly Hennen Huber, with contributions by Mary Braun, Jim Daniels, and Alphonse Sowada

Minneapolis Institute of Arts 

"Time and Tide: The Changing Art of the Asmat of New Guinea" was written to accompany an exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in collaboration with the American Museum of Asmat Art at the University of St. Thomas. It traces visual and cultural themes illustrating the range of Asmat creativity, and explores how their art has changed in recent years while preserving many core principles. The catalogue contains an introduction to Asmat art by exhibition curator Molly Huber; a brief history of the Asmat people by Bishop Alphonse Sowada, an internationally known expert on their culture; a history of the American Museum of Asmat Art by former director Mary Braun; and a vivid firsthand account of Asmat art today by Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer and journalist Jim Daniels. A highlight of the book is the section featuring detailed, full-color photographs of the 70 breathtaking objects in the exhibition, with engaging commentaries accompanying selected works.

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice

Authors: Edited by Frederick Ilchman. Text by David Rosand, Linda Borean, Patricia F. Brown, John Garton

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The exhibition catalogue "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice” shed new light on a well-studied period by focusing not on a single painter, nor on the whole range of artists at a particular moment, but instead on the artistic dialogue and creative rivalry of the three greatest painters of sixteenth-century Venice.  Although Titian was born thirty years before Tintoretto, and forty years before Veronese, his very long life meant that the careers of the Big Three overlapped for nearly four decades.  While Titian clearly provided the point of departure for the two younger artists, as an elderly painter he in turn learned from their innovations.  The catalogue’s reconstruction of this competitive climate brings to life the extraordinary developments in Venetian art in certain formats, such as the altarpiece, and subject matter, such as portraiture. Moreover, the book makes clear the fundamental roles Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese played in pioneering the new combination of oil on canvas, a technical development that allowed unique expressive possibilities and permitted new approaches to the manipulation of paint, including the personal and identifiable signature touch.  These three artists also helped created the new format of the easel painting, whose portability allowed pictures – rather than artists – to travel to clients, opening up unprecedented creative freedom. 

 

The catalogue began with four introductory essays surveying the three rivals and the competitive climate in cinquecento Venice; the structures of patronage; the early collecting of these painters; and the materials and techniques of the three artists.  The fifty-six paintings in the exhibition, as well as a host of comparative examples, were then discussed through an innovative approach.  Rather than standard catalogue entries, with a page of text per image, the catalogue consisted  of mini-essays on the various groupings in the exhibition. These groupings pitted the three artists against each other based on similar subject matter and composition.  By focusing on how each artist reacted to the others, these mini-essays revealed the richness of their artistic dialogue in such areas as "Armored Saints and Reflective Surfaces,” "The Supper at Emmaus and the Biblical Feast,” "Allegories of Love and Fertility,” "Gentlemen of Fashion,” and "Saint Jerome in the Wilderness.”

 

The catalogue included much new archival and technical information, particularly x-radiography and infrared reflectography, including the discovery of an unprecedented case of Tintoretto slicing up an existing painting to create a new work with a completely different format and subject.  

 

The major author of the catalogue was Frederick Ilchman, the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. One other AAMC member contributed to the catalogue: John Marciari , Curator of European Art and Head of Provenance Research at the San Diego Museum of Art.

William Kentridge: Five Themes

Authors: William Kentridge, Mark Rosenthal, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Rudolf Frieling, Cornelia H. Butler, Judith B. Hecker, Klaus Biesenbach, Michael Auping

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Norton Museum of Art

With a searing body of work ranging from drawings and films to prints, tapestries, and sculptures, William Kentridge (b. 1955) has offered a fresh and distinctive glimpse of the daily lives of South Africans - both during the apartheid regime and after its collapse. This extraordinary catalog, produced in close collaboration with the artist, investigates the five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the course of his career such as: Soho and Felix: works featuring Kentridge's best-known characters, the businessman Soho Eckstein and his alter ego, the anxiety-ridden Felix Teitlebaum; Ubu and the Procession: inspired by Ubu Roi, these projects reflect the excitement, conflict, and rapid social changes in post-apartheid South Africa; Artist in the Studio: an examination of Kentridge's practice and his emergence as an installation artist; The Magic Flute: work related to the artist's set designs for Mozart's opera; and, The Nose: Kentridge's most recent production, including work inspired by his staging of the Shostakovich opera for New York's Metropolitan Opera in spring 2010.Kentridge has created a DVD especially for this publication; it includes fragments from significant film projects (both known and newly completed) as well as commentary that sheds further light on the artist's work. This is the first time that Kentridge has produced a DVD for one of his books.

 

Willie Doherty: requisite distance: ghost story and landscape

Authors: Charlie Wylie; with a contribution by Erin K. Murphy

Dallas Museum of Art

The art of Willie Doherty, one of the most important artists to emerge from Northern Ireland in the past three decades, and two-time nominee for the Tate’s Turner Prize, joins history, memory, and language into an enveloping experience, one rich in beauty and apprehension in the same measure. This exhibition catalogue features two bodies of Doherty’s art: Ghost Story, a tensely beautiful 15-minute media work based on landscape and memory, and a selection of eleven powerful photographs of the Irish and Northern Irish landscape from the 1990s.  Arising from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Doherty’s art is universal in effect and not dependent on any specific context. Charles Wylie’s essay deals with how Ghost Story powerfully evokes a mind at work trying to recall unsettling things, and the impact of troubling memories on the present.