Published: May 2012

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books

Known to her classmates at Georgia State College for Women as "the cartoon girl," Flannery O'Connor provided satirical illustrations GSCW's student newspaper, The Colonnade, and other school publications while earning a social sciences degree and planning a career in journalism. Executed in the high-contrast technique of linoleum cut from the fall of 1942 until her graduation in 1945, her cartoons skewering the denizens of the Milledgeville campus—roughly drawn but formally dynamic, and often accompanied by punchy, dialogue-driven captions—are the subject of a revelatory new book by O'Connor scholar Kelly Gerald.

Published: May 2012

In the introduction to Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), a collection of his writings from the early 1980s, Hal Foster boldly proclaimed his intention "to seek out new political connections and make new cultural maps," thus creating "a critical intervention in a complex (generally reactionary) present." A fiercely analytic anti-idealist dedicated to Marx and Freud, the twin towers of materialist thought for the 20th century, Foster was then not a theorist per se so much as a theory wrangler. He saw himself as an activist and an intellectual infighter writing against the evil empire of capitalism. Scorning pluralism and most art of the early '80s, and using terms like "resistance," "tactics," "positions" and "strategies," he projected an infectiously militant, iconoclastic fervor.

Published: May 2012

Publisher: Yale University Press

Since the vast majority of Lucian Freud's paintings are portraits, Sarah Howgate enjoyed broad purview while selecting work for the Freud survey now at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and scheduled to travel in July to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Lucian Freud Portraits clutters with anecdote the discussion of Freud's idiosyncratic meditations on the human form. Howgate avers that the exhibition is "a life represented in paint rather than a biographical retrospective," but her essay stresses the artist's personal relationships with his sitters, distracting attention from his pictures' universality by imposing a diaristic reading on his life's work. Such a strategy doubtless makes more accessible the canvases some might find difficult, but it misrepresents the self-evident intention of the pictures, particularly those painted after the late 1950s.

Published: February 2012

Publisher: Foggy Notion Books

The conventional story of postwar American art relies heavily on the chapter in which Abstract Expressionism establishes itself as the dominant idiom, and New York, its home, as the hegemonic art capital. Figurative modes were, if out of fashion, alive and well, of course; MoMA's 1959 exhibition "New Images of Man" surveyed recent American art dealing with the human form. Among the participants was a stalwart of the Los Angeles scene, painter Rico Lebrun (1900–1964), whose grim, harrowing vision of bodies in distress is among 41 painters, sculptors, photographers, installation artists and performance artists that curator Michael Duncan compiles in L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945–1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy.

Published: April 2012

Publisher: Walter König

A handsomely produced volume would contradict the spirit of Kienholz: The Signs of the Times. From the book's cover, which features an incomprehensible detail of a poorly photographed sculpture and "KIENHOLZ" stamped in gold; to gratuitously pastel-tinted pages printed with bizarre typefaces; to an overabundance of snapshots of husband-and-wife team of Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz; the monograph's cheesy design is perfectly suited to the aggressively vulgar Kienholzian oeuvre.