Art in America - Most Recent Books

Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism

By Margarita Tupitsyn — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism have not been deprived of attention—at least not in Western scholarship and exhibition practice.

Saul Steinberg: A Biography

By Michèle C. Cone — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Besides Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), who had a retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum in 1978, only a few 20th-century cartoonists (e.g., Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb) have been accorded exhibitions of their works in major art institutions.

Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010

By Robert Atkins — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0100

REMEMBER A TIME in the New York art scene when money talked but did not drown out every other sound? When “uptown” and “downtown” signified not just geography but lifestyle? When a clash between establishment artists and younger avant-gardists was a rite of succession? While these characteristics were commonplace throughout the 20th century, by its end a new (art) world order was firmly in place.

The Master of Aix

By Richard Kalina — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0100

PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906), the subject of Alex Danchev’s sympathetic, well-researched biography Cézanne: A Life, was the quintessential artist’s artist.

Beyond Cute

By Janet Koplos — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0100

This book was written for me-or those like me who wish they better knew the ins and outs of the Japanese art world of the last 20 years.

East Village Rimbaud

By Robert Atkins — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0100

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was as full of contradictions as the changing East Village neighborhood he lived in during the 1980s.

When Art Spoke to Power

By Michael Asbury — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The relation between art and politics during the 1960s and '70s in Latin America is a highly contested subject. Critics and academic writers today reflect the myriad positions that artists themselves once adopted in the heat of the moment.

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974

By Stephen Maine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0100

A young Ed Ruscha appears on the cover of Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Prestel), pointing at the dirt on the side of the road that stretches beyond him to distant, sun-baked hills. The volume was published in conjunction with the recently opened exhibition at LA MOCA, set to travel this fall to Haus der Kunst in Münich. The grainy, black-and-white photograph is from Royal Road Test (1967), an artist's book done in collaboration with Patrick Blackwell and Mason Williams that documents the destruction of a Royal typewriter tossed from the window of a car speeding along Highway 91 in the southern California desert.

Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art

By Stephen Maine — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Accompanying an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum on view through Sept. 2, Ancestral Modern celebrates the gift of Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi's collection to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). This marks the first substantial gift of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art pledged to a major US museum. A useful and beautiful addition to the literature on indigenous Australian art, the collection uniquely focuses on works produced in the last 15 years.

Can Art Change Lives

By Eleanor Heartney — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0100

It’s rare these days to find critics squaring off for a no-holds-barred match over matters of principle. So it was exhilarating to see Claire Bishop and Grant Kester butt heads in the spring of 2006 over the issue of participatory art.

Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons

By Stephen Maine — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Foster After Theory

By Ken Joshnson — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Lucian Freud Portraits

By Stephen Maine — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

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.

L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945-1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy

By Stephen Maine — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Kienholz: The Signs of the times

By Stephen Maine — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

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.

The Kippenberger Clan

By Raphael Rubinstein — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

ALTHOUGH MARTIN Kippenberger's musical achievements were negligible—some impromptu punk club performances and a handful of recordings featuring his energetic drumming or lugubrious baritone—he organized his life and career very much along the lines of a rock star's.

Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment

By Stephen Maine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The contemporary art journal Paper Monument has published a delightful, useful book titled Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment. The publication's editors, Dushko Petrovich and Roger White, asked a wide selection of art teachers (many of them established artists) "to tell us about art assignments: remarkable ones they had given, received, or just heard about." The book includes over 100 responses of varying length. Amidst the professional demands of art schools, these examples suggest training for the unexpected and capricious expectations of the real world.

Rosamond and Friends

By Michele Cone — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Rosamond Bernier first came to my attention in 1977, when I was about to set out on a lecture tour through the U.S. on behalf of the Alliance Française. Several friends urged me to prepare by attending one of Bernier’s famed art talks at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where she appeared six or seven times a year for four decades, ending in 2008.

Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

By Soojin Lee — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Yayoi Kusama reappeared on the international art scene in the early 1990s after two decades of relative obscurity. Ever since, she has seen her fame and critical acclaim grow as never before—along with speculations that her “mental illness” may be part of a lifelong publicity strategy.

Alighiero e Boetti

By Stephen Maine — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

In the forthcoming monograph Alighiero e Boetti (Yale University Press), Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey argues for the importance of the Italian polymath, who died in 1994 at the age of 53. Boetti's widely varied production and arcane processes has been a challenge to understand, and subsequently marginalized his output, although his colorful embroidered maps are well known. The book precedes, but is unrelated to, the July 1 opening of MoMA's, "Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan."