Art in America - Most Recent Books

Lives of the Artists

By Robert Atkins — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

During the third quarter of the 20th century, the New Yorker—characterized by intellectual assurance, cultural breadth and refreshing clarity—played a central role in defining late modern taste. Affiliated writers such as Whitney Balliett, Arlene Croce, Janet Flanner, Brendan Gill, Pauline Kael, Lewis Mumford, Harold Rosenberg and Edmund Wilson frequently upended conventional thinking and promoted vanguard experimentation.

Body of Evidence

By Sue Taylor — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:32:11 +0100

First published in 1858, Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical secured its author, Henry Gray (1827-1861), an enduring place in the annals of medicine and the history of art. A standard reference on the structure of the human body, the book is available today in its 40th print edition and in an abridged version online.1 In The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame, Ruth Richardson now illuminates the context from which this famous tome emerged in Victorian London.

The Azoulay Accords

By Abigail Solomon-Godeau — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The fact that I was reading Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography in April, as the news media reported the potential release of yet more photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison (including, allegedly, pictures of rape), was a matter of chance. But the coincidence is a reminder that Azoulay’s central themes—state violence, violations of human rights, and the nature and potential of photographic witness—are as relevant to our own political circumstances as they are to hers.

Paintings in Proust

By David Ebony — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

In Paintings in Proust, the California-based New York artist and author Eric Karpeles focuses on the more than 100 real-life artists mentioned in the novel.

Keith Haring

By Robert Atkins — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:19:43 +0100

Haring remains a lightning rod for critical discord and hyperbole. According to various observers, he is either one of the best or one of the worst artists of our time.

Surrealism To Die For

By Peter Plagens — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:19:36 +0100

Many avant-garde artists believed that free imaginings, even at their most gruesome, would help render
people unsuitable for social or commercial bondage.

The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation

By Michele C. Cone — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:19:25 +0100

Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959

By Jori Finkel — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Salon to Biennial grew out of Altshuler’s 1994 book The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century. An important study of the making of certain influential exhibitions, that book had one major flaw: a limited number of color plates and tiny reproductions of sprawling exhibitions.

Words For Art

By Barry Schwabsky — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Did Conceptual artists usher art into the realm of language (or language into the realm of art) or, on the contrary, did the fact that art had already become linguistic allow certain artists to invent a practice that could be called Conceptual art?

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe

By David Coggins — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids—taken 1970-75, when the artist was 23 to 29 years old—document his emerging identity, both artistic and sexual. The book Polaroids: Mapplethorpe, published to accompany an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, reveals a photographer determined to bring formal rigor to the medium’s intimacy.

Who Owns Antiquity?

By Benjamin Genocchio — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

James Cuno’s passionate, finely reasoned new book, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage, is a fresh salvo in the ongoing battle between museums that collect antiquities and modern states that claim to be the legal heirs of ancient societies and cultures.

Channeling New Media

By Robert Atkins — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Seemingly all that new media art lacked was validation by the academy. Now three related books from MIT Press and the announcement by Danube University in Krems, Austria, of the November 2008 start-up of the first degree-granting Masters of Media Art Histories program (featuring user-friendly rolling admission and low residency requirements) suggest that perhaps this development is already under way.

Seven Days in the Art World

By Peter Plagens — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World

By Nancy Princenthal — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

An appealing hybrid of autobiography and cultural history, this broad-strokes memoir describes the life of the New Museum’s founding director and the tumultuous art worlds in which it transpired.

I'll Be Seeing You

By Paul Mattick — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

By Richard Hell — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Richard Brody, a New Yorker editor and film critic, whose first book this is, contends that the late-period films are magisterial culminations of Jean-Luc Godard’s lifelong dedication to cinema. Brody is right.

Conceptualizing Craft

By Garth Clark — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Books on theory are rarely urgent reading foranyone but other theorists. The exception iswhen the ﬁeld they cover happens to be in crisis.Then they are voraciously consumed in a search fora solution to whatever ails the ﬁeld. For that reason, two books on craft, Howard Risatti’s A Theoryof Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression andGlenn Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft, are likelyto garner attention as this community wrestles withits most challenging identity crisis in over a century.