Art in America - Most Recent Books

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."

The Map and the Territory

By Brian Boucher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Writing his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes didn't imagine anything like the scene that comes two-thirds into Michel Houellebecq's fifth and latest novel, The Map and the Territory, which appeared in English last week. There we read in grisly detail about the murder and dismemberment of a character named and modeled after Houellebecq. Where Barthes wished to banish authorial biography and intention from literary criticism, Houellebecq's presence is unmistakable. Besides appearing as a character blessed with some of the book's best dialogue, the narrator's style is almost sarcastically flat, emphasizing words and phrases by simply putting them in italics, constantly reminding the reader of his authorial voice.

Untitled Photographs

By Stephen Maine — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Discontinuity is one of the few constants among the 78 images in Untitled Photographs by Tim Barber, recently published by OHWOW. The artist's first monograph includes black-and-white and color work spanning the past 15 years and varies—wildly and in every way imaginable—in subject matter, style, method and affect. The Canadian-born, New York-based Barber courts this apparent inconsistency so aggressively that it's a stance, although the implications of his position are ambiguous. It is unclear whether he figures his eye alone provides understated coherence to the assembled exposures, or if he considers the entire issue of authorial sensibility irrelevant-perhaps outmoded.

Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context

By Stephen Maine — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

After long production delays, the catalogue related to "Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context," a wide-ranging two-part exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in 2006, was finally published earlier this month. The interesting but odd volume raises a fundamental question: should it echo the intention and methods of the curatorial project, or build on its premise? To its detriment, Twice Drawn attempts to replicate the complexities of the exhibition.

MetaMaus

By John Reed — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Pantheon's MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic is a kind of "making of" Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical comic memoir, Maus. The 300-page full-color hardback and companion DVD abound with source materials—interviews with the author, photographs, letters, art—presented in parallel with a conversation between editor Hillary Chute and Spiegelman. The title transcends footnote: MetaMaus is a work of criticism in itself, providing not only notes on process and sources, but considering the entirety of a family, and the thinking of influences of an artist now and at the time the work was created.

Time Machines

By Stephen Maine — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Particle physicists' quest to replicate the hypothetical Higgs boson has never looked as promising as it does this week. And it probably has never looked as good as it does in Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines, just published by Hirmer. Having gained access to a variety of labs on five continents, the Brooklyn-based artist has taken ravishing, even intimate photographs of the objects they were built to house—the enormous, phenomenally complex machines used to study subatomic particles. Approaching his subject in the spirit of detailed research, Greenberg achieves a quirky but convincing reconciliation of the imperatives of artistic and scientific investigation.

Spine

By Stephen Maine — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The artist's voice is not a feature of the typical monograph or catalogue raisonné. Proxies are enlisted to elucidate intentions, to describe sources and processes, to contextualize, to assess—naturally, in laudatory terms. In the interview section, the artist's voice is directed, constrained by queries. While the monograph as a form is indispensable, its format is a routine and R. H. Quaytman's Spine (Sternberg Press/Sequence Press) is a welcome break.

Basso Profundo

By Peter Plagens — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Graphic designer Saul Bass was the first great artist I was ever a fan of. My father, who’d taken night-school art classes as a young man during the Depression, was a jack-of-all-trades in small advertising agencies and had an eye for the good stuff in commercial art.

Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman

By Sue Taylor — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

With studios in New York and Paris, a band of assistants, gold medals and other distinctions, sculptor Malvina Hoffman (1885[?]-1966) was at the height of her career when, at a dinner party in Chicago in 1929, she importuned Stanley Field for work. He was president of the city’s Field Museum of Natural History and grandson of department store mogul Marshall Field, the museum’s first major benefactor. Hoffman’s boldness paid off: within months, she had a contract to produce 147 sculptures for $109,000 to $125,000, a massive sum at the outset of the Great Depression.

Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s

By Richard Kalina — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0100

A passion for self-invention has long marked the American psyche, and nowhere has it seemed more pronounced than in California and, in particular, Los Angeles.

The Trouble with Joan Mitchell

By Faye Hirsch — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Mitchell’s splendid works, daunting intellect, friendships with many preeminent artists and writers, and mind-bogglingly self-destructive behavior are legendary.

Seeing French

By Tom Huhn — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Debate over what precisely was at issue in French critical thought—and, indeed, in France itself—in the 1960s and ’70s continues to this day

Witnessing for Women

By Abigail Solomon-Godeau — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0100

If there is one central conclusion to be drawn from the recent array of books and catalogues on contemporary women artists, it is that there exists no such thing as women’s art, or even feminist art. Indeed, as many feminist scholars, critics and artists have long argued, possession of a uterus, or identification with feminism, in no way determines, much less defines, the nature of women’s artistic production.