Anita Haldemann

An enormous clothbound panorama of Kara Walker's works on paper--all reproduced for the first time This gorgeous 600-page volume provides an exciting opportunity to delve into the creative process of Kara Walker, one of the most celebrated artists working in the United States today. Primarily recognized for her monumental installations, Walker also works with ink, graphite and collage to create pieces that demonstrate her continued engagement with her own identity as an artist, an African American, a woman and a mother. More than 700 works on paper created between 1992 and 2020--which are reproduced in print for the first time from the artist's own strictly guarded private archive--are collected in this volume, thus capturing Walker's career with an unprecedented level of intimacy. Since the early 1990s, the foundation of her artistic production has been drawing and working on paper in various ways. Walker's completed large-format pieces are presented among typewritten notes on index cards and dream journal entries; sketches and studies for pieces appear alongside collages. The result is a volume that allows readers to become eyewitnesses to the genesis of Walker's art and the transformative power of the figures and narratives she has created over the course of her career. Now based in New York, Kara Walkerwas born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994; soon afterwards, Walker rose to prominence for her large, provocative silhouettes installed directly onto the walls of exhibition spaces. Walker's work confronts history, race relations and sexuality in a decidedly non-conciliatory manner, urging the public to reconsider established narratives surrounding the experiences of African Americans in particular.

Kara Walker: a Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be

Christoph Schreier

Rosemarie Trockel

Edited by Anita Haldemann, Christoph Schreier. Text by Gregory Williams, Brigid Doherty.

Drawings, Collages, and Book Drafts

Hannes Schüpbach

The Swiss photographer and filmmaker Rudolph Burckhardt (1914–99) came to New York City in 1935 and experienced the awe that many first-time visitors to the city share. The grandeur, the energy, the vitality, the sheer movement of this American metropolis all drew Burckhardt in, and he made New York his home for the rest of his life. Equally inflecting his career as a photographer and filmmaker, the city and its vibrant cultural life became Burckhardt's muse. Rudy Burckhardt—New York Moments is a rare collection of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s. It includes not only street scenes and details of city life—“The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and the people in the street astonished me,” he wrote—but also the portraits he made of the New York School painters, most notably Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. As a photographer for ArtNews in the 1950s, Burckhardt had an insider’s view of the burgeoning art scene. But he also recognized the limits of photography—“a photograph, when it gets printed and comes out a picture, becomes like a fact, you know”—and turned his hand to filmmaking. For the rest of his career, photography and film would work together to capture his unique vision. Including photographs, film stills, and interpretive essays, Rudy Burckhardt accompanies an exhibition of Burckhardt's work at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland, and is a fitting tribute to the Swiss photographer who most poignantly captured the energy of mid-century New York.

Photographs and Films

Rudy Burckhardt -- New York Moments

One of the founding artists of modern art, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is now widely acclaimed as the preeminent painter of the late nineteenth century. Less well known is his groundbreaking work as a draftsman; relatively little scholarship has been devoted to this aspect of his oeuvre, which is rarely presented in exhibitions. The Kunstmuseum Basel's Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) contains 154 sheets by Cézanne, making it the most comprehensive and significant collection of the artist's drawings in the world. The collection dates back to the 1930s, attesting to the museum's farsighted collection policy. Two thirds of these drawings come from dissolved sketchbooks, which were reconstructed in view of this presentation. The starting point and nucleus of Cézanne's creative thinking, they allow us to observe Cézanne's everyday practice as a draftsman up close. Early scenes of violence appear side by side with portrait sketches; copies after Delacroix or ancient sculptures alternate with landscapes and bathers. Repetition and slight variation of the angle from which he studied a motif enabled the artist to understand how perceptions formed and to develop entirely new pictorial registers. In his watercolors, Cézanne explored the dynamic interplay between line and color, casting off the constraints of the tradition. In his paintings, too, the line is vital. He often produced a preparatory drawing on the canvas and reworked it with the brush before executing the picture in paint. This book offers fascinating insights into this outstanding painter's creative process. Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Basel - Neubau, Switzerland (10.06.-24.09.2017).

From Sketchbook to Canvas

The Hidden Cézanne

Bernhard Mendes Bürgi

Exhibition at Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, 09.05-30.09.2015

Frank Stella : Paintings & Drawings

Cleveland Museum of Art

Michaël Borremans

Jeffrey D. Grove

Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent, Belgium)

Peter Doroshenko

Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Basel)

S.M.A.K. (Ghent)

Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Kunstmuseum Basel

Drawings

Didier Semin

Toni Hildebrandt

Stephan Kunz

Markus Rätz

This volume offers the first overview of one of Switzerland's best-known artists, Markus Raetz (born 1941), who uses drawing to plan his sculptures, installations and kinetic objects. The book includes pieces chosen from over 15,000 exquisite drawings from the artist's studio, as well as one animated cartoon.

Drawings : Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett

Markus Raetz

Anita Haldemann

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