Elsa Smithgall

Fabienne Eggelhöfer

Katy Siegel

Elke Seibert

Kai-Inga Dost

Critics have traditionally confined Paul Klee's contribution to American art as one of "spirit," and limited to the works of the New York School and other Abstract Expressionist painters. In fact, Klee's influence on American art is more expansive, as illustrated in this study of ten artists who, through their use of automatic drawing, color field painting, symbols, and pictographs, reveal how Klee's theories and artistic methods contributed to the history of post-war American art. The ten artists explored include familiar names, such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey, Gene Davis, and Kenneth Noland, as well as lesser-known artists William Baziotes, Norman Lewis, Theodore Stamos, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. The richly-illustrated book features essays exploring Klee's legacy among various schools of American art and a chronology illustrates where and how American artists learned about Klee. It also includes a profile of each artist and their connections to Klee, followed by exquisite reproductions of their works.

after Paul Klee

Ten Americans

Lillian Davies

Pauline Pobocha

Abstract Expressionism

Jonathan Lethem

Hilton Als

Rosalyn Drexler

Rosalyn Drexler, I thought to myself... She'd been praised by Donald Barthelme and Norman Mailer and Annie Dillard and Gloria Steinem and somehow shrugged it all off and stayed underground, irascible, implausible...she touched Pop, she touched Pulp, she touched Porn, she appropriate and satired and surrealled and film-noired, all with an intimacy and eccentricity that made the work a genre of its own.

Who Does She Think She Is?

Ulrich Wilmes

Okwui Enwezor

This unprecedented global survey of the art of the postwar era represents a comprehensive examination of the production of art across all continents, under the conditions engendered by World War II. Accompanying the exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965, this extensive catalogue presents the work of more than 200 artists from over 50 countries. Uniquely, it understands the term "postwar" as a truly global condition, focusing on the increasingly interdependent nature of the world as the result of new geopolitical affinities and technological realities. The catalogue illuminates how these epochal social changes manifested worldwide across the practices of painting, sculpture, installation, performance, cinema, and music, through eight thematic sections: Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Era; Form Matters; New Images of Man; Realisms; Concrete Visions; Cosmopolitan Modernisms; Nations Seeking Form; and Networks, Media, and Communication. Key historical texts, visual essays, color illustrations, and over 35 original contributions by leading international art historians, curators, and scholars offer new insights into the complex legacies of artistic practice and art historical discourses that emerged in the aftermath of World War II's devastation. Artists' biographies, a comprehensive bibliography, and chronologies of the postwar period further supplement what will become an indispensable resource for future research.

Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965

Postwar

Since ’45 details the collision of American history and modern art. Since World War II, New York has been the indisputable center of the art world, and as Katy Siegel shows, it has had a profound influence on the preoccupations that contemporary art would come to have. Tracing art history over the past decades, she shows how anxieties over race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction have supplanted the legacy of European artistic traditions. Siegel’s study encompasses a variety of works, including Rothko’s planes of color, Warhol’s serial silkscreens, Richard Prince’s cowboys, Robert Longo’s Men in Cities, Faith Ringgold’s Black Light, and Laurie Simmons’s dollhouses, and moves fluidly from discussions of artists’ works, art museums, and galleries to cultural influences and significant historical events. Rather than arguing on nationalist grounds or viewing American culture as representative of a now-devalued nation, Siegel explores how American culture dominated not only American artists but created conditions that now, after the full globalization of the art world, affect artists around the world. Since ’45 will interest all readers engaged in post-war and contemporary art in the United States and beyond.

America and the Making of Contemporary Art

Since '45

Christopher Bedford

Mark Bradford's exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is born out of his longtime commitment to the inherently social nature of the material world we all inhabit. For Bradford, abstraction is not opposed to content; it embodies it. His selection of ordinary materials represents the hair salon, Home Depot, and the streets of Los Angeles--both the culture industry and the grey economy. Bradford renews the traditions of abstract and materialist painting, demonstrating that freedom from socially prescribed representation is profoundly meaningful in the hands of a black artist. Bradford's longtime social and intellectual interests will be present in the Pavilion, most notably in his concern for marginalized people, both their vulnerability and their resiliency, and the cyclical threat and hope of American unfulfilled social promise. Coming at a moment of terrible uncertainty, 'Tomorrow is Another Day' is a narrative of ruin, violence, agency, and possibility, a story of ambition and belief in art's capacity to engage us all in urgent and profound conversations, and even action. Exhibition: U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy (13.05.-126.11.2016).

Tomorrow is Another Day

Mark Bradford

Hans Werner Holzwarth

Jeff Koons

Ingrid Sischy

Eckhard Schneider

L'art de Jeff Koons est séduisant et sexy, conceptuel et ludique. Il s'adresse au spectateur de manière très directe, comme on a pu le voir depuis que l'artiste a conquis la scène artistique dans les années 1980 avec ses sculptures de ballons de basket et son lapin gonflable en inox. Depuis le début des années 1990, après être apparu dans la série Made in Heaven, qui le montrait dans ses ébats amoureux avec sa femme, ou avoir dressé la sculpture florale d'un chiot de 12 mètres devant le château d'Arolsen, Koons est devenu une figure incontournable de la vie publique. Aujourd'hui, il célèbre les mythes du quotidien dans des peintures-collages de grand format dominées par des personnages de bandes dessinées et dans des sculptures hautement réfléchissantes dont la facture artisanale ultraperfectionniste transforme des objets insignifiants en œuvres d'art. Au fil des années, Koons n'a cessé de susciter des défenseurs enthousiastes aussi bien que des adversaires farouches, ce qui en fait un des artistes les plus populaires de notre époque.

David Reed

Stephan Berg

Even more seductive than the title of this book are Reeds unique pictorial inventions combine the precise color application of Minimalism with the swirling gesturism of Abstract Expressionism and the magical light of Baroque painting to create an adventurous, multilayered, dense and complexely interlocking ornamentation. Viewing his paintings, often executed in extremely elongated formats (hence this unique landscape book size) is like a cinemaScope experience that opens undreamt-of vistas and horizons. This catalogue to accompany the noted exhibitions, co-designed by the artist, and translates Reeds preoccupation with the film mediun into book form.

you look good in blue

A beautiful showcase of David Reed's 1974-75 paintings and related works. A companion to the upcoming exhibition of Reed's 1974-75 brushstroke paintings, this book features color plates of works originally exhibited in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery. Along with installation images and plates from that seminal exhibition, related paintings, performances, and film images appear throughout the book in the form of a visual essay. New texts by Richard Hell and Reed appear alongside reprints from the time, including the original exhibition text by Paul Auster. A conversation between Katy Siegel and artist Christopher Wool unfolds the significance and legacy of Reed's early work.

Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975

Sarah Roberts

A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped her Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist’s sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell’s life, social circle, and surroundings. Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell’s admirers and those just discovering her work.

Katy Siegel

Books

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