This text examines three decades of work by the artist, Nancy Spero. Her subject matter, the depiction of women, has ranged from the writings of Artaud to the Vietnam war. She collages and imprints her images of contemporary goddesses onto long papyrus-like friezes that scroll around walls, combining totemic figures with mythological and historical chronicles. This book also includes Spero's own writings many of which are published for the first time.

Nancy Spero (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

Arts & Photography

Bird, Jon

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

Born in Cologne in 1936 and based in New York since 1965, Haacke's strong political, cultural and social concerns are reflected in his installations, texts and sculptures. Throughout his fifty-year career Haacke has frequently changed the presentation of his art to get his message across. Often borrowing from non-art sources such as corporate advertising, questionnaires or scientific experimentation, Haacke is probably the most successful and best-known late twentieth-century artist to create a political art that manages to hit its mark with succinct elegance. Haacke sometimes works almost as a sleuth-like reporter, uncovering museum politics in his art. exhibitions. For example, his 1971 one-person show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, was cancelled in response to his proposal to present the questionable real estate dealings of several New York companies. Though he began as a painter in the late 1950s, Hans Haacke soon began to make works such as Raintower (1962) which drew on natural energies and forces. Subsequent works, for example the opinion-based MOMA-Poll (1970), encouraged active audience participation. The artist is particularly admired for his research into the art world's hidden economies and politics, as well as into repressed histories of places and people. Bevolkerung [To The Population, 1999]) have often drawn immense controversy. Haacke is a unique figure in post-war art, and his work has touched on such diverse movements as Conceptual, Pop, Minimal and Land art. His integrity as well as the formal innovations of his art have proven hugely influential for many generations of contemporary artists. Haacke has presented solo exhibitions in such museums as the Tate Gallery, London (1984); the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and tour (1986); and the Musee nationale d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1989), among others. Haacke has participated in such landmark group exhibitions as 'When Attitudes Become Form', Kunsthalle Bern, and tour (1969), and 'Information' at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970). He has been featured in four Documentas, Kassel (1972, 1982, 1987 and 1997), both 'Skulptur. Projekte in Munster' exhibitions (1987 and 1997), and three Venice Biennales (1976, 1978 and 1993).

Hans Haacke (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Nesbit, Molly

Grasskamp, Walter

Leon Golub (1922–2004) is best known for his iconic history paintings of mercenaries, interrogations, torture scenes, and the riots of the 1980s and ’90s. Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London running from March  through November 2016, this collection of nearly all of Golub’s political portraits from 1975–1978, almost 100 paintings, offers a rich survey of his powerful style with analysis from curator Jon Bird and professor of art history Gill Perry.             Bird and Perry examine the ways Golub increasingly explored the effects of power upon the body through facial expressions, gestures, and poses, and how he invested his characters with psychological tension and depth. As they show, Golub always derived his source material from media representations, aiming to capture the way power—whether political, military, or social—is mediated through the camera lens. This “look of power” is the dominant characteristic of the portraits included here, all painted as part of his Political Portraits series of the 1970s, which captured historical figures—ranging from Fidel Castro and Henry Kissinger to Pinochet and Mao Tse-Tung—at various stages of their public office. With a narrative of arrogance and venality traced clearly across the face, these portraits forcefully show that power is uncompromising. The result is a startling collection of faces, arrestingly rendered through Golub’s signature, visceral style. 

Leon Golub Powerplay: The Political Portraits

Reaktion Books

An international movement that followed specific geographical-cultural patterns, Conceptual Art built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, redefining the institutional and social relationships among production, work and audience in ways which have comprehensively transformed the nature of the art object and forms of artistic practice, both historically and in the present. Investigating and documenting the histories, theories and forms of Conceptual Art, this timely book, including both established writers and a new generation of art historians, shows that Conceptual Art was a broad movement encompassing a range of artistic tendencies. This is the most stimulating account of the movement to date, arguing forcefully for its vitality and potential as well as examining its influence on art today. With essays by Alex Alberro, Stephen Bann, Jon Bird, David Campany, Helen Molesworth, Michael Newman, Peter Osborne, Birgit Pelzer, Desa Philipagesi, Anne Rorimer, Peter Wollen and William Wood.

Rewriting Conceptual Art (Critical Views)

Newman, Michael

Leon Golub

Now in his late 70s, Leon Golub is a leading exponent of history painting – painting as a narrative, symbolic expression of global, social and political relations and of the realities of power. In this book, published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition traveling to Ireland, England and the United States, Jon Bird examines the artist's work from the classically influenced early paintings through depictions of conflict and masculine aggression to compelling images of the last two decades. Despite the widespread critical attention his work has received, the range and extent of his practice and its complex interweaving of the iconographic traditions of both high and popular art have not been properly examined. As a history painter, Golub is acutely aware of the antecedents to his own imagery and symbolism; part of Jon Bird's critical project is to track and define the artist's relationship to modernism. Making a case for Golub's practice of "critical realism" that also takes account of the unconscious, Bird focuses on two themes that dominate Golub's work: how his art figures the body as a sign for social and psychic identity, and what might be termed the symbolic expression of social space.

Otherworlds accompanies a major exhibition of the work of two American artists – Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith – at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, from 13 December 2003 to 30 March 2004. They are both prominent artists, from different generations, whose figurative art addresses issues of the feminine across history and mythology. The book explores thematic connections in their work – the female body, myth and fantasy, the “decorative” – and situates them in the context of post-War American art and social movements, as well as feminist and cultural theory. Now in her mid-seventies, Nancy Spero is a respected feminist artist whose practice has greatly influenced a younger generation. Her work on paper and her installations are an acknowledgement of the power of the carnivalesque, and an exploration of the potential recoding of space and architecture through a visual poetics of word and image. Never abandoning the figure, even at a time when images of women were thought to carry only negative connotations, Spero has systematically refigured the feminine as collective, social and empowered. Coming from the generation of artists immediately following Spero, Kiki Smith has always acknowledged a liberating impulse in her art. Both artists have turned vulnerability into strength, making art that represents the female body, but in forms that avoid objectification or narcissism, and that can speak to the universal without idealization or reduction. Both artists make art from the histories, fantasies, legends and myths of the feminine, reclaiming the female body as an expressive vehicle of emancipation and desire. Contributors: Rosetta Brookes, Sylvere Lotringer, Jo Anna Isaak, Marina Warner and Anne Reynolds.

Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith

Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, Second Edition

Leon Golub (1922–2004) was a leading advocate of history painting—paintings that depicted narrative scenes drawn from famous moments in history and symbolized the ongoing struggle for power in both social and political relations. In this updated and expanded edition of Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, Jon Bird examines Golub’s work from his classically influenced early paintings to his later depictions of conflict and masculine aggression and the compelling images of his final decades.
 Despite the critical attention Golub’s work has received, the range and extent of his practice and its complex interweaving of the iconographic traditions of both high and popular art have not been properly examined. Making a case for Golub’s practice of critical realism, which also takes account of the unconscious, Bird focuses on two themes that dominate Golub’s work: how his art presents the body as a sign for social and psychic identity and how his work posits the symbolic expression of social space. Featuring nearly two hundred color plates, Bird’s study is the definitive look at Golub, defining his relationship to modernism and his place among the great artists of the twentieth century.

Leon Golub (1922-2004) was one of postwar America's most politically engaged artists. His frieze-like figurations of human cruelty and the crimes of warfare kept political painting alive throughout the countless changings of the avant garde of the 1960s and 70s, and his vocal ethical stance and intransigent emphasis on content remains refreshing today. Golub addressed events as they unfurled, from Vietnam to South Africa to Iraq and Afghanistan, confronting chilling acts of brutality head-on, in a weathered, scratchy style synthesized from sources as various as Etruscan and Roman art, French history painting, pornography and sports photographs. This attractively designed full Golub overview accompanies a 2011 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía. Including 150 color plates, it surveys paintings from the 1950s to the present, giving Golub's heroic life work its full due.

Padiyar, Satish

Isak, Jo Anna

GUILBAUT, Serge

Turner

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Books by Bird, Jon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bird, Jon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nancy Spero (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

Hans Haacke (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Leon Golub Powerplay: The Political Portraits

Rewriting Conceptual Art (Critical Views)

Leon Golub

Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith

Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, Second Edition

Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, Second Edition

Leon Golub