Modern And Contemporary Art In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art

Hollein, Max

Metropolitan Museum Of Art (new York, N.y.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Shopping--the word nowadays signifies more than the mere purchasing of goods. From the Paris arcades to the suburban mall, buying has been an essential part of urban life throughout the 20th century. As a ritual, shopping has both created and transformed our identities. For artists, consumer meccas and all their forms of presentation have long been a source of inspiration and criticism. If Walter Benjamin's description of the flaneur in turn-of-the-century Paris was the turning point in our understanding of the complex interchanges between consumer society and art, the cultural productions that followed his theorizing hardly proved him wrong. Consider only Pop Art, a mode of art making created by a generation of artists who themselves were designers of advertising materials, and who used those same products as source material for work that now hangs in museums. Shopping is the first publication to be extensively devoted to this topic. It documents and analyzes the fascination and influence of the fine arts, architecture, film, and music on the aesthetics, structure, and environment of consumer culture. Numerous illustrations reveal the crossover work of artists like Eug ne Atget, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Duane Hanson, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky, and others, as well as pieces conceived by fine artists, architects, and film makers. Complete with contributions by internationally renowned authors, Shopping serves as a diversified basis for the discussion of a topic more dear to us than most of us would admit. You simply must buy this book.

Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture

Arts & Photography

Béret, Chantal

History & Criticism

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Observers of contemporary art associate the name Julian Schnabel with highly evocative, large-scale paintings. At the time of his early exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe in the 80s, the larger-than-life Schnabel was loudly hailed as a new milestone in the development of painting, the savior of an art form declared dead years before. Still painting some of the most massive canvases around, Schnabel is a virtually unrivalled master in the use of "bigness" and a broad range of materials. Fragmentation and overlapping play an important role in his art, in terms of both material and content. If his paintings don't exhibit a consistent style, why should they? Instead, they combine oil painting and collage techniques, classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art, Neo-Expressionist features, as well as figuration and abstraction, gesture and structure. This volume presents a broad selection of Schnabel's paintings in a survey of his diverse oeuvre, with emphasis placed on works from 1990 to the present.

Julian Schnabel: Malerei/Paintings 1978-2003

Fleck, Robert

Pfeiffer, Ingrid

Individual Artists

Total Enlightenment is a superb and much-needed survey of the Conceptual movement in late- and post-Soviet Russia, a movement which even today remains still relatively unknown in the West. The book owes its title to a 1974 essay by the influential theorist Boris Groys, in which he asserted that Moscow artists held a unique relationship to the traditional art of Russia, which set them apart from their Western role models and contemporaries. He also noted that, for these artists, who were laboring under the censorious gaze of the government, the political content of their work constituted a genuine risk-taking. This volume features key works and paintings, drawings, photographs and installations by some of the most important artists of this era: Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Komar & Melamid, Alexander Kosolapov, Igor Makarevich & Jelena Jelagina, Andrej Monastyrskij, Boris Mikhailov, Dmitri Prigov, Leonid Sokov and Vadim Zakharov.

Total Enlightenment (German and English Edition)

Groys, Boris

Kabakov, Ilja

Reference

Hatje Cantz

The intertwined stories of Realism and modernism begin with the great innovations of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Realism sought to record the messiness, poverty and brute facts of everyday life in urban and rural France, against the restrictions of religion and class and the high-flown emotion of the Romantic painters. Courbet's "Burial at Ornans" is a classic instance of Courbet's stance: it depicts a funeral in rural Ornans, and uses the occasion's actual participants, instead of models, portraying them entirely without sentiment, and on a scale usually reserved for royal subjects. But in his portraits, landscapes, drawings and still lifes, Courbet frequently suggested a more meditative, inward-looking realm, somewhat removed from his declarations of social realities, and revealed in such works his virtuoso touch and formal brilliance. Gustave Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art introduces this "other" Courbet, the painter whose vision of nature and formal preoccupations were later inherited by Cézanne and Picasso, and further built on by the Symbolists and Surrealists. With over 200 color reproductions of the French Realist's work, as well as essays by Sylvain Amic and Bettina Erche, this volume acts as a welcome counterweight to the Courbet we thought we already knew, further complicating and enriching our understanding of one of the most influential European painters any century has produced.

Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art

Erche, Bettina

"Beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table" is the most famous formulation of the Surrealist effect, penned by the Comte de Lautréamont in the 1860s and adopted as a rallying cry by André Breton at the inception of the Surrealist movement. Lautréamont's vivid simile lent itself both to poetry and to visual art, and the Surrealist artists were quick to grasp that an entirely new kind of sculpture could be made from such potent combinations of commonplace objects. Duchamp's Dada-era objects, Freud's theories of the fetish, the "uncanny" and sexual symbolism and the popularity in Europe of African votive objects supplied further stimulus, and soon Breton, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and even Picasso had populated this infant genre with a whole slew of disquieting (and sometimes fun) inventions--May Ray's 1920 "Cadeau" (a clothes iron with tacks attached) and Dalí's 1936 lobster telephone are two instantly recognizable examples. Younger recruits to the Surrealist cause, such as Hans Bellmer, Isamu Noguchi and Meret Oppenheim developed the possibilities of the genre even further, and Oppenheim's 1936 "Fur Cup" must be today the supreme instance of the Surrealist object. Surreal Objects is the first publication to exclusively address the Surrealist object. Surveying works by over 50 artists and writers--among them such familiar names as Breton, Dalí, Duchamp, Magritte, Man Ray and Picasso, and less-known artists such as Antoni Clavé, Leo Dohmen, Wilhelm Freddie and Conroy Maddox--it provides a definitive treatment of one of Surrealism's most characteristic yet neglected themes.

Surreal Objects: Sculptures and Objects from Dalí to Man Ray

MADELINE, Laurence

Lampe, Angela

Scholars around the world are researching the degree to which colour was employed in classical and medieval sculpture. Their numerous activities and projects were most recently presented and debated at an international colloquium held in the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt. The current contributions of 20 internationally known scholars are brought together in this richly illustrated book in English.
Among specialists, the educated layperson’s ideal of an antiquity in shining white marble has long since been dismissed as an historical error. The classical and medieval reality of coloured sculpture is now regarded as an incontrovertible fact. As long ago as the early 19th century, statues with remains of their original paint were not only discovered in Greece, but news of them was published. In the 20th century, these discoveries were at first neglected. However the work done by a team under the archeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, resulting in an exhibition shown worldwide since 2003 entitled“Gods in Colour”, has put new life into this research and literally changed the way we see Antiquity. The extent of this revolution is graphically captured by the present volume with articles ranging from the controversial history of this research to the current state of the art of reconstructing historical painting techniques and the latest scientific methods of analyzing material residues. It culminates in the changes in the perception and significance of sculpture brought about by colour. 
 With illustrations and commentary on numerous examples of ancient and medieval works, this volume unfolds a rich panorama of polychrome statuary on the basis of the latest research results.

Circumlitio: The Polychromy of Antique and Medieval Sculpture

Brinkmann, Vinzenz

Primavesi, Oliver

Hirmer Publishers

Henri Matisse created some of his most exquisite works by cutting shapes out of paper. Delightfully entertaining and playfully inventive, his "paintings with scissors" are also a superb introduction to the most basic artistic concepts: color, line, and form. 
This engaging and accessible look at Matisse’s cut-outs, arguably the highlight of his magnificent career, follows the artist as he goes in search of pure forms of expression. Illustrated with beautiful reproductions and details of Matisse’s most famous works, the book explains how the artist’s paintings evolved over the course of his life, gradually becoming flatter, simpler and more chromatically pure until they resembled the cut outs themselves. Matisse’s spontaneity, his love of bold colors, and his seemingly effortless ability to capture movement on paper make him one of the most appealing artists to children. Fun and easy-to-follow, this exploration of Matisse’s cut-outs invites children of all ages to grab a pair of scissors, find some colored paper, and "paint."

Matisse: Cut-Out Fun With Matisse (Adventures in Art)

Children's Books

Matisse, Henri

Hollein, Nina

Arts, Music & Photography

Prestel Pub

Focusing on one of Matisse's greatest bodies of work and his last artistic creations, this flexi edition of essays and reproductions provides scholarship on this important period.

Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors: Masterpieces from the Late Years

Berggruen, Olivier

Prestel

This companion volume to a major exhibition of the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy highlights the extraordinary range of his prolific career. Throughout his career Moholy-Nagy produced brilliant works in painting, film, photography, sculpture, set design and typography. A leading proponent of the Bauhaus School, he strove to apply artistic principles to every aspect of daily life. This companion volume to a retrospective features 170 works from all phases of Moholy-Nagy's career. Essays on his involvement with the Bauhaus School; his late paintings; his photographs, photograms, and photosculptures; and his accomplishments in the field of graphic art are complemented by numerous color illustrations. The book also documents the reconstruction of a never completed work, The Room of Today, which incorporates the most important themes Moholy-Nagy brought to his art. Readers viewing his work for the first time, along with those already possessing a deep appreciation for his art, will celebrate this long-overdue volume.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

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