This volume gathers together essays by the noted critic Thomas McEvilley which document and analyse the fundamental changes that have taken place in painting from the 1960s to the present. Sometime during the 1960s, the ideology of Modernism began to be perceived as a collapsing structure. In terms of the visual arts, this perception focused primarily upon the tradition of easel painting which was declared to be dead. After two decades, painting revived around 1980. Its return from exile, however, signaled new aims. Incorporating elements of conceptualism and performance, painting has assumed a new theoretical basis in postmodern cultural theory. Demonstrating the failure of artistic modernism in social and cultural terms, McEvilley elucidates the new theoretical context in which easel painting is practised today. He shows painting to be a more versatile and flexible medium than was previously thought, as well as a means of expression that can incorporate a variety of social and theoretical stances without compromising its focus on pictorial reality.

The Exiles's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era (Contemporary Artists and their Critics)

Arts & Photography

MCEVILLEY, Thomas

History & Criticism

Cambridge University Press

The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era (Contemporary Artists and their Critics)

Book by Dial, Thornton, Baraka, Imamu Amiri, McEvilley, Thomas, Arnett, Paul, Arnett, William

Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger

Dial, Thornton

Arnett, Paul

Arnett, William

Museum of American Folk Art

New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, N. Y.)

Centre Culturel Americain (Paris, France)

Baraka, Imamu Amiri

Individual Artists

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

This volume, reproducing in colour 77 of Pat Steir's paintings, surveys her entire career, with emphasis on her recent work. Steir is known for pictures that quote the history of art, but since 1986 has moved into a more fluid abstractionism, using techniques such as throwing paint at the canvas.

Pat Steir

Harry N. Abrams

James Croak (b. 1951), one of America's most original artists, has produced an astonishing and idiosyncratic body of work during the past 20 years. Using a variety of innovative materials and techniques, including taxidermy, latex rubber, tar, and his trademark cast dirt, he has created art of astonishing presence and feeling. The mysterious darkness of his earthen material seems to convey something of the terror and anxiety of our uncertain time, and simultaneously a sense of contemplation as an avenue to spiritual renewal.
Fully illustrated, the book follows Croak's experiments with Minimalism through the art of the figure that chiefly holds his attention today. A groundbreaking essay by Thomas McEvilley places his art in historical context. Also included is an interview with the artist by Barbara J. Bloemink, executive director of the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, which probes into the sources of Croak's powerful and compelling work.

James Croak

This volume on the Lesbian poet Sappho represents many years of work and includes two major unpublished new studies: "The Garden of the Graces: The Survival of Bronze Age Religious Motifs into the Modern Lyric Poem," and "The Clear-Voiced Song-Loving Lyre: Recent Explorations in Sapphic Studies."

Sappho

Literature & Fiction

Spring Publications

Delight: Helen Chadwick

HOWARD, Richard

Univ Pennsylvania Inst of

Presents a view of Samaras' art as developed over the last 20 years including panoramas, photo transformations, boxes, the mirrored corridor, bronzes, chairs, and dot and disc paintings

Lucas Samaras--Objects and Subjects, 1969-1986

SAMARAS, Lucas

Abbeville Press

Book by Abramovic, Marina, Goldberg, Roselee, McEvilley, Thomas, Elliott, David

Objects Performance Video Sound

Goldberg, RoseLee

ELLIOTT, David

Abramovic, Marina

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Spring was turning into summer. I stood where the waves crashed, waiting for Della in the late afternoon by the sea. Birds rested on the swelling crests, fluttered up from their closing grip, then rested again. The waves poured closer, the sun sank down, and the birds screeched on in their game of death. 
And Della was no longer just late. She was not coming. 
She had flown through the crack in the vase.... This compelling beginning to North of Yesterday sets the tone for an even more compelling journey that quickly follows, a travel beyond space and time into the terrain of the unconscious, the synaesthesia of dream. It is a novel of male psyche, the multi-layered recesses of mythology which define the object of desire and the destructive/redemptive quest. The tale forms a captivating matrix of the interior realm through an unfolding stream of cultural remnants (with archetypal and architectonic language), unmasking an essential conflict within the Western mind. There is both murder and mystery at its core, but it is a hermetic mystery of supra-consciousness, the transmigration of souls, and it may be that murder occurs nowhere but within the imagination... North of Yesterday is written in a fluid mixture of prose and verse. It incorporates classical meters and narration, and systematically interweaves the Orpheus myth with a contemporary situation: the story of a death by heroin overdose. Love, guilt, desire and degradation are paired in the stories of Della and Wally, and then again in those of Vincent and Waz, and made poignant mockery by a mad poet, Quintus of Smyrna. This is a bizarre epic of Everyman, a challenging prose invention with few antecedents: North of Yesterday joins that great tradition of sardonic, black-hearted comedies extending from Lautreamont's Maldoror and Huysman's Against Nature, to Hedayat's The Blind Owl and the latter works of William Burroughs.

North of Yesterday

McPherson & Co

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Books by MCEVILLEY, Thomas