When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand

For centuries elephants in Thailand have been revered as a national symbol, worshiped as living gods and employed as beasts of burden in the nation's thriving timber industry. But when logging was banned in Thailand in 1990, these noble animals fell on hard times. Reduced to performing tricks for tourists by day and illegal heavy labor by night, Thailand's elephants were exhausted, malnourished, and dying in alarming numbers.
Hearing of their plight, a pair of unlikely heroes came to the rescue, Wildly eccentric Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid devised a brilliant scheme: to create the world's first quadruped occupational retraining program-a network of art schools for unemployed elephants. Taking a cue from elephant trainers in a number of American zoos, Komar and Melamid taught the animals to hold brushes in their trunks and apply paint to canvas. And the results were astonishing: Not only did the elephants' paintings closely resemble the expansive gestural work of such Abstract Expressionist artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, but the pachyderm painters also began to develop clearly distinct regional styles-lyrical and expressive in the northern Thai school, subtle and atmospheric in the east, dynamic and angst ridden in the central school.
Sanctioned by the World Wildlife Fund, the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project has been a remarkable success; paintings by some of the most talented elephant artists have been auctioned at Christie's for thousands of dollars, generating funds to provide proper care for the elephants and support for their trainers.
When Elephants Paint follows Komar and Melamid and their eclectic entourage through Thailand's lush jungles and steaming cities, describing the odd encounters and creative cajoling that helped turn this seemingly whimsical idea into a concrete, beneficial reality. Illustrated with more than 100 photographs, including actual elephant paintings, this riotously funny and provocative book offers a valuable lesson in wildlife conservation and startling revelations about the nature of art itself.

Arts & Photography

Komar & Melamid

Mia Fineman

Painting

Harper Paperbacks

Walker Evans

A tenant farmer's deprivation-lined face. Antebellum homes that have seen better days. The display windows of small-town main streets. The early subway commuter. Billboards. The images made by photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. This major catalogue--published to accompany a retrospective exhibition originating at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveling to San Francisco and Houston--presents the full range of Evans's work, from his 1920s black-and-white street scenes of anonymous urban dwellers to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years.
 Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.
 Evans--who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness--wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."
 Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

Maria Morris Hambourg

Jeff L. Rosenheim

Douglas Eklund

Individual Artists

Princeton University Press

A selection of works by the influential portrait photographer, packaged in an accordion-folding folio, spans his entire career and demonstrates his signature technique of portraying his subject without extraneous detail and against white backgrounds.

Richard Avedon Portraits

Richard Avedon

Philippe de Montebello

Harry N. Abrams

The catalog that accompanied an exhibition at the Met featuring items from the then acquired Walker Evans archives. Metropolitam Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 2000. 318 pages; b&amp;w photos throughout; 10 x 11.5 inches. Bibliography, index.

Photography & Video

Metropolitan Museum of Art / Princeton University Press

With dedication and intensity, Thomas Walther, a visionary collector of photography, has been sorting through the seemingly superfluous vernacular photography of this century. Other Pictures is his selection of over 150 unique images from his "other" collection, his collection of found images. They are perfectly presented here, giving us the opportunity to appreciate and muse over these singular anonymous masterpieces, images as indelible as any created by the most democratic of tools-the camera.

Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection

Thomas Walther

Twin Palms Publishers

“Payson’s photographs of the NBA playoffs, I soon realized, are deeply woven into this paranoid, paranormal, paramedia web. From April through June 2001, Payson watched every game in the playoffs, camera glued to his eye, through the final triumph of the Lakers over the Sixers. He shot about two hundred rolls of color film, which amounts to over 3,200 frames. A selection of about ninety is reproduced here. Mostly photographed off an eighty-inch projection-screen TV, they are indelible impressions of the ghost in the machine of American image culture.” —Mia Fineman A riveting journey deep into the dark heart of the American Dream, Eric Payson’s Gladiators are photographs of the 2001 NBA playoffs shot off a wide-screen television. These pictures are about more than mere basketball—they explore our obsession with entertainment and voyeurism, expose our lust for the controlled violence and stylized pageantry of spectator sports, investigate the innate themes of racial politics and male bonding, and examine the electronic medium that transmits it all. Payson, a child of the American media, turned his living room TV screen into a virtual box seat at the Roman Colosseum to create Gladiators, a compelling examination of our fixation with professional sports.

Gladiators

Payson, Eric

Mark Holborn

powerHouse Books

The distinguished art critic Donald Kuspit reserved a chapter of his book, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century, for Vincent Desiderio, who, he says, "pictures privacy, with great sensibility and masterful craft" and "Old Master brilliance." This significant monograph, the first on the artist, will gain him the praise and audience his startling accomplishments and empathy deserve, as well as raise him to the top rank of contemporary painters, alongside Mark Tansey, Eric Fischl, John Currin and Gerhard Richter. More than 100 of Desiderio's works, some of them enormous canvases and triptychs, are faithfully reproduced here, and, thanks in part to five gatefolds their painstaking detail and sweeps of emotion can be truly appreciated. Desiderio's repeated themes and motifs, appearing in often perplexing narratives of great psychological complexity, strike at the intellect and the heart: art history (often manifested in piles of books open to paintings), human intimacy, heroic behavior and, perhaps most viscerally, the plight of the artist's handicapped son, Sam. Rounding out the volume are many works on paper and excerpts from the artist's sketchbooks, an interview by Donald Kuspit, and essays by Lawrence Weschler, Barry Schwabsky and Mia Fineman. Most of all, in Desiderio's highly original works, the viewer will rediscover painting's ability to both astonish and move.

Vincent Desiderio: Paintings 1975-2005

Lawrence Weschler

Vincent Desiderio

Donald Kuspit

Barry Schwabsky

History & Criticism

D.A.P./Marlborough Gallery

Painter, photographer, watercolorist, and printmaker Sean Scully roams the world with his camera, capturing its surfaces in places as far-flung as Mexico and the Aran Islands, as close to home as his own studio. His photographs sometimes consist of close-up shots of his own paintings, wherein he zooms in on the material reality of his richly painted surfaces and transforms their colors and shapes into a different abstract configuration. More often, Scully goes from recognizable objects in the larger world to subjective impressions of them. Snapshots of fa ades, windows, and doors are never straightforward recordings of architectural elements. By depicting fading walls, cracked surfaces, rough edges, and the deep shadows created by them, these images capture beauty in decay, and evoke the basic contradiction of nature and life: solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. As metaphors of physical and mental conditions, the photographs capture the memories, feelings, and thoughts connected to the experience of that reality. It is precisely this continuing interchange of the recognizable and abstract worlds, the visible and the invisible, that empowers Scully's works in all media.

The Color of Time: The Photographs of Sean Scully

Arthur C. Danto

Garrett White

Sean Scully

edward-lucie-smith

Steidl

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

Books by Mia Fineman