In today’s art world, many artists are using portraiture to explore complex issues of identity. The Portrait Now brings together more than eighty portraits from internationally acclaimed artists to demonstrate the accomplishment and inventiveness of this art form. Recent works by John Currin, Sally Mann, Catherine Opie, Chuck Close, Lucian Freud, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Vik Muniz, Thomas Struth, and many others reveal developments in painting, sculpture, video art, photography, self-portraiture, and caricature. Challenging the boundaries of figurative art, these works often go beyond likeness, break free of traditional media, and respond to complicated political, religious, and social issues. With beautiful color images of and in-depth discussions on each work, the book also includes an insightful introductory essay that places portraiture within a historical context and examines how this art form––as well as the purpose it serves––has evolved. The Portrait Now is an indispensable reference book for anyone interested in contemporary art.

The Portrait Now

Arts & Photography

Howgate, Sarah

Nairne, Sandy

Photography & Video

Yale University Press

Thinking About Exhibitions

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians plus artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances, in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.

Ferguson, Bruce W.

Greenberg, Reesa

Reference

Routledge

A series of exhibitions and accompanying catalogues organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Views from Abroad examines the complex artistic crosscurrents between Europe and America in 20th-century art. This latest volume, subtitled American Realities, highlights a wide range or masterworks from the Whitney's Permanent Collection. Exploring the themes of allegory, symbolism, and narrative as central to American art, it also reconsiders the relationship of these themes to abstraction. Essays reexamine the legacy of modern and contemporary American art, explicitly focusing on radical approaches to the depiction of people and places.

Views from Abroad: American Realities : European Perspectives on American Art 3

Weinberg, Adam D.

Serota, Nicholas

History & Criticism

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Irving Penn Portraits

Keaney, Magdalene

Distribution General

British sculpture in the twentieth century

Serota, Nicholas (editors)

Whitechapel Art Gallery

In 1994 two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner—then valued at twenty-four million pounds—were stolen from a German public gallery while on loan from Tate Britain. In this vivid, personal account, Sandy Nairne who was then Director of Programmes at the Tate and became centrally involved in the pursuit of the paintings and the negotiations for their return, retells this complex, 8-year, cloak-and-dagger story, which finally concluded in 2002 with the pictures returning to public display at the Tate. In addition to this thrilling narrative, Nairne unravels stories of other high-value art thefts, puzzling what motivates a thief to steal a well-known work of art that cannot be sold, even on the black market. Nairne also examines the role of art theft within the larger underworld of international looting and illicit deals among art and antique collectors. The art heist, of course, is a popular theme of crime novels and films, and Nairne considers these depictions as well, investigating the imaginative construction of the art thief, the specialist detective, and the mysterious collector. Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners is a compelling, real-life detective story that will keep both art and mystery lovers eagerly turning pages.

Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners

Reaktion Books

Drawn from a career spanning seven decades, Irving Penn Portraits presents thirty photographs of renowned personalities by one of the most distinguished photographers of the 20th century. With an essay by curator Magdalene Keaney, Irving Penn Portraits is the first book to focus exclusively on Penn€™s portraiture and his contributions to the genre. From Penn€™s early work of the 1940s to recent images made in 21st century, Irving Penn Portraits honors a selection of photographs with reproductions of superb quality. Among those featured are Giorgio de Chirico, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Duke Ellington, Marlene Dietrich, Woody Allen, Rudolf Nureyev, Helmut Newton and Jasper Johns.

Harry N. Abrams

This beautifully produced compendium features 500 paintings from many of the best figurative artists active over the last twenty-one years. Reflecting the diverse methods of contemporary portrait practice, the book includes a dazzling array of styles, from immaculate photorealism to intense expressionism. The BP Portrait Award is one of Britain’s most prestigious art prizes, and each year nearly 300,000 people visit the exhibition based on the competition. It has acted as a springboard for many painters’ careers, notably the prize-winners who have been subsequently commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint an eminent sitter. This book includes full-colour reproductions of many of those commissions – including paintings of Dame Helen Mirren, J.K. Rowling, Sir Michael Caine, Fiona Shaw, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Paul Smith and Dame Cicely Saunders. As well as these high-profile commissions, the book features an inspiring wealth of subjects: unflinching self-portraits, warm portrayals of children and babies, conversation pieces, studies of people at home and at work – a rich and varied selection of hundreds of faces by some of the finest portrait painters of our time.

500 Portraits: BP Portrait Award

National Portrait Gallery

In 1994 two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner—then valued at twenty-four million pounds—were stolen from a German public gallery while on loan from Tate Britain. In this vivid, personal account, Sandy Nairne who was then Director of Programmes at the Tate and became centrally involved in the pursuit of the paintings and the negotiations for their return, retells this complex, 8-year, cloak-and-dagger story, which finally concluded in 2002 with the pictures returning to public display at the Tate. In addition to this thrilling narrative, Nairne unravels stories of other high-value art thefts, puzzling what motivates a thief to steal a well-known work of art that cannot be sold, even on the black market. Nairne also examines the role of art theft within the larger underworld of international looting and illicit deals among art and antique collectors. The art heist, of course, is a popular theme of crime novels and films, and Nairne considers these depictions as well, investigating the imaginative construction of the art thief, the specialist detective, and the mysterious collector. Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners is a compelling, real-life detective story that will keep both art and mystery lovers eagerly turning pages.

Known for his cool, clean, comics-inspired pictorial language, Julian Opie has been one of the leading figures in contemporary British art since the early 1980s. Equally at home in museum settings--like Tate Modern, the ICA Boston and MCA Chicago, where he has mounted recent one-person exhibitions and projects--and in collaboration with mainstream rock bands like Blur and U2, his work crosses media and genres with quiet, computer-assisted abandon. In the early days, Opie transgressed the boundaries between painting and sculpture by applying paint to the everyday articles he used in his steel objects. More recently he has experimented with digital technologies in the applied arts. Now, he is probably best-known for his hypnotically low-tech moving images generated by LCD and LED technologies. This volume assembles a representative collection of portraits, half-length figures and new works that draw from the motifs of baroque portraiture.

Julian Opie: Recent Works

CLARK, Timothy

Hatje Cantz

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