Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cézanne's painting. He shows how Cézanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cézanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.

Cezanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art

Arts & Photography

Shiff, Richard

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Often simple in composition, the art of Waltercio Caldas invites a host of complex questions about perception and space. Caldas challenges not only the way we look at his objects in the moment, but also our perspectives on art more generally. For decades he has been a central figure in Brazilian art. While his influence extends across much of the art world, he has remained largely underrecognized in the United States. To make this exceptional artist more widely known to the U.S. audience, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin and the Fundação Iberê Camargo, a premier art organization in Porto Alegre, Brazil, have organized the exhibition The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas.
The exhibition catalog Waltercio Caldas is the first illustrated English-language publication to fully explore Caldas’s four-decade artistic trajectory, his influences, and his impact. The catalog includes essays by the exhibition’s curator, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; leading art critic Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, who investigates Caldas’s work in relationship to that of his international peers and its importance in the history of art; and renowned art historian Richard Shiff, modern and contemporary art professor at the University of Texas, who discusses key Caldas works that epitomize his investigation of the history of art. The catalog also includes a selected chronology of the artist’s career and a selected bibliography.

Waltercio Caldas

Blanton Museum of Art

Caldas, Waltercio

Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

University of Texas Press

Willem De Kooning: Paintings

This beautiful book presents a retrospective of eighty of Willem de Kooning`s finest paintings and painted works on paper. The book reassesses de Kooning`s critical status as one of America`s greatest and most influential artists, examines the complexity of his painting techniques, and places him in the context of other artists and art movements of his era. The book serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition of de Kooning`s work presented at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London.

Willem de Kooning: Paintings

Prather, Martha

SYLVESTER, David

National Gallery Washington

A magisterial presentation of all the works of Barnett Newman, along with fascinating new insights into his artistic achievement Barnett Newman (1905–1970), one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, has captivated critics, scholars, and the general public for decades. This highly anticipated catalogue raisonné presents Newman’s entire oeuvre—paintings, drawings, sculpture, graphics, an architectural model, lost and unfinished works, and ephemera—in one stunning and definitive volume. Featured elements include color reproductions of unparalleled quality; extensive provenance, exhibition, and publication histories; and a listing of the contents of the artist’s library at the time of his death.
 In addition to the catalogue raisonné prepared by Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, the book offers revelatory essays on the artist, his career, and his working methods and features fascinating photographs of Newman, his studios, and his installations. Richard Shiff draws on new documentation to explain why Newman chose to create abstract art, how he achieved “fullness” in his paintings, and how his works exemplify the social functions of an artist. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro reveals extraordinary details about Newman’s studio practice and materials and techniques, information not available to the public before because Newman only allowed his wife to observe him at work. Mancusi-Ungaro also discusses the fate of works that were damaged while traveling to exhibitions or by vandals. Produced and designed to the highest possible standards, this magnificent catalogue raisonné is a critical purchase for anyone interested in twentieth-century art.

Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné

Mancusi-Ungaro, Carol

Colsman-Freyberger, Heidi

Barnett Newman Foundation / Yale University Press

Camille Pissarro (18301903) was a ceaseless innovator and organizer whose ideological concerns were as profound as his aesthetic interests. Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country examines how Pissarro's artistic theories and social convictions influenced his Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist work.
 Pissarro espoused an anti-bourgeois, anarchist ideology and was interested in the plight of the working classes. This book’s authors examine recurring motifs in Pissarro’s work as intellectual metaphors as well as his background as a Sephardic Jew who was involved in many of the political and class issues of the period. The text also looks at Pissarro as a painter who identified with laborers and agriculture, exploring connections between his subject matter and the dirty” nature of his painterly technique.
Featuring a wide selection of superb paintings from private collections, many rarely seen, this beautifully illustrated book reveals the genius of an artist keenly focused on his natural surroundings and the lives of common folk.

Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

Levitov, Karen

Jewish Museum

The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse

An authoritative and elegant study of the theme of repetition in early modern painting Today serial imagery dominates all forms of visual media, from advertising to conceptual sculpture. In this innovative project, the authors show that the phenomenon of repetition appears as a radical element in early modern painting, long before its embrace by 20th-century high modernism. In works by Ingres, Delaroche, Gérôme, Corot, Millet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, and Matisse, the reader can compare closely related versions of some of the most familiar imagery of the 19th and early 20th centuries. By making multiples of closely related subject matter in their paintings, the authors argue, these painters challenged an aesthetic based on the notion of an inimitable, unique masterpiece. Through beautiful illustrations and essays by leading scholars, this book ultimately shows how the 19th-century invention of photography and film—with their intrinsic attributes of repetition—did not diminish the traditional medium of painting but rather propelled it in new directions.

Bann, Stephen

Weiss, Jeffrey

Kelly, Simon

Stuckey, Charles F.

Walters Art Museum

Ewan Gibbs (b. 1973) has quickly become one of the most exhibited, collected, and admired artists working today. His unique visual vocabulary—self-described as "found language"—can be clearly seen in his drawings that re-create photographic images, often of major architectural landmarks worldwide. Arlington National Cemetery introduces Gibbs's latest project, eighteen drawings that focus on the gravestones at the United States's most hallowed resting place. 
The book includes essays that illuminate aspects of Gibbs's artistic practice, including the precise tools and methods that he employs to create his meticulously rendered drawings. A preface by the artist explains what inspired him to explore this American landmark, and the images are presented accordion-style, so that readers may contemplate them as a series.

Arlington National Cemetery: Drawings by Ewan Gibbs

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

A celebration of the stunning collection of artworks donated in honor of the creation of The Menil Drawing Institute Featuring outstanding 20th-century drawings promised or bequeathed to the Menil Collection for the opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, this elegant volume is a testament to the growing significance of drawings as stand-alone artworks over the past century. The drawings come from the private collections of well-known connoisseurs Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney, and include works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Its chief curator Edouard Kopp profiles the Drawing Institute’s nature and scope, and noted scholars John Elderfield and Richard Shiff discuss historical aspects of drawing, while Terry Winters muses from an artist’s viewpoint.

Drawing Is Everything: Founding Gifts of the Menil Drawing Institute

Winters, Terry

Kopp, Edouard

Elderfield,John

The Menil Collection

In an age where art history’s questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins’s series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be.  Shiff’s turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.

Doubt (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts)

Routledge

In an age where art history’s questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins’s series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be. Shiff’s turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.

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Books by Shiff, Richard