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

Arts & Photography

Shiff, Richard

Blanton Museum of Art

Caldas, Waltercio

Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

University of Texas Press

For almost fifty years, the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927) has painted a series of portraits of his wife, Ada. This beautifully illustrated book is the first to focus on these iconic paintings, which are unprecedented in their focus on a single figure over many years. In this volume, leading scholars explore the allure of Ada as a subject and the art-historical importance of Katz’s portraits, asking fascinating questions about Katz’s methods and intentions: What do these paintings reveal and conceal about their subject? What does Katz do in the studio to convey such vitality on his canvases? How does Katz’s work fit into the history of portraiture and the art movements of the 1960s and beyond? Acclaimed art critic and curator Robert Storr examines Ada’s alluring persona, comparing her to other “goddesses” who have captivated centuries of portrait painters. James Schuyler recounts a day in Katz’s studio, and the late British art critic Lawrence Alloway explores the role of repetition in the Ada portraits, which he views as a cycle of images with antecedents in Velázquez and Rembrandt. Featuring the renowned series of Ada portraits, this book demonstrates the cumulative power and enduring delight of Alex Katz’s achievement, as well as his devotion to his greatest muse.

Alex Katz Paints Ada

History

Yale University Press

Spanning nearly seven decades, a comprehensive consideration of the psychologically acute and surprisingly honest portraits of Alice Neel Widely regarded as one of the most important American painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel is internationally recognized for her contributions to Abstract Expressionism, especially her perceptive portraiture. Neel (1900–1984) was a portrait painter at a time when this was traditionally the role of a male artist. After ascending to prominence in the 1960s as the feminist movement gained momentum, she has remained an iconic figure in the history of American painting.
A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel often painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and Meyer Shapiro, delving into personalities and idiosyncrasies with a rare frankness. Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neel’s range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artist’s early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neel’s style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths

Walker, Barry

LEWISON, JEREMY

Garb, Tamar

Louise Bourgeois was a prolific artist known for her highly personal body of work consisting of sculptures, installations, drawing and prints that deal with themes of memory, trauma, fear and hidden emotion. Bourgeois first received international acclaim in the 1990s, when the artist was in her eighties, for her ambitious series of Cells: small room-like sculptures containing arrangements of symbolic objects intended to elicit emotional and psychological responses in the viewer. Here, for the first time, her vast oeuvre is interwoven with a fascinating discussion of the full range of ideas, emotions and experiences that inspired the creation of her work. Renowned critic and curator Robert Storr, acknowledged as Bourgeois s leading interpreter, presents a chronological account of the artist s career, weaving in thematic discussions accompanied by sequential portfolios of the artist s work. An introduction outlining the artist s career is followed by chapters examining her childhood; Bourgeois s education, early career and emigration to the US; her mid-career disappearance and her gradual return to prominence during the 1980s; and her late career as high-profile celebrity artist, exhibiting across the world until her death in 2011. The final chapter examines Bourgeois s profound and ongoing artistic legacy.

Intimate Geometries The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois /anglais

Thames&Hudson

The most complete and up-to-date book on Ron Mueck and his distinctive, carefully crafted sculpture that explores reality’s relationship with artifice For a major exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Ron Mueck has created three new works, which will be shown alongside five other significant sculptures. Whether monumental or smaller than life, Mueck’s works create a tension between the real and the phantasmagorical world. This book will serve as a record of the exhibition, but will also be a reference work covering his sculpture over twenty years. It features photographs of his emblematic works, spectacular exhibition views of the new works presented at the Fondation Cartier, and images taken in his studio and during installation. Analytical essays study his work from the perspective of classical and modern art history, and an interview with Mueck invites readers to discover the artist’s intimate universe. 150 illustrations, 100 in color

Ron Mueck

Paton, Justin

Baudelaire's famous description of "the best criticism" as "entertaining and poetic, not coldly analytic," lives in the essays of Peter Schjeldahl. Schjeldahl self-consciously continues the modern tradition of art criticism crafted by poet-critics, providing a sharp perspective on individual artists, their work, art-world events, and new creative directions. He challenges established views, and his infectious passion for art continually engages the reader. In essays on Rothko, Munch, Warhol, Dubuffet, Nauman, Sherman, Salle, de Kooning, Guston, Ruscha, and Koons, Schjeldahl skillfully juggles theory and analysis in exploring cultural context and technique. His writings, free of the contortions of some critical prose and characterized by a sustained focus on works of art, map the contemporary art scene in New York (with occasional forays to Los Angeles and elsewhere), cataloguing the colorful personalities, cultural attractions, and ethical hazards of the art world. It's a fast, fun trip, with arguments that fold back upon themselves in surprising revelations and reversals of the author's opinion. There is never a dull moment for those with an eye on contemporary art.

The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990 (Lannan Series) (Volume 2)

Schjeldahl, Peter

Wilson, MaLin

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Rackstraw Downes paints down-to-earth, often gritty features of today's American environment in an unflinching and highly realistic style. This book is the first to provide a multifaceted picture of his work, its intellectual foundations, and its place in the history of art--from both outside commentators and Downes himself.
 Beautifully illustrated, with copious examples from thirty years of the artist's work, the book makes eminently clear why Downes is widely regarded as a "painter's painter." It showcases many of the artist's panoramic pictures--painted with a strong sense of place and a miniaturist's sense of scale. The images, which depict industrial parks, construction sites, housing projects, refineries, razor wire, and landfills, stimulate fresh thoughts about these supposedly unattractive sights. Bathed in the light of a precise time, the paintings resonate with a strikingly evocative quality.
 The three essays that accompany Downes's art provide rare insights into the way a painter thinks and works. Sanford Schwartz explores the relationships between the artist's personal and intellectual background and his oeuvre. Robert Storr situates Downes in the context of a number of highly prominent contemporary artists such as Chuck Close, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Smithson in a way that offers a new interpretation of Downes's work, while making clear its importance within twentieth-century art. Downes's own essay, "Turning the Head in Empirical Space," presents a direct, firsthand account of his working methods within a larger discussion on spatial paradigms of Renaissance and post-Renaissance modes of painting.

Rackstraw Downes

Schwartz, Sanford

Downes, Rackstraw

Princeton University Press

In the mid 1960s, Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of artists collectively known as the Imagists. A cousin to the contemporaneous phenomenon of Pop art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face approach. The Imagist artists--including Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg and Karl Wirsum--each had his or her own unmistakable style: scatological, meticulous, comical and absurd. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell the Imagists' whole story, from their notoriety in the 1960s to their 21st-century resurgence in popularity. Almost 50 years after their first show, the Imagists have influenced generations of artists, from Jeff Koons to Chris Ware. With a wealth of archival footage and photographs, the film also includes over 40 interviews with critics, curators, collectors, artists and the Imagists themselves.

Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists

Pentimenti Productions

California-based artist Raymond Pettibon began making his signature ink-wash drawings framed or pinned directly on the wall, they are often combined by the dozens in no discernible order, like a giant scattered notebook. With solo exhibitions worldwide including a retrospective at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1994), Pettibon is considered one of the world's most significant innovators of figurative art. Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper speaks with the artist about recurring obsessions such as baseball, film noir, surfers and the animated figure Gumby. Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr examines the full scope of Pettibon's prolific career, setting the artist firmly within the tradition of Western figurative painting. Critic and curator Ulrich Loock looks at a single strand in Pettibon's oeuvre: a drawing centering on the character Vavoom. The artist has chosen three extracts from The Art of English Poesie by George Puttenham, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, and Modern Painters by John Ruskin. This book also includes never-before-published scripts from as-yet-unmade videos on subjects from Jim Morrison to Hollywood.

Raymond Pettibon (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Cooper, Dennis

Loock, Ulrich

Phaidon Press

Alex Katz is a towering figure in contemporary painting, a key New York-based artist since the early 1960s. Katz was an independent figure during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and Pop when he first emerged -- and remains a unique, though highly influential figure to this day.Alex Katz is best known for his distinct portraits of sophisticated, irresistible women, masterfully painted using precise, broad areas of colour. Alongside these unmistakably Katzian' female portraits are portraits of men, group portraits, landscapes and interiors rendered in painting, drawing, collage and metal cut-outs. All attest to the artist's attention to detail, economy of means and consummate technique. Bigger-than-life paintings such as The Black Dress (1960), Blue Umbrella (1972), Red Coat (1982) and White Visor (2003) have entered the collective conscience as the epitome of a particular, late 20th century feminine ideal: icons of fashion, yet miraculously resilient to the prevailing fashions of contemporary art.

Alex Katz (Contemporary Artists)

Ratcliffe, Carter

Blazwick, Iwona

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