In twentieth-century sculpture, one name towers above all others: Romanian-born Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). This book accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Brancusi's sculpture, drawings, and photographs, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Profusely illustrated throughout, with photographs by the artist and images culled from a wide range of archival sources, it is the most definitive work yet published on this influential artist. The authors provide a detailed reassessment of Brancusi's work, incorporating and extending the profound revisions in scholarship that have been taking place since the last major retrospective in 1969-70.

Constantin Brancusi

Arts & Photography

Philadelphia Museum Of Art

Temkin, Ann

Rowell, Margit

Centre Georges Pompidou

Bach, Friedrich Teja

History & Criticism

MIT Press]

Eva Hesse, a pivotal figure in the development of postwar international art, created paintings, sculpture, and works on paper that were striking in their beauty and playful sensibility. Although much has been written about Hesse's dramatic life--her childhood flight from Nazi Germany, her struggles to gain acceptance as a young female artist, her battle with cancer, and her tragic death in 1970 at the age of 34--her art has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves. This lavishly illustrated catalogue redresses that omission, focusing on Hesse's innovative working methods and choices of materials as well as on the larger aesthetic and philosophical questions raised by her artistic practice. The book presents and documents over two hundred works by Hesse in all media. Particular attention is devoted to the degradation and aging of her sculptures over the past three decades. Essays by a distinguished team of writers deal with themes of mutability and decay in Hesse's art; discuss her little-known early career in New York and Germany; explore her innovative use of translucent materials; and examine the role of drawing and collage in her creative process.

Eva Hesse

Fer, Briony

Meyer, James

Timpanelli, Gioia

Sussman, Elisabeth

Petzinger, Renate

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Yale University Press

Barnett Newman

One of the most enduringly influential Abstract Expressionists, Barnett Newman (1905-1970) took the genre to a startling new sphere. His tough, spare, emotive paintings were misunderstood and reviled by most critics when they first appeared in 1950 but came to command wide respect and even veneration by the end of the 1960s. Seemingly simple on first viewing, the paintings are in fact richly complicated and unexpectedly diverse. Newman aspired to breadth and nobility in his works, infusing them with deep meaning and producing a powerful physical presence through his mastery of expansive spatial effects and evocative color. While pursuing his personal quest, he managed to challenge, and profoundly change, the parameters of painting.

The public reaction that greeted Joseph Beuys's death in 1986 resembled that more usually accorded to a deceased world statesman than an artist. Yet even now the art and life of this controversial and extremely influential German artist remain impenetrably intertwined - even more so perhaps because Beuys, like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, precisely orchestrated his public image, building a personal myth that has the power to bind together his entire oeuvre. Thinking Is Form breaks through the mass of obscure writing about Joseph Beuys to introduce this legendary artist in a simple and clear manner, through his utterly individual drawings. The subject of a major touring exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Beuys's drawings are used here as the springboard for discussions of his life, art, and ideas. Some employ such unconventional mediums as hare's blood or margarine, or use the backs of envelopes or commercial stationery. Some incorporate photographs, pressed flowers, and other organic materials, emphasizing their function as a reservoir of ideas for Beuys's sculpture, actions (performance art), and other enterprises. His achievement is viewed in the broader context of European art, and his graphic works are considered chronologically as his formative medium, in relation to his work as a whole, and as autobiographical narrative. This is the first time that the disciplines of curator and connoisseur have been rigorously applied to the selection and presentation of a truly representative segment of Beuys's work. Beuys, following the strategy articulated by Duchamp, made his own life his masterwork, and his drawings formed the drafts for that work. Now that the work is complete, it is through the drawings that we can begin to grasp as a whole the accomplishment of a man who declared "Everyone is an artist."

Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys

Rose, Bernice

Individual Artists

Thames&Hudson

In celebration of Ellsworth Kelly’s ninetieth birthday in May 2013, The Museum of Modern Art will present the first exhibition in 40 years of all fourteen paintings that comprise the Chatham series of works the artist produced after leaving New York City for Spencetown, in upstate New York, in 1970. The series has not been exhibited in its entirety since it was presented at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1972. The Chatham Series, published in conjunction with the exhibition, is a richly illustrated exploration of this key moment in Kelly’s career. The 14 large-scale paintings he produced there all rely on a single formal concept―each is made of two joined canvases of pure monochrome color―yet the works vary in color and proportion from one to the next. An essay by Ann Temkin traces the artist’s explorations of shape, color and spatiality from the early 1950 to today.

Ellsworth Kelly: The Chatham Series

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Beuys, like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, precisely orchestrated his public image, building a personal myth that has the power to bind together his entire oeuvre. This book attempts to break through the mass of obscurantist writing about Joseph Beuys, to introduce him in a simple and clear manner through his individual drawings, used here as the basis for discussions of his life, art and ideas. Some employ such media as hare's blood or margarine, or are realized on envelopes, emphasizing their function as a reservoir of ideas for Beuy's sculpture, "actions", performance art and other enterprises.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Sherrie Levine: Newborn (English and German Edition)

In twentieth-century sculpture, one name towers above all others: Romanian-born Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). This book accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Brancusi's sculpture, drawings, and photographs, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Profusely illustrated throughout, with photographs by the artist and images culled from a wide range of archival sources, it is the most definitive work yet published on this influential artist. The authors provide a detailed reassessment of Brancusi's work, incorporating and extending the profound revisions in scholarship that have been taking place since the last major retrospective in 1969-1970.

Constantin Brancusi, 1876-1957

Raymond Pettibon is famed for the breadth and depth of his reading: his art draws on it (excuse pun) at every turn. This anthology of Pettibon's favorite authors assembles an eclectic mix, from Charles Baudelaire to Borges, and Charles Manson to Mickey Spillane. Pettibon's choice of literary resources opens up interesting angles on his work, and his transformation of those resources is fascinating. "There is something in my storyteller's art that wants to put the reader and the writer on equal footing in the role of the creator," Pettibon says; the Pettibon Reader assists his fans in that endeavor.

Raymond Pettibon: A Reader

D'Harnoncourt, Anne

Ghez, Susanne

Gabriel Orozco: Photogravity

Orozco, Gabriel

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Books by Temkin, Ann