Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Describes how eighteenth century open Salon exhibitions by the French Academy encouraged the public view and evaluate art, and explains the influence of this public opinion on the painters of the day

Arts & Photography

Thomas Crow

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Must avant-garde art hold itself apart from the values and beliefs widely held in the common culture? Must advanced artists always be the symbolic adversaries of the ordinary citizen? These questions have dominated, even paralyzed the modern art world, particularly in recent years when perceived elitism and imposed canons of taste have come under fire from all sides. In this stimulating book, a prominent art historian shows that the links between advanced art and modern mass culture have always been robust, indeed necessary to both. Thomas Crow focuses on the continual interdependence between the two phenomena, providing examples that range from Paris in the mid-nineteenth century to the latest revivals of Conceptual art in the 1990s.

Modern Art in the Common Culture

This book puts the life of the artist at the centre of innovative art history, narrating a biography of five painters at the centre of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques Louis-David and his extraordinarily precocious pupils Drouais, Girodet, Gerard, and Gros. Their shared ambition was to build an alternative, exalted life in art, one committed to rigorous classical erudition while suffused with the emotional depth of familial bonds. In this experiment of enlightened teaching, the roles of master and pupil were frequently reversed. Thomas Crow tells how the personal histories and aesthetic choices of these artists were played out within the larger arena in which a whole social order was being overturned, a king embodying all patriarchal authority was put to death, and a republic of equal male brotherhood was proclaimed. The revolutionary ideal of male fraternity was just one of many shifts in the philosophical underpinnings of the visual arts, the sum of which moved painting more and more into an exclusively masculine frame of reference. In their paintings these artists found themselves compelled to define the entire spectrum of desirable human qualities - from battlefield heroics to eroticised corporeal beauty - as properties of the male sex alone. This process both reinforced and complicated the bonds of emotion and mutual identification between them. That imaginative aspiration toward a single-sex utopia proved in the end to be inseparable from a tragic artistic vision of unendurable suffering in which fathers and sons found themselves hopelessly at odds. In the practical conduct of their lives and careers, the young Davidians found all too often the costs of their vocation to be prolonged illness, dispiriting exile, waste of talent, psychological traumas of shattered friendship, embittered resentment, and mourning - and in one instance, early death. The outcome of the Revolution, which would have accelerated the fragmenting tendencies within any family, cost them their intellectual and spiritual home in David's studio. Other studios would multiply, but with the end of this one - as much a condition of mind as a practical place of work - classicism itself came to signify loss, retrospection, and regret.

Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France

In this illuminating book, a prominent art historian explores the links between avant-garde art and modern mass culture, showing that the connections between the two have always been strong, and even necessary to both. The author recounts vivid episodes involving Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Christopher Williams, and many others, arriving at fresh and original insights into modern art and its place in late twentieth-century culture.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) is one of the great heroes of late twentieth-century art, a cult figure as much in the contemporary art world as on the architecture scene, whose work is independent from any movement or school. This book is the first and definitive monograph on the artist, who died at the 
age of thirty-five. 
Born in New York and trained in architecture, Gordon Matta-Clark is most famous for his slicing through faÁades, walls and floors of derelict buildings. This 'deconstructing' gesture, provocative and extreme, turns architecture into astonishing sculptures, where the mass of the building is entwined with the light and air that penetrate it. Matta-Clark's interventions are always grounded in social or political convictions. Some of his projects include opening a restaurant (Food, 1971) 
in the then-neglected district of SoHo in New York, purchasing at auction fractions of unusable urban land 
in New York (Reality Properties: Fake Estates, 1973), dispensing oxygen to passersby in the streets of 
New York from a self-made cart (Fresh Air Cart, 1972), and other visionary urban projects that he conceived 
as a founding member of the New York-based Anarchitecture group. His practice remains one of the most unique, unequalled, and hugely influential of the past decades.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Diserens, Corinne

Kravagna, Christian

Kirshner, Judith Russi

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, was originally published as the proceedings from a conference held in Vancouver, in 1983. Due to its popularity, this reprint is being issued with the same insightful and intriguing papers by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, T.J. Clark, Hollis Clayson, Thomas Crow, Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, Clement Greenberg, Henri Lefebvre, Marcelin Pleynet, Allan Sekula, Paul Hayes Tucker and John Wilson Foster, all of which constitute a major contribution to the rethinking of the history and debates concerning modernism and modernity. Once novelties in the 1980s, many of these essays and theories in this illustrated reader are today regarded as modern classics.

Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers

Hollis Clayson

Clement Greenberg

Paul Hayes Tucker

Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin

John Wilson Foster

Henri Lefebvre

Marcelin Pleynet

T.J. Clark

The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

Between 1961 and 1968, at the height of the Pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) created about 50 large black-and-white drawings. Not only was their imagery, culled from consumer culture, entirely new--baked potatoes, ads for foot medication and BB Guns--but so was their treatment, which drew on the rudimentary character of cheaply printed commercial drawings. Conceived independently from Lichtenstein's paintings, these drawings recast illustrations from newspaper ads and comic books into works of keen visual intensity, curiously echoing the clean-edge aesthetic of 1960s geometric abstraction. "Drawing is the basis of my art," Lichtenstein later affirmed; "It is where my thinking takes place." Published for an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York, this richly illustrated publication offers 120 color illustrations, plus essays on Lichtenstein's technique and on his little-known 1967 Aspen project, in which the artist transformed a room into a black-and-white cartoon drawing.

Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968

Isabelle Dervaux

Graham Bader

Margaret Holben Ellis

Lindsey Tyne

Clare Bell

Reference

Hatje Cantz

Self-described as an “American painter of signs,” Robert Indiana (born 1928) has interpreted the postwar American semiotic landscape through a unique merging of Pop's graphic snap with American modernist painting's codes of sexuality and use of advertising designs. Best known for his iconic rendition of the word “love,” over the past 50 years Indiana has created a major body of work that spans the movements of assemblage, hard-edged abstraction and Pop art. This book surveys his career from the early 1960s to the present, also convening new scholarship on this important artist by writers such as Thomas Crow and Robert Storr. Addressing topics ranging from Indiana's politically engaged works, his formative years in the Coentie's Slip artistic community in downtown Manhattan, Indiana's place within Pop and his allegorical depictions of gender and family, this book reevaluates and reorients some of Indiana's most significant works.

Robert Indiana: New Perspectives

Robert. Storr

Allison Unruh

Kalliopi Minioudaki

For a medium so potentially “disembodied” and transparent, photography can offer a unique capacity to concretize place, especially when used in art installations in which photographs may be assembled from numerous sources and locations. Take Place investigates this particular implementation of photography through various scholarly disciplines―art history, photography theory, the history of architecture and social geography―and through creative disciplines such as installation art, performance, architecture and especially multimedia projects. Take Place offers points of departure for the study of photography as it is deployed within other media.

Take Place: Photography and Place from Multiple Perspectives

Kitty Zijlmans

Barbara Hooper

Caroline van Eck

Photography & Video

Valiz

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Books by Thomas Crow