Painting provides an overview of Roman Opalka’s (1931–2011) career, spanning more than five decades. In 1965, Opalka began a project that would occupy the entirity of his career, titled 1965/1―[Infinity]. Each painting comprises rows of tiny numbers that progress sequentially from one canvas to the next.

Roman Opalka: Painting

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Dominique Lévy

In 1948, America came knocking unexpectedly at the door of Pierre Soulages (born 1919). James Johnson Sweeney, then curator at MoMA and future director of the Guggenheim Museum, had heard talk in Paris of a painter who worked in black with broad brushstrokes. He wanted to find out more. Thus began the success story of a young European painter in America. His thriving career during the 1950s to the mid-1970s consisted of shows at Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis, and exhibitions at the Phillips Collection and the Guggenheim. Hollywood celebrities like Otto Preminger, Charles Laughton and Alfred Hitchcock collected his work, which today may be found in the collections of more than 40 American museums. In 1954, Soulages joined the Kootz Gallery; when it closed 12 years later, Soulages found himself without American representation, and continued his career back in Europe, where he is among the most revered painters of his generation. Soulages in America contains a 2012 interview with the artist and his wife; a wealth of documentary material, including letters from Alfred Barr, Leo Castelli and Sam Kootz; correspondence from artists such as Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler; plus installation photographs and other archival documents.

Soulages in America

Individual Artists

Local History brings together rarely seen works from the 1950s through the early 1970s by Enrico Castellani, Donald Judd and Frank Stella, juxtaposing these with later examples that reveal each artist’s distinct evolution and the various reverberations of their brief aesthetic collision in the 1960s.

Local History: Castellani, Judd, Stella

In the intricate wire sculptures of the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (1912–94), lines are given new dimension, describing architectural space and engaging with the human body. Gego: Autobiography of a Line gathers key works from the artist’s oeuvre, from her famed entropic sculpture of the ‘70s to the works on paper created at the end of her long career. This fully illustrated publication is among the first to position Gego’s work in a global context, and features texts by curator Chus Martínez, head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland; art historian Kaira Cabañas; and Gego’s grandson, Daniel Crespin; as well as previously unpublished archival material. The book also includes “GEGO,” a new poem by poet, artist and composer Anne Tardos, performing a linguistic intervention in Gego’s work.

Gego: Autobiography of a Line

Multum in Parvo highlights the complex relationship between scale and size in the oeuvre of Alexander Calder (1898–1976) over a period of more than 30 years. As its title--translating to “much in little”--implies, the volume features over 40 rare small-scale sculptures, ranging from the size of a thumb to 30 inches tall, all of which feature the same physical qualities as Calder’s largest mobiles in the most miniature of detail. In addition to archival material, installation photography of the sculptures in the environment designed for them by architects Santiago and Gabriel Calatrava, and original architectural sketches, the book also includes commissioned essays by Jed Perl, art historian and author currently at work on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder, and Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, as well as poems by Karl Shapiro and John Updike.

Alexander Calder: Multum in Parvo

Sotto Voce

Body and Matter

Kazuo Shiraga

Satoru Hoshino

Peter Regli (b. 1959 in Andermatt, Switzerland) is best known for his ongoing project, Reality Hacking, a series of temporary and often anonymous interventions in the landscape and other public spaces. Initiated in the 1990s and spanning four continents,

Peter Regli

Robert Motherwell (1915–91) came to abstraction not through painting, but through philosophy, poetry and art history. While studying at Stanford, he was introduced to modernism and symbolism; Mallarmé’s dictum, “To paint, not the thing, but the effect it provides,” would prove essential in Motherwell’s work. Elegy to the Spanish Republic is perhaps the most literal example of this influence. Begun in 1948, the series, comprising some 150 canvases, was the artist’s “funeral song for something once cared about” in abstract pictorial form. Exploring the inextricable links between poetry, politics, writing and painting revealed in the history of the series, this volume includes Harold Rosenberg’s “A Bird for Every Bird,” Federico García Lorca’s “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” notes and writings by Motherwell on the Spanish Civil War, scholarly essays and rare archival material.

Robert Motherwell: Elegy to the Spanish Republic (DOMINIQUE LEVY)

In 1966, German artist Gerhard Richter (born 1932) embarked on a series of paintings: uniform grids of colored rectangles or squares in a chart configuration against a white background, inspired by industrially produced paint chips. With the exception of only one other painting, this marked the artist’s first use of color and a turning point in his career. This comprehensive catalogue is the first publication dedicated to the original Colour Charts, both those created in 1966 and those made in the ‘70s after a five-year hiatus. Featuring new essays by Dietmar Elger, head of the Gerhard Richter Archive; Hubertus Butin, curator and author of several key texts on Richter; and Jaleh Mansoor, professor at the University of British Columbia, whose research concentrates on modern abstraction and its socioeconomic implications, this is a handsome tribute to one of Richter’s most groundbreaking bodies of work.

Gerhard Richter: Colour Charts

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Dominique Lévy publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dominique Lévy