The Poetry Issue! Ursula No. 8, the magazine's first theme issue, celebrates the time-honored affinities between poets and artists. A collaboration with The Poetry Project in downtown New York, organized by Nicole Eisenman and featuring a riotous painting by Eisenman on the cover, the issue gathers new work by a dozen distinguished poets, along with contributions by Jeremy O. Harris, Anne Waldman, Mark Bradford and many more.

Ursula: Issue 8

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

Philip Guston and the Poets explores the artist’s oeuvre in relation to critical literary interpretation.
The book draws parallels between humanist themes reflected in both Guston’s paintings and drawings as well as in the language and prose discerned in five of the 20th century’s most prominent literary figures: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale and T.S. Eliot. The enormous influence that Italy itself had upon Guston and his work is also examined.
Spanning a 36-year period, Philip Guston and the Poets features approximately 60 major paintings and 25 prominent drawings dating from 1944 through 1980, the last of which were created in the final year of Guston’s life. The monograph also includes an extensive essay from Kosme de Barañano, an internationally respected art historian and Guston scholar.
A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston (1913–80) first came to fame as an Abstract Expressionist. He began reintroducing figurative elements―clumsy hands, cigarettes, light bulbs―into his work in the late 1960s. These late paintings were first exhibited, to savage critical reception, in 1970.

Philip Guston & the Poets

History & Criticism

"Guston's Richard Nixon drawings are nasty, scabrous, witty, grossly unfair and one of the juster verdicts handed down on our 37th president, the only one to resign from office." -William Corbett, The Brooklyn Rail 
Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings is the first comprehensive collection of Guston’s legendary satirical caricatures of the 37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon. Expanding on Poor Richard (University of Chicago Press, 2001, now out of print and rare), it features some 180 works depicting Nixon and his cronies from 1971 and 1975. The book opens with an introduction by Philip Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and also includes the transcript of a panel discussion moderated by Phong Bui with William Corbett, Irving Sandler, Lisa Yuskavage, Bob Mankoff and Katy Siegel.
These trenchant works were created in the tumultuous political climate of the early 1970s; the US was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the chaos of the 1968 presidential election and the enduring violence of the Vietnam War. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, and Nixon’s unsuccessful attempts to prevent their disclosure, made the president look both amoral and somewhat hapless. This is the “Poor Richard,” a slyly political little sneak, that appears in Guston’s cartoons from the period.
A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston (1913–80) first came to fame as an Abstract Expressionist. He began reintroducing figurative elements―clumsy hands, cigarettes, light bulbs―into his work in the late 1960s. These late paintings were first exhibited, to savage critical reception, in 1970; Guston began his Nixon drawings at precisely this point in his career. Caricaturing Nixon, Guston began to refine a pictorial language equally sensitive to inner pathos and the turmoil of the public world.

Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings: 1971 & 1975

Mayer, Musa

Individual Artists

Two of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) and David Smith (1906–65) pushed sculptural practice in metal to new heights over the course of their careers. Bringing together pivotal sculpture of a historic moment in American art history, this monograph also features photographs from Italian Ugo Mulas, who met both sculptors in Spoleto in 1962 and documented them throughout his life. This publication is released on the occasion of an exhibition at Hauser &amp; Wirth Zürich from June 10 to September 17, 2017.

Alexander Calder / David Smith

Considered one of the foremost Belgian artists, Philippe Vandenberg (1952–2009) was a prolific painter whose oeuvre features a series of radical stylistic and thematic shifts, reflecting an existential philosophy both in his restless personal trajectory and his responses to varying sociocultural changes.Using image, word and symbol, Vandenberg challenged the ethical context of the work of art, wrestling with universal themes such as war, religion, movement, sexuality and death.This monograph includes an introduction from the book’s editor, Wouter Davidts; a text from David Anfam, Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum; and an interview between the artist and his contemporary Ronny Delrue. Also included are transcriptions of a seminar focused on the artist’s work held in 2016 at his former atelier.

Philippe Vandenberg

This publication celebrates the well-known German collector and gallerist Ingvild Goetz's longstanding passion for art. An extensive chronology provides an in-depth view of Goetz's history with the Arte Povera movement as a gallerist in the 1970s and ’80s, and as a collector from the 1980s onwards. It includes previously unpublished archival materials that trace the emergence of Arte Povera, as well as newly commissioned essays from curators Douglas Fogle and Chiara Vecchiarelli. Artists featured are Claudio Abate, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Giorgio Colombo, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Paolo Mussat Sartor, Guilio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Guiseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giovanni Prini and Gilberto Zorio.

Arte Povera Seen by Ingvild Goetz

Jack Whitten (born 1939) is an American abstractionist celebrated for his innovative processes of applying and transfiguring paint in works equally alert to materiality, politics and metaphysics. This publication focuses on more than 20 of the artist’s paintings from the 1980s and features an essay by Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin.
Whitten holds a unique place in the narrative of postwar American art: over the course of a five-decade career, he has bridged gestural abstraction and process art, experimenting ceaselessly to arrive at a nuanced language of painting that hovers between mechanical automation and personal expression. Whitten has had a profound influence on many artists working today, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in recognition of his major contribution to the cultural legacy of the United States.

More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten, 1979–1989

Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943–47 is the first book to explore nature’s central role in establishing the singular voice of this truly pioneering figure in abstract expressionism. In the early 1940s, Gorky turned to nature as a primary subject matter, inspired by his summers spent in Connecticut and rural Virginia. The resulting works from this career-defining period, filled with a bold use of color, line and composition, and infused with an explosive expressive freedom, are some of the most evocative works of Gorky’s career. Featuring over 50 landscapes from this period, including paintings and works on paper, the book opens with a personal foreword from the artist’s granddaughter (and the show’s curator). The book continues with an essay from Edith Devaney, curator of the celebrated 2016 Abstract Expressionism show at the Royal Academy of Art in London, which traces the development of the Armenian-American artist’s passion and instinct for art along the arc of his career, highlighting key links to Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943–47

Author of From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky, Matthew Spender presents a new expanded edition of his 2010 publication Arshile Gorky: Goats on the Roof, with never-before-published material, including diary entries and letters from the artist’s wife as well as additional contextual documents. Arshile Gorky is increasingly considered an important influence on the development of abstract expressionism. From Gorky’s turbulent childhood fleeing the Armenian genocide in Turkey, to his adulthood in the United States, to his suicide in his forties after a traumatic series of physical and emotional setbacks, this biography offers an intimate window into the artist’s life, telling his story through many voices: his letters, sent and received; the correspondence of family and friends; pivotal reviews and criticism; newspaper articles and other essential documents. With new design integrating a fuller range of artwork and archival images, the book provides a more comprehensive portrait of Gorky, showing his struggle for recognition, his devotion to his family and his connection to his Armenian heritage. The artist’s life story unfolds through his personal letters, the correspondence between friends and family and key contemporary reviews. Arshile Gorky (1904–48) immigrated from Ottoman Armenia to the US in 1920. After five years living under strained conditions with his family in Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York and became absorbed into the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of modernism. From 1946, Gorky suffered a series of crises: his studio burned down, he underwent an operation for cancer and his wife had an affair with Roberto Matta. Gorky hanged himself in 1948, at the age of 44. He is buried in North Cemetery in Sherman, Connecticut.

Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents

Humor & Entertainment

Richard Jackson

Los Angeles-based cult artist Richard Jackson consistently uses his mistrust of conventional painting as a gateway to works that straddle the divide between the explicitly civilized and the wildly primordial. Born in 1939, Jackson emerged alongside the Minimal and Conceptual artists of the 1970s with whom he became associated, yet remained distant in terms of approach. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism and action painting, Jackson has built his career over three decades, exploring the limits of painterly practice. This wryly designed monograph fuses Jackson's two passions: art-making and hunting. Using the format of a hunting magazine, it showcases images from recent solo exhibitions at Haswellediger & Co., Nyehaus, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois and includes essays by Paul McCarthy, Bozidar Brazda, Julian Bismuth and Carissa Rodriguez.

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