Utilizing works from museums across North America, "Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde" traces the path of the pioneering sculptor Jacques Lipchitz from his birthplace in Lithuania to his early work in Paris before World War I, where he was associated with the Parisian avant-garde and applied cubist principles to three-dimensional artwork. By breaking the volume and using different planes, Lipchitz created works that were a new force in the history of sculpture. His innovation of the transparents style in sculpture during the late 1920s was groundbreaking and was copied by many, including Picasso. At the outbreak of World War II the Jewish artist fled to New York, where he worked on increasingly monumental sculptures until his death in 1973. This substantive catalog contains new essays by internationally renowned scholars and translated articles by contemporaries Ramon Gomez de la Serna and Joaquin Torres-Garcia that have not appeared in English before. Contributors include Jonathan Fineberg, Christopher Green, Jordana Mendelson, David O'Brien, Cathy Putz, and Cecilia de Torres.

Lipchitz and the Avant Garde: From Paris to New York

Arts & Photography

Lipchitz, Jacques

Helfenstein, Josef

Fineberg, Jonathan David

Krannert Art Museum

Individual Artists

Utilizing works from museums across North America, Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde traces the path of the pioneering sculptor Jacques Lipchitz from his birthplace in Lithuania to his early work in Paris before World War I, where he was associated with the Parisian avant-garde and applied cubist principles to three-dimensional artwork. By breaking the volume and using different planes, Lipchitz created works that were a new force in the history of sculpture. His innovation of the transparents style in sculpture during the late 1920s was groundbreaking and was copied by many, including Picasso. At the outbreak of World War II the Jewish artist fled to New York, where he worked on increasingly monumental sculptures until his death in 1973. This substantive catalog contains new essays by internationally renowned scholars and translated articles by contemporaries Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Joaquin Torres-García that have not appeared in English before.

Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde: From Paris to New York

GREEN, Christopher

Putz, Cathy

De Torres, Cecilia

Mendelson, Jordana

O’Brien, David

Complex and highly idiosyncratic, the work of Louise Bourgeois enthralls audiences throughout the world. Beginning in the 1940s, shortly after arriving in New York City, Bourgeois produced her first mature, highly original paintings, drawings, and sculptures. 
While most of her contemporaries were drawn toward pure abstraction, the work of Louise Bourgeois entered the realm of the psychological and symbolic. Themes already evident in these early works continued to resonate throughout her career. The Personages represent her first explorations in sculpture; summoning a physical presence, they suggest moments of alienation as well as evocative encounters. 
This comprehensive catalogue features the artistís work from the 1940s and 1950s, including 25 sculptures, 17 paintings, 30 drawings, and the series of prints inspired by New Yorkís landscape of skyscrapers, ìHe Disappeared into Complete Silence,î which presents Bourgeoisí own hermetic texts juxtaposed with enigmatic pictures. An essay explicates the role of ritual and representation in the work of Louise Bourgeois and includes rare documentary photos.

Louise Bourgeois: The Early Work

Surveying the American artist’s multimedia works on paper from 1964 to the presentAmerican artist Louise Fishman’s (born 1939) physical and process-driven work reimagines the Abstract Expressionist model into a vehicle for dialogue about history and emotion centered in the artist’s identities as Jewish, feminist and lesbian. Though she is primarily a painter, Fishman has worked with a number of different mediums to create works on paper since the early 1960s. A Question of Emphasis presents a vast selection of these works in a single volume, encompassing collage, oil and wax, thread, acrylic text, ink, charcoal, printmaking, oil stick, watercolor and tempera. Fishman conceives of her works on paper not as studies for later paintings but as discrete pieces of art, generally small- and medium-scale and frequently sculptural and tactile. New writing as well as an interview between Fishman and artist Ulrike Müller accompany a wide selection of works.

A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing

Prescient prints from the golden age of Dutch satire 
This volume explores the satirical visual strategies that early modern Netherlandish printmakers―such as Joan Blaeu, Romeyn de Hooghe, Willem Jacobsz and Claes Jansz Visscher―used to memorialize historical events, lionize (or demonize) domestic and international leaders, and instigate collective action. While some of their prints employ visual puns that even the illiterate could enjoy, others were captioned in Latin, French or Dutch, prompting educated elites across Europe to consider the relationship between text and image in earnest. Published for an exhibit at Krannert Art Museum, Paper Knives, Paper Crowns provides a chronological arc and thematic overview of Netherlandish political prints, addressing multiple types of printmaking as well as the medium’s relationship to other art forms, engaging with art historical scholarship and studies of early modern political history and theory in the process.

Paper Knives, Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic

History & Criticism

Al Held, the Italian watercolors: An exhibition, August 27 to September 26, 1993

Al Held

An ancient time brought to life by textiles
While the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt are more widely known, the simple pleasures of life as it was lived are better portrayed in textiles, which carried designs commemorating the joys of festivals, food, and dancing. Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt presents 103 full-color images of the astonishing textile collection of Rose Choron, featuring rare examples from Egypt’s Coptic Christians as well as the Islamic period.
Dating primarily from the third to seventh centuries, these hand-woven fabrics showcase colorful images of dancers, haloed saints with hands raised in prayer, and a plethora of flowers and animals evoking the bountiful ecology of the Nile Delta. Some display Arabic inscriptions celebrating divine power, and all offer insights into a lost world: people’s dress, their interior decoration, and their view of their relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds.
Eunice Dauterman Maguire explains the work by providing a rich historical and mythic context, as well as detailed technical explanations. This volume also features a preface by Rose Choron herself, explaining the origins of the collection and the source of her fascination with the textiles.

Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt: The Rich Life and the Dance

Maguire, Eunice Dauterman

Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists features recent work by seven important contemporary artists who come from the region stretching from Egypt to Pakistan, but who have lived much of their lives in Europe or the United States. The artists, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Mona Hatoum, Y.Z. Kami, Walid Raad, Michal Rovner, and Shahzia Sikander, draw on their experiences of displacement and knowledge of multiple cultures to offer alternative visions of the contemporary world. They have crossed or collapsed political, cultural, and religious borders, and disrupted conventional and stereotypical representations of time and place, and of history and geography. Their art offers new kinds of intercultural understanding. David O'Brien and David Prochaska write sensitively of how these artists address various experiences of travel, exile, diaspora, alienation, and integration, feelings of longing and belonging, memories of place and people, encounters with divergent views of sexuality and gender, alternate political understandings of the world, and cultural practices that both divide and unite us.

Beyond East And West: Seven Transnational Artists

Prochaska, David

The lives and work of Bill Traylor and William Edmondson share fascinating parallels despite a twenty-year age gap and the fact that they never met. Major figures in American and African-American art history, both were born into poverty in the South and began creating art as older men after working for decades as physical laborers. In 1937 Edmondson was the first African American artist to have a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 
Traylor, a draftsman, and Edmondson, a sculptor, both created figurative work inspired by their surroundings or people they knew and employed abstract forms and simplified compositions. By considering their art together, this volume examines the aesthetic connections between their works within the framework of modernism.

Bill Traylor, William Edmondson and the Modernist Impulse

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Hedda Sterne's impressive art career began in the late 1930s when she exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris. She attained national prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, exhibiting with Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and her career continues into the present. This book documents Sterne's importance to the post-war American art scene. It highlights notable periods in her artistic career, including her Machine and Spray Roads paintings, portraits, installations, and recent drawings.

Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne, a Retrospective

Eckhardt, Sarah L.

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Books by Krannert Art Museum