Art books. Many of us can’t live without them, but sooner or later we
can’t live with them, either. First we run out of shelves,Posts with indoor tracking
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indoors. then table space gets scarce, and soon stacks of books start
rising from the floor. Luckily these conditions stop no one from
publishing them, or from buying them or giving them as gifts.Thank you
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This
year’s offerings confirm once more the variety of genres that thrive
beneath the art book banner. There are the standard artists’ monographs,
for example, among which Johannes Grave’s ‘CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH’
(Prestel, $120) stands out, primarily for its size and lavish
reproductions — a total of 227, nearly all in color — of paintings,
drawings and prints by this great German Romantic. It conveys a fuller
sense of Friedrich’s enigmatic,An indoor positioning
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any single museum or exhibition could possibly provide.
Mr.
Grave’s rather pedestrian text, while rich with interesting information
and hypotheses about the works, never really gets going, but the
pictures more than compensate. They could easily inspire a Friedrich
pilgrimage to various, mostly German, museums.
In the category
of books by rather than about artists, one of the most stunning is Chris
Ware’s new graphic novel, ‘BUILDING STORIES’ (Pantheon Books, $50),
which elliptically tells the tale of a smart, fatalistic, unnamed young
woman who happens to have a prosthetic leg, and of her search for love.
As usual, Mr. Ware’s style is a model of compression in both word and
picture. Less usual, for the genre as a whole, is the vividness with
which he limns his heroine’s intense, if fairly ordinary, inner life,
and also the brilliant way he avoids the visual relentlessness that can
plague graphic novels.
He accomplishes this last feat by
spreading his story over “14 distinctively discrete books, booklets,
magazines, newspapers and pamphlets,” as the text on the illustrated box
they come in puts it. Varying considerably in size, length and design,
these entities offer no clues about sequence. The reader is left to
piece together a multistrand narrative whose characters also include
other residents of the Chicago brownstone in which the woman lives — an
unhappily unmarried couple and the spinster landlady — as well as the
building itself. The lack of clear structure, much less traditional
linearity, turns reading into an unusually active process. This is a
great, easily ownable work of art.
The anthropomorphic ceramics
and patterned textiles (abstract, figurative, abstractly figurative)
produced during the Wari Empire (A.D. 600 to 1000) are staples of any
museum display of pre-Columbian art. Nonetheless, the breadth of the
cultural achievement of the Wari, who preceded the better-known Incas in
the highlands of Peru, has never been so thoroughly demonstrated or
explicated.
Overseen by Susan E. Bergh, organizer of the
exhibition and a curator at the Cleveland Museum, this lavishly
illustrated, often breathtakingly beautiful book pulls together essays
by more than a dozen scholars. Historical and geographical contexts are
detailed, and there are essays covering architecture, religious deities
and rituals, textiles and feather work, sculpture, and inlaid and metal
ornaments. For a sense of the revelations in store, consider the
full-page reproduction, on Page 144, of a Wari urn decorated with
delicate and varied plant forms that presages American and European folk
art motifs by several hundred years.
Another volume that
explores a far more familiar bit of art history and makes it fresh is
‘DRAWING SURREALISM,’ (DelMonico Books/Prestel, $60) catalog to an
exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that will travel to
the Morgan Library & Museum in New York in late January. The
restless nature of Surrealist drawing — from hyper-realism to free-form
automatism,Find detailed product information for Low price howo tipper
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technique falling somewhere in between — is well established. Overseen
(like the show) by Leslie Jones, a curator at the Los Angeles museum,
and Isabelle Dervaux, of the Morgan, this invaluable book presents a
profusion of unfamiliar works and, even better, unfamiliar talents from
15 countries around the globe. It reveals the truly international nature
of Surrealism, enriching the understanding of this already richly
polymorphous style.
As for even more recent art history, it can
be presented in many ways, including as an information-dense handbook.
This is the case with ‘ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: NEW YORK ART SPACES 1960
TO 2010’ (MIT Press, $40), a kind of fleshed-out, multivoiced timeline
of the city’s alternative spaces. It was edited by Lauren Rosati and
Mary Anne Staniszewski for a show at Exit Art, one of New York’s
greatest — and sadly now defunct — exemplars of the form.
In
some 400 pages this book provides thumbnail sketches of more than 140
alternative spaces and related organizations, including the artist-run
restaurant Food, Bomb magazine and the activist group Gran Fury. It
begins with the venerable Judson Memorial Church, where Happenings and
avant-garde dance flourished in the 1960s, and concludes with newcomers
like No Longer Empty, the nomadic exhibition organizers, and OurGoods,
an online bartering network for artists, designers and artisans.
Included are essays by the editors, as well as by Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo,High quality mold making
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are interviews with 15 other people who helped establish or lead various
spaces (an interesting group, although it might have been even more
interesting to hear from either Helene Winer, the second director of
Artists Space, or Susan Wyatt, who saw it through the culture wars of
the late 1980s).
This is an indispensable source book that
leaves you wanting more — specifically, individual studies of some of
the organizations it covers. It stands as vibrant and irrefutable
evidence of what happens when people take things into their own hands.
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