Another summer in the Hamptons has whizzed by all too quickly. With the perfect beach days still to come and crisp fall weather on its way, there are new art reads poised to publish.
This month’s Art on the Shelf list of new book releases are “The heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler,” “The Noguchi Museum - A Portrait,” “Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction,” “Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern,” “Photography Is Magic” and “International Pop.”
“The heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler”
Taking Helen Frankenthaler's 1950s New York debut as its starting point, "The heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler” follows the artist's painting and expands its focus to include the immediate social and artistic context of her work, then traces artistic currents as they move outward in different directions in the ensuing decades. This new publication edited by Katy Siegel collects six scholarly essays, six short texts from contemporary artists, and reprints of historical writing. The book interweaves these voices with a visual chronology that gives historical context by highlighting key works from performances, publications, and cultural ephemera from the 1950s to today.
Beginning with the second generation of the New York School, readers are introduced to artists, as well as writers, who created work that embraced decoration, play, and the everyday, challenging the narrow historical image of formalist art. The book traces these various phenomena as they unfurl over the next fifty years. The archival imagery from cultural as well as artistic sources, and the writing make the book accessible and compelling to a general art audience
BASIC FACTS: “The heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler” is written by Katy Siegel. Published by Gagosian / Rizzoli. Release Date: September 15, 2015. Paperback; 272 pages; $40.00.
“The Noguchi Museum - A Portrait”
“The Noguchi Museum – A Portrait” provides a unique perspective on the artwork of Isamu Noguchi and its setting in the Noguchi Museum through the eyes of renowned photographers Stephen Shore and Tina Barney. Noguchi, a modernist sculptor and designer, founded and designed the museum in Long Island City, Queens for the specific purpose of exhibiting his works. Coinciding with the publication, the museum celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2015.
Shore has photographed individual works on view at the museum, documenting them in new and surprising ways. Barney photographed visitors at the museum and its events, capturing something of the spatial experience of the museum. Together, with an essay reflecting on Noguchi and his influence, these new photographs comprise a tribute to the museum and artwork while highlighting the skill and eye of these two photographers. A section at the end of the book features more traditional plate images of iconic Noguchi works, to give context to Shore's and Barney's photographs. The book includes a foreword by the museum director, Jenny Dixon, and a selection of archival images documenting the transformation of the museum.
BASIC FACTS: “The Noguchi Museum - A Portrait” is by Tina Barney and Stephen Shore. Published by Phaidon Press. Release Date: September 28, 2015. Hardcover; 136 pages; $49.95.
“Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction”
This illustrated monograph is published on the occasion of two exhibitions in spring 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs” and “Piotr Uklański: Selects from the Met Collection", curated by Uklański. The book presents an in-depth examination of the photographs shown in “Piotr Uklański: Fatal Attraction” plus groupings artworks selected by Uklański from the Met’s collections. Both exhibitions were based on the classical themes of love and death.
BASIC FACTS: “Piotr Uklanski: Fatal Attraction” is written by Rosetta Brooks, Doug Eklund and Jamieson Webster. Published by Gagosian / Rizzoli. Release Date: September 29, 2015. Hardcover; 176 pages; $49.95.
“Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern”
One of the twentieth-centuries most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) brought wide public attention to the works of the modern masters, including Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time, there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde; her midtown gallery was the acknowledged center of the postwar New York art scene; and her museum on the Grand Canal in Venice remains one of the world’s great collections of modern art. Guggenheim was equally famous for her unconventional personal life and for her ironic, playful desire to shock.
Best-selling author Francine Prose offers a singular reading of Guggenheim’s life. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries, to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs. Prose delivers a colorful portrait of a defiantly uncompromising woman who maintained a powerful upper hand in a male-dominated world. Part of the series: Jewish Lives.
BASIC FACTS: “Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern" is written by Francine Prose. Published by Yale Press University. Release Date: September 29, 2015. Hardcover; 240 pages; $25.00.
“Photography Is Magic”
“Photography Is Magic” draws together current ideas about the use of photography as an invaluable medium in the contemporary art world. Edited and with an essay by photography writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, the publication surveys the work of a diverse group of artists. Many of the featured artists work at the borders of the art world and the photography world and all are engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice, and its place in a shifting photographic landscape that is being reshaped by digital techniques.
“Photography Is Magic” includes images and texts by more than 80 artists. From Michele Abeles and Walead Beshty to Daniel Gordon and Matthew Lipps, Cotton selected artists who are consciously reframing photographic practices using mixed media, appropriation and a recalibration of analog processes. Cotton brings these artists together around the idea of magic, the properties of illusion, and material transformation that uniquely characterize photography.
BASIC FACTS: “Photography Is Magic” is written by Charlotte Cotton. Published by Aperture. Release Date: September 29, 2015. Paperback; 384 pages; $49.95.
“International Pop”
"International Pop" is the first major survey to chronicle the emergence and migration of Pop art from an international perspective, focusing on the period from the 1950s through the early 1970s. Including original texts from a diverse roster of contributors, the book provides new scholarship on the period and examines artists across the globe who were simultaneously confronting radical cultural and political developments that would lay the foundation for the emergence of an art form embracing figuration. “International Pop” amplifies the scope and tenor of what is understood to be "Pop," exposing the variety and complexity of this period and subject matter, and revealing how artists alternatively celebrated, cannibalized, rejected or assimilated some of the presumed qualities of Pop in the US and Britain.
Anchored by a 48-page visual chronology, the book features essays by a range of scholars examining developments in Britain, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Hungary as well as Western Europe and the U.S. The volume includes 320 illustrations, including full-color plates of each work in the exhibition “International Pop”, which was on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from April 11 to August 29, 2015.
BASIC FACTS: “International Pop” is written by Darsie Alexander, Erica Battle, Claudia Calirman, and Charlotte Cotton. Published by Walker Art Center. Release Date: August 25, 2015. Hardcover; 352 pages; $85.00.
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