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Celebrated photographer Robert Mapplethorpe challenged the limits of censorship and conformity, combining technical and formal mastery with unexpected, often provocative content that secured his place in history. Mapplethorpe’s artistic vision helped shape the social and cultural fabric of the 1970s and ’80s and, following his death in 1989 from AIDS, informed the political landscape of the 1990s. His photographic works continue to resonate with audiences all over the world. Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe preserved studio files and art from every period and vein of his production, including student work, jewelry, sculptures, and commercial assignments. The resulting archive is fascinating and astonishing. With over 400 illustrations, this volume surveys a virtually unknown resource that sheds new light on the artist’s motivations, connections, business acumen, and talent as a curator and collector.
Robert Lebel, French art critic and collector, was instrumental in rendering Marcel Duchamp’s often hermetic life, art, and ideas accessible to a wider public across Europe and the United States, principally with his 1959 publication Sur Marcel Duchamp, the first monograph and catalogue raisonné devoted to the artist. Duchamp was a willing partner in the book’s creation. In fact, his active participation in both its conception and layout was so substantial that the book is considered part of the artist’s oeuvre. But the project took six years to complete. The trials, tribulations, quarrels, and machinations that plagued the production, publication, and publicity of Sur Marcel Duchamp ...
In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author analyses works by Mann, Proust and Joyce as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture.
The legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 –1989) is rich and complicated, triggering controversy, polarizing critics, and providing inspiration for many artists who followed him. Mapplethorpe, one of the most influential figures of his time, today stands as an example to emerging photographers who continue to experiment with the boundaries and concepts of the beautiful. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs offers a timely and rewarding examination of his oeuvre and influence. Drawing from the extraordinary collection jointly acquired in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, as well as the Mapplethorpe Archive housed...
Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (1921–1987) amassed an extraordinary collection of 26,000 photographs between 1973 and 1984, recognizing that photography was an undervalued art form on which he might have a profound impact as a collector. He was mainly attracted to photographs that stimulated his imagination, and his taste ran toward the idiosyncratic—images that surprised him chiefly because he had never seen them before. In choosing the 147 works reproduced in this volume, Paul Martineau selected masterpieces as well as images from obscure sources: daguerreotypes, cartes-de-visite, and stereographs, plus mug shots, medical photographs, and works by unknown makers. The latter category contains s...
Accompanies an exhibition held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 8 February-1 May 2011.
Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated within an economic system - it depends on money for its creation, for the livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution. In this sense, art can be understood as an enterprising activity. However, profit-making is rarely the primary goal of artists, and indeed the entanglement of art with enterprise generates significant aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical and ethical challenges for contemporary art practice. Social enterprise has emerged from this complex terrain with the promise of an alternative model of economic organisation in the arts. Grace McQuilten and Anthony White argue that artists can, and have, engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of this model. Art as Enterprise brings a fresh perspective to the debate about the roles of contemporary art in consumer capitalist society.
Winner of the Arts Club of Washington Marfield Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection This "admiring and absorbing biography" (Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review) charts Sam Wagstaff's incalculable influence on contemporary art, photography, and gay identity. A legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, Sam Wagstaff was a "figure who stood at the intersection of gay life and the art world and brought glamour and daring to both" (Andrew Solomon). Now, in Philip Gefter's groundbreaking biography, he emerges as a cultural visionary. Gefter documents the influence of the man who—although known today primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe—"almost invented the idea of photography as art" (Edmund White). Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe braids together Wagstaff's personal transformation from closeted society bachelor to a rebellious curator with a broader portrait of the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, creating a definitive portrait of a man and his era.
Walls of Algiers examines the historical processes that transformed Ottoman Algiers, the "Bulwark of Islam," into "Alger la blanche," the colonial urban showpiece - and, after the outbreak of revolution in 1954 - counter-model of France's global empire. In this volume, the city of Algiers serves as a case study for the analysis of the proactive and reactive social, political, technical, and artistic forces that generate a city's form. Visual sources - prints, photographs, paintings, architectural drawings, urban designs, and film - are treated as primary evidence that complements and even challenges textual documents. The contributors' wide-ranging but intersecting essays span the discipline...
By exploring the intense interaction between painting and printmaking between art theory and unbridled artistic ambition, Printing the Grand Manner breaks new ground in its analysis of both the reproductive prints and Le Brun's original compositions. --Book Jacket.