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A broad and deep anthology of critic and art historian Richard Shiff’s most influential writings, which have shaped our understanding of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. In his engaging and often strikingly deep observations of major modern and contemporary visual art, Shiff has written about an impressive range of artists, including Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, and Bridget Riley. A leading scholar and powerful voice, Shiff’s insight into some of the most prominent artistic practices spans generation, place, and approach as seen in this considered selection of essays on twenty-six artists. These writings first appeare...
"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's Fountain. But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology. Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but ...
"'Order to me is to be ordered about", Willem de Kooning said. Between Sense and de Kooning is an exploration of how de Kooning both worked and thought concerning art, while respecting the artist's own ambiguities and his reluctance to embrace categorical distinctions between representation and abstraction. Richard Shiff acknowledges de Kooning's idea that art is not about concepts like progress or development, but is instead a sensory phenomenon.
Published on the occasion of the twenty-five year anniversary of David Zwirner, this book paints a picture of the gallery’s growth and development through the lens of the artists that have shaped it. Since its founding in 1993, David Zwirner has above all else been guided by its artist-centric ethos. Beginning with the gallery's early days on Greens Street in SoHo, to its transition and expansion to Chelsea, London, the Upper East Side, and Hong Kong, this book captures David Zwirner's devotion to its inimitable roster of artists and estates. The heart of the publication is a wide-ranging, dynamic selection of the gallery's standout exhibitions—in many cases handpicked by David Zwirner h...
The most comprehensive monograph on Turner Prize-nominated artist Peter Doig. In every generation of artists, there are a few-or perhaps just one-who propose a new set of questions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. While stories of painting’s demise in the early 1990s deemed painters and their work quaintly anachronistic, Doig-looking ahead as much as back for inspiration-forged a new painterly language: an ironic mix of Romanticism and post-impressionism to create haunting and sometimes dreamlike landscape vistas. In this lavish new volume devoted to his entire career-which includes paintings, drawings, and reference material, such as found photographs-art...
Twenty years of thinking about Judd: authoritative meditations on the epochal minimalist from renowned American art historian Richard Shiff This important new publication collects more than 20 years of sustained thinking about Donald Judd from one of today's most respected art historians and theorists. In Sensuous Thoughts, Richard Shiff draws on Judd's own writing, on the work of the pragmatist philosophers Charles Sander Pierce and William James, and on interviews with many of Judd's contemporaries and close relations, to dramatically enhance the act of looking at Judd's work. Across nearly 300 pages, Shiff closely explicates such topics as Judd's dialogues with artists such as Willem de K...
Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cézanne's painting. He shows how Cézanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cézanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.
Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This v...
In an age where art history’s questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative - embracing doubt as a critical tool and asking how particular histories of art have come to be.
This catalogue to the exhibition at the Kunstverein St. Gallen focuses on the work of American artist Robert Mangold, who occupies a key position in today's painting world. This broad survey is of considerable significance within the context of discourse on contemporary non-relational painting, and presents the Mangold's paintings from 1984 to 1997 in full-color well reproduced plates.