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Now reissued in an attractively priced, compact edition, this classic and authoritative survey is the first detailed account of a seminal era in photographic history. Inspired and guided by Bernd and Hiller Becher, themselves pioneers in the area of documentary photography, the artists of Germany’s Düsseldorf School not only pushed the boundaries of their teachers’ practice, but also ushered in three generations of technical and compositional achievement that is rivalled in importance only by the arrival of color photography. This book introduces readers to the historic, cultural, and scientific environments in which the Bechers’ practice thrived. It explores the teaching philosophies with which they encouraged their students, and considers the qualities that highlight the Düsseldorf School: intricate detail, large scale, painterly distance combined with an immersive quality. The plate section, organized by artist, features 160 beautifully reproduced images by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Laurenz Berges, Elger Esser, Simone Nieweg, Jörg Sasse, and Petra Wunderlich.
R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007) is one of the most intriguing 20th century artists. Kitaj left behind a manuscript unmatched among 20th-century artist autobiographies -- Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter. Eloquently describing his vices and sufferings, it stands in the traditions of both St. Augustine and Thomas de Quincey.
This book gets its name from 60 unusually dark and cryptic photographs. When Newton opened his "Archives of the Night" in the 90's, gloomy images emerged like flocks of bats. His famous "Domestic Nudes" appeared in pairs and tableaus together with sinister landscapes. Palace architecture was displayed next to morbid vanitas paintings as were bodies cut open from an anatomical museum of wax figures, placed on show alongside a portrait of a Dracula star putting on his make-up. With the Archives, Newton, who decided on the placement of these works himself, showed us his dark side. But at the same time, he was amusing himself with grey areas - also typical for Newton. The juxtaposition of seemingly disparate motifs created new and enigmatic relationships that oscillate between satire and poetry, brutality and gentleness, irony and pathos.
For more than five decades, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher collaborated on photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features the Bechers’ quintessential pictures, which present water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and more as sculptural objects. Beyond the Bechers’ iconic Typologies, the book includes Bernd’s early drawings, Hilla’s independent photographs, and excerpts from their notes, sketchbooks, and journals. The book’s authors offer new insights into the development of the artists’ process, their work’s conceptual underpinnings, the photographers’ relationship to deindustrialization, and the artists’ legacy. An essay by award-winning cultural historian Lucy Sante and an interview with Max Becher, the artists’ son, make this volume an unrivaled look into the Bechers’ art alongside their career, life, and subjects.
"The book opens with a poem by SHERMAN ALEXIE. A new commission by SEAN THOMAS finds him back in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, documenting the teen rites of passage that pile up at the end of high school: senior prom, first romances, lazy summer jobs. Then Bruce Weber’s first story in the book: a profile of FATHER GREGORY BOYLE, founder of Homeboy Industries, the pioneering Los Angeles based gang intervention and rehabilitation program. From there All-American travels to Harlem with LISA EISNER, whose commissioned story about Amateur Night at the Apollo becomes a love poem to the vibrant neighborhood. Weber’s second story is a profile of the charming and eccentric MICKY WOLFSON, whose...
A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903–75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans’s work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly ...
"Cy Twombly's work realizes its most personal expression in his intimately sized drawings and paintings on paper. Finding inspiration as much in the forces of nature as in ancient epics and legend, and using the simplest of media - pencils, ballpoint pens, crayons, wall paint - he creates poetic and archaic worlds, usually in series and often as collages." "The eighty-four works in this retrospective, organized by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, in 2003 to mark Twombly's seventy-fifth birthday, were collected from the artist's studio, and many have not been previously exhibited. Dating from between 1953 and 2002, the drawings embrace the entire career of one of the most important American artists alive today, from his early monotypes to the major mythological cycles of later years, revealing the many nuances of his aesthetic approach."--BOOK JACKET.
A new ed. of Struth's "Museum photographs", adding 26 additional images which include pictures of artworks at their original locations.
Mundane buildings, nondescript streets, anonymous facades--these are the features that first strike in viewing Thomas Struth's pictures of streets--"unconscious places". Both in black-and-white and in color, Struth uses a frontal, eye-height view, with no optical distortion to disrupt the impression that what we see is a neutral, objective recording of reality. At the same time, Struth's urban landscapes are also a critical depiction of different human habitats. This volume presents a comprehensive survey of Struth's street views from the 1970s to 2010: narrow lanes in Edinburgh, Wuhan, Naples, and Erfurt; satellite towns in Paris, Leverkusen, Chicago, and Pyongyang; thoroughfares in Brussels, Lima, and Los Angeles; grand boulevards in St. Petersburg, New York City, and Beijing. Frequently there is an almost total absence of people in his cityscapes, which provides a feeling of desolation. In contrast, his famous Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo, is bustling with people and billboards.