This lavishly illustrated book offers a detailed look at the evolution of Helen Frankenthaler's sumptuous evocations of the natural world in paintings spanning forty years. Famous as the inventor of the "soak-stain" technique that ushered in Color Field painting in the mid-twentieth century, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) continued to create powerful, original abstractions throughout her lifetime. This volume focuses on a selection of paintings that reveal the relationship between the pittura and the panorama in her work over the course of four decades. As Frankenthaler scholar John Elderfield notes, this interplay between works that are reminiscent of easel paintings, though made on the floor, and large, horizontal canvases that open onto shallow but expansive spaces, as panoramas do, was intrinsic to the artist's development. In an original essay, Pepe Karmel traces connections between Frankenthaler's sumptuous evocations of what she called "the atmosphere of landscape" and inspirations ranging from sixteenth-century Venetian paintings to works by Lucio Fontana, as well as her influence on successors including Mary Weatherford. Published to accompany an exhibition organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and Venetian Heritage, in association with Gagosian, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, this generously illustrated volume offers a close look at a key aspect of Frankenthaler's long pursuit of painting as a means to convey experiences and effects.
Accompanying a highly anticipated exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this monumental publication is the most comprehensive volume on Willem de Kooning yet published.
This catalogue of an exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery, New York, highlights the critical three-year period, 1983-1985, in the last decade of de Kooning's long career, during which he radically transformed his style. The paintings in this catalogue were selected by John Elderfield, curator of the widely acclaimed, full-scale retrospective of de Kooning's work held at MoMA in 2011-12. Of the works of this period, Elderfield observed: "De Kooning truly reinvented himself in these extraordinary canvases....They remain not only spatially complex, but also extremely physical pictures, both visually open and densely embodied." Elderfield's essay discusses ten themes in de Kooning's work specific to these paintings. The book also includes texts by five painters reflecting on de Kooning's late works.
L'exécution de l'Empereur mexicain Maximilien en 1867 inspira 4 versions différentes de tableaux à Manet et, est également le thème central d'une exposition au MoMA de l'automne 2006.
Bob Dylan is one of America's most influential and important cultural figures. W ith over 500 songs, 46 albums and an astonishing 110 million record sales to his name , Dylan, now in his early seventies , is turning increasingly to a nother mode of artistic expression , one that has occupied him throughout his life, but for which he is much less well known . Although Dylan has sketched and drawn since childhood and painted since the late 1960 s , only relatively recently has he begun to exhibit his artworks . The twelve works collected in this beautifully produced volume represent his latest foray into portraiture : an exploration of British 'types'. In an illuminat ing essay, curator and art historian John Elderfield explains the story behind these works and Dylan's approach to his art. Previously, Elderfield has acknowledged that while it may be unsettling when an artist does not adhere to the thing for which we have come to admire him most, Dylan has often asked his audience to get over the discomfort of his changing: ' And don't speak too soon / For the wheel's still in spin ... ' For Elderfield, Dylan's paintings, like his songs, are 'product s of the same extraordinary, inventive imagination, the same mind and eye, by the same story - telling artist, for whom showing and telling - the temporal and the spatial, the verbal and the visual - are not easily separated.'
Capturing the development of a rising star in the art world, Anna Weyant unveils the artist's sharp-witted commentary on the representation of women in pop culture and the art historical canon. This book chronicles six years of Weyant's artistic output and is the most comprehensive publication about her painting practice to date.
Anna Weyant is the first monograph published by Gagosian that is devoted to the New York-based artist best-known for her precisely rendered figures with their creamy curves and soft beauty, which simmer with the tensions between feminine sexuality and purity, tragedy, and comedy.
With a dark sense of humor, Weyant unpicks the tropes and traditions of art historical representation, interrupting masculine expectations to often absurd and excruciating effect. Particularly drawn to the uncertainties of adolescence, the artist captures young females in situations of intimate weirdness and catastrophe.
The resonance of art history and the effect of doubling are topics discussed in essays by both John Elderfield and Yvonne Owens. Elderfield explores the meaning of the uncanny in film, painting, and sculpture, examining the strangeness of familiarity, and the difference between a real figure and a porcelain doll or an automaton. Owens highlights the pictorial devices reimagined by Weyant, including the still life and seductive symbols of vanitas and memento mori.
Naomi Fry describes the potential violence of the double and the menace of everyday objects in Weyant's world, which she compares to «a velvet-lined jewel box softly sealed shut.» With wry reference to pop culture, Fry asserts the subtle differences and multiple viewpoints that reveal the painter's virtuosity and the fullness of female experience.
In a conversation between Weyant and Edward Steed, the artist and the acclaimed cartoonist for the New Yorker discuss the awkwardness of fame, the sweet spot of comedy, and the indescribable nature of a great work of art.
