Authors: John Szarkowski.
Paperback, 156 pages
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication Date: 2007-03-01


Reviews :

    The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski is a twentieth-century classic--an indispensable introduction to the visual language of photography. Based on a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and originally published in 1966, the book has long been out of print. It is now available again to a new generation of photographers and lovers of photography in this duotone printing that closely follows the original. Szarkowski's compact text eloquently complements skillfully selected and sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the entire history and range of the medium. Celebrated works by such masters as Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Steichen, Strand, and Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced. Szarkowski, the legendary curator who worked at the Museum from 1962 to 1991, has published many influential books. But none more radically and succinctly demonstrates why--as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1990--"whether Americans know it or not," his thinking about photography "has become our thinking about photography."...

Authors: James Agee. Walker Evans.
Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publication Date: 2001-08-14
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives was called intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and is "renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (New York Times). Today it stands as a poetic tract of its time, recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. With an elegant new design as well as a sixty-four-page photographic prologue of Evans's classic images, reproduced from archival negatives, this sixtieth anniversary edition reintroduces the legendary author and photographer to a new generation....

    Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.

Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.

Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park...

Authors:
Hardcover, 116 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Edition: 25th

Reviews :

    "A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print Reptiles you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madame, if that's the way you see it, so be it, '" An engagingly sly comment by the renowned Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972)--the complex ambiguities of whose work leave hasty or single-minded interpretations far behind. Long before the first computer-generated 3-D images were thrilling the public, Escher was a master of the third dimension. His lithograph "Magic Mirror" dates as far back as 1946. In taking that title for this book, mathematician Bruno Ernst is stressing the magic spell Escher's work invariably casts on those who see it. Ernst visited Escher every week for a year, systematically talking through his entire oeuvre with him. Their discussions resulted in a friendship that gave Ernst intimate access to the life and conceptual world of Escher. Ernst's account was meticulously scrutinized and made accurate by the artist himself. Escher's work refuses to be pigeonholed. Scientific, psychological, or aesthetic criteria alone cannot do it justice. The questions remain. Why did he create the pictures? How did he construct them? What preliminary studies were necessary before he could arrive at the final version? And how are the various images Escher created interrelated? This book, complete with biographical data, 250 illustrations, and explications of mathematical problems, offers answers to these and many other questions, and is an authentic source text of the first order....

Authors:
Hardcover, 76 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Edition: 25th

Reviews :

    M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents. From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita.

Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception....

Authors: William Feaver.
Hardcover, 488 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli
Publication Date: 2007-11-06


Reviews :

    This volume, with more than 400 reproductions, will be the most comprehensive publication to date on Lucian Freud, covering a span of seventy years and including many works not previously reproduced. The result is a corpus of great works that reveal him to be the premier heir today of Rembrandt, Courbet, and Cézanne. The book includes not only Freud’s paintings but also his sketches, woodcuts, and powerful etchings. While the bulk of his paintings are female nudes, his cityscapes, plant studies, and interiors, executed in his distinctive muted palette and visible brushwork, are all included. Freud, who has lived in London ever since his family left Berlin in 1933 when he was ten, has achieved preeminence through his ruthless perception of the human form. His importance has long been recognized in England, but his present super-celebrity status dates from a retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., in 1987. William Feaver, painter and for many years art critic for The Observer, provides a unique account of Freud’s preoccupations and achievement. Startling, moving, profoundly entertaining, the book lives up to Freud’s advice to students when getting them to paint self-portraits: “To try and make it the most revealing, telling, and believable object. Something really shameless, you know.”...

Authors: Bruce Bernard. David Dawson.
Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: 2006-11-07


Reviews :

   

Freud at Work is a rare glimpse into the life of one of the most celebrated—and most private—artists working today. Though in his eighties, this great figurative artist continues to paint with undiminished energy and discipline.

In 120 revealing black-and-white and color photographs taken in Lucian Freud’s London studio, and in a fascinating in-depth interview, we come to understand the stages of the artist’s work and the intensity of his interaction with his subjects—whether fellow artist David Hockney, the Queen of England, or performance artist Leigh Bowery, among others.

Two remarkable photographers have been recording Freud at work over the past twenty years . The artist, uncharacteristically, allowed Bruce Bernard, the acclaimed picture editor, to photograph him in the studio, especially during the years he was working with Bowery as his model. Following Bernard’s death in 2000, David Dawson, the painter’s assistant, began photographing the daily life of the studio, showing us the progress of Freud’s paintings, his models—some naked, some famous—and the painter himself caught in moments of intense concentration.

Though Freud has always been reluctant to give interviews, talk about the painters he admires, or discuss how he works, his conversation here with the Australian writer Sebastian Smee is frank and revealing.

Unlike any other book we have seen about Freud—comparable to David Douglas Duncan’s books of photographs of Picasso—this important document invites us for the first time into the secret domain of the artist.

...

Authors: Robert Hughes.
Paperback, 136 pages
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication Date: 1997-10
Edition: Revised

Reviews :

    In his highly acclaimed text, Robert Hughes points out that the reality pursued in Freud's paintings goes far beyond naturalism. It is both startling and disconcerting, producing some of the most powerful and moving visual images to have appeared in the last thirty years.

Freud—once dubbed "the Ingres of existentialism"—has almost single-handedly redefined the figurative painting of our time. No other living artist possesses his ability to paint the texture and thinness of skin over flesh, and his distinctive portraits have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget.

This volume, with over one hundred superb reproductions of his greatest paintings, pays tribute to one of the most original and accomplished artists of the twentieth century....

Authors: Jim Dine. Susanne Lange.
Hardcover, 328 pages
Publisher: Steidl & Partners
Publication Date: 2008-07-01


Reviews :

    Jim Dine may be best known for his prints, paintings and sculptural works--and for being one of the founders of Pop art--but he has also been making photographs since 1996. Most of the photographs are set up in the studio. Often featuring multiple exposures, Gothic imagery and automatic-writing-like text, they tend to convey a tinge of Surrealism. Dine has said about his practice, "I don't use Photoshop with all the things you can do. I photograph and then I preview. I preview all day until I get it right, but I get it right by changing the objects." For this volume, which will be eye-opening even to Dine's most familiar fans, the artist has selected a group of self-portraits, portraits he has taken of friends and relatives--both alive and dead--and portraits of Pinochio, the fictional character he has been reimagining for the last several years....

Authors: M. C. Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher.
Paperback, 77 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2001-06


Reviews :

    Renowned artist M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. Weird, beautiful, finely detailed illusions....

Authors: Starr Figura. Lucian Freud.
Hardcover, 144 pages
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication Date: 2007-12-01


Reviews :

    One of the foremost figurative artists working today, Lucian Freud has redefined portraiture and the nude through his unblinking scrutiny of the human form. Although he is best known as a painter, etching is integral to his practice. This volume accompanies a major Museum of Modern Art exhibition that will present the full scope of Freud's etchings, including some 75 works--from the rare early experiments of the 1940s to the increasingly complex compositions he has created since rediscovering the medium in the early 1980s. Written by exhibition curator Starr Figura, it also includes a selection of paintings and drawings that illuminate the crucial, cross-pollinating relationship between Freud's etchings and his works on canvas. Freud is not a traditional printmaker: Treating the etching plate like a canvas, he stands the copper upright on an easel. He also typically depicts the same sitters in etchings as in paintings, demarcating their forms through meticulous networks of finely etched lines. Freud's etchings may either precede or follow the execution of paintings, and they are sometimes as large as, or larger than, their related canvases. But with their figures dramatically cropped or isolated against empty backgrounds, they achieve a startling new sense of psychological tension and formal abstraction....