Book of the Day Posted Aug 03, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, 2020

● Purchase ● An uplifting celebration of spring and the power of art against lockdown: Hockney’s new iPad drawings, in an intimate sketchbook format
 
At the beginning of 2020, just as global COVID-19 restrictions were coming into force, David Hockney was at his new house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a method of drawing he has been using for over a decade.
 
Drawing outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney; “we need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,” he says. This uplifting publication—produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts—includes 116 of these new iPad drawings and shows to full effect Hockney's singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature. The book begins with an interview with the show's curator, Edith Devaney, in which Hockney discusses his heralding of the spring. It also features augmented reality, an exciting technology that enables smartphones and tablets to recognize printed images and play a related film or animation.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 31, 2021

Book of the Day > Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964

● Purchase ● How a small photography club gave birth to modernist photography in Brazil
 
Published in conjunction with the first major museum exhibition of Brazilian modernist photography outside of Brazil, Fotoclubismo presents the groundbreaking creative achievements of São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, a group of amateur photographers founded in 1939 that is essentially unknown today to European and North American audiences. The vast majority of FCCB members pursued photography outside of their day jobs as lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers, but they were nonetheless quite serious about their artistic ambition. Their radical experimentations with process and form and their determination to distill inventive compositions from everyday life contributed to their esteemed reputation within an active international postwar scene—a status that has been all but forgotten.
 
This richly illustrated publication assembles a robust selection of photographs to introduce the FCCB’s photographic experiments to an international audience. Six chapters highlight individual achievements nestled between thematic groupings that suggest the breadth of the club’s talent. Curator Sarah Meister’s essay situates the FCCB within the broader contemporary art scene in Brazil as well as a dynamic network of photographers around the world, and offers fresh insight into the status of the amateur then and now. This is the first non-Portuguese-language publication to grapple with these photographs that were widely heralded at the time of their creation.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 29, 2021

Book of the Day > Polaroid Now: The History and Future of Polaroid Photography

● Purchase ● Polaroid Now celebrates new work created by contemporary artists working with Polaroid cameras and film today, and discusses the history, and evolution of the first instant imaging camera system that became a household name.
 
This curated selection of images is diverse aesthetically and geographically, and embraces the world-wide community of Polaroid artists. The book celebrates the unique, one-of-a-kind, and instantly gratifying qualities of Polaroid imagery. Additionally, Polaroid photographs by renowned luminaries such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Chuck Close are included, as well a section on the 20x24 Polaroid camera.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 29, 2021

Book of the Day > Anni & Josef Albers: Equal and Unequal

● Purchase ● A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design
 
Josef - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most important abstract artists, and this is the first monograph to celebrate the rich creative output and beguiling relationship of these two masters in one elegant volume. It presents their life and work as never before, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their remarkable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States through their intensely productive period in Connecticut.
 
Accessibly written, the book is packed with more than 750 artworks, archival images, and documents—many published here for the first time—all tracing the remarkable lives and careers of this legendary couple.
 
Dispersed throughout area series of short essays on artists that focuses on the Alberses relationship with a number of important artists and architects of the 20th century, like Ruth Asawa, Marcel Breuer, Merce Cunningham, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence, and many more.
 
The beautifully cloth-bound package utilizes an elegant color palette and design that speaks to the work of both artists. This comprehensive visual biography showcases the artists’ rich and dynamic lives, and their infinite influence on each other, as they shared the profound conviction that art was central to human existence.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw

● Purchase ● Joseph Elmer Yoakum (1890–1972) started drawing late in life and produced some two thousand works on paper, primarily landscapes and select portraits, over just ten years. This beautifully illustrated monograph offers the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative world of drawings and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable life. It charts his rise from an unknown veteran to an untrained artist with work represented in major museum collections in Chicago and New York and examines what fueled his creative process, which he described as a “spiritual unfoldment.” Essayists delve into Yoakum’s friendships with the up-and-coming community of Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explore the religious outlook he may have adopted to help him cope with a racially fractured city, and reveal his complicated relationship to his African American and Native American heritage. Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw also features an assessment of Yoakum’s understudied sketchbooks as well as in-depth conservation analysis.

Book of the Day Posted Jul 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Kovi Konowiecki - And In Its Place, Another

● Purchase ● As the title of Kovi Konowiecki’s debut monograph – and in its place, another – reminds us, we are always and forever subject to the twin certitudes of transience and change. As is the artist, who has moved back and forth between California, Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East, all of which places are part of the fabric of this sprawling, unscripted book.
 
Here we are confronted with the geographical and emotional margins of society and the mind: the external and internal boundaries that inhibit both human movement and human potential. The photographs portray individuals and communities that exist in a liminal space between belonging and abandonment, many of which exert feelings of desolation.
 
But what might seem on the surface political is made intensely personal through Konowiecki’s purposeful reliance on emotional connections in the pictures rather than specific relationships of place or subject. As he says, this work comes as a “happy accident, inspired by the frequent travels that nourished a sharp eye for the liminal types of communities to which I am drawn: people I have met in my wanderings, passersby in the street, a horse trained in a small Arab village, and untended gardens.”
 
The “unscripted” nature of the work has an impact on the form of the book, in particular in the variety of genres and colors, from landscape photography to portraiture and from black and white to color. The various forms of expression serve as ways to materialize the ideas at the core of the project and to break down barriers or restrictions within the photographic medium.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Kusama: Cosmic Nature

● Purchase ● Experience the brilliant artist's lifelong obsession with nature and immersion in gardens, a bedrock of her hugely influential work.
 
Yayoi Kusama’s work is the product of an infinite curiosity and obsessive drive to create. Throughout the artist’s long and varied career, there is one persistent yet little-studied through line—her deep engagement with nature. From early sketches depicting flowers at her family’s plant nursery in Japan, to her most recent monumental sculptures of botanical forms poised to take flight, Kusama consistently calls our attention to the patterns, connections, and cycles of living things that are not always visible.
 
KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist’s enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama’s work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature.
 
Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama’s engagement with the natural world. Featuring more than 120 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and archival photographs, including stunning views of the works displayed in NYBG’s gardens and galleries, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature offers a new perspective on one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Prints and Objects

● Purchase ● An updated catalog of the smaller-scale works created by installation art’s most iconic duo
 
Though born on the same day in 1935, artists Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009) did not cross paths until many years later in Paris. The seemingly fated couple married quickly and embarked on a decades-long artistic collaboration until Jeanne-Claude’s death, engaging creatively with the environment around them through site-specific installations that often enveloped buildings and entire landscapes with fabric and nylon. In order to fund their ambitious projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began making more salable items, such as prints, collages and objects, early on in their career. This volume is a completely revised and expanded catalogue raisonné of pieces that may have been made on a smaller scale but with no less creative fervor. This publication is a testament to a creative collaboration that never allowed convention to limit the scope of its activity.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Frédéric Chaubin: Stone Age – Ancient Castles of Europe

● Purchase ● Follow photographer Frédéric Chaubin as he embarks on a unique, century-spanning journey through Europe. Featuring images of more than 200 buildings in 21 countries, Stone Age presents the history and architecture of the most dramatic medieval castles of the continent in an unprecedented collection.
 
Building on the success of his foray into Soviet design with CCCP, Chaubin once again documents the afterlife of highly rational structures that seem out of place in a modern-day world. Precursors of Brutalism, these castles value function over form and epitomize the raw materials and shapes that would go on to define so much of architectural history.
 
Shot on film with a Linhof view camera, the collection is the outcome of five years of travel and investigation. Complete with a practical map and explanatory essay, its castles tell the story of 400 years, unfolding through the feudal Middle Ages into the 15th century.
 
A photographic study of decay as much as endurance, Stone Age traces the history of some of these singular structures that continue to enchant their audiences today and that occupy a distinct, mystical place in our collective imagination.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Rahim Fortune: I Can’t Stand To See You Cry

● Purchase ● A year and change into father's diagnosis, his nightly calls began to become more frequent. My sister and I, his youngest children, spent countless hours in his room caring for him as his body gave up. Many nights we'd leave his room both knowing his condition was getting much worse, but we chose to say nothing of it.
 
I can't stand to see you cry is an exploration of Texas and the surrounding states, as well as the people who are fixed within its complex landscape. Fortune analyses relationships between family, friends and strangers ,all caught in a flood of health and environmental issues while working to maintain grace. The artist uses his own personal experiences to explore the friction between public and private life, and the unspoken tensions in daily life through an approach rooted in the landscape. Moreover, Fortune’s biographical approach to photography attempts to unpack his own identity and experience in the midst of a pandemic, civil unrest, a cross-country move, a career, and the loss of a parent, thinking about both the future and past.
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