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.

Book of the Day Posted Jul 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Georgia O’Keeffe (2021)

● Purchase ● A visual feast of flowers, abstractions, cityscapes and landscapes from American modernism’s most iconic painter

Offering a complete survey of Georgia O’Keeffe’s illustrious career, this magnificent new book ranges from the works produced between 1910 and 1920 that made her a pioneer of abstraction to her celebrated flower paintings and views of New York, which led to her recognition as one of the key figures in modern American art, and culminating with her paintings of New Mexico.

The selection of color plates is accompanied by quotes from O’Keeffe on her art and additional photographic material pertaining to the paintings. The sense of reverence for the world and its forms emerges vividly through O’Keeffe’s words. “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding—to understand maybe by trying to put it into form,” she writes. “To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”

Also featured are a biography and texts by contributing curators from the venues to which the show travels, by scholars at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and by acclaimed French art writer Catherine Millet.

Book of the Day Posted Jul 17, 2021

Book of the Day > Matthew Rolston: Art People -- The Pageant Portraits (Exhibition Catalogue, Collector's Edition)

● Purchase ● ART PEOPLE: THE PAGEANT PORTRAITS is a body of work by photographer and artist Matthew Rolston. This group of photographs furthers Rolston’s investigations into the nature of portraiture and the methods by which society and the human condition are mediated through artwork and art creation. Comprised of emotionally intimate portraits of participants of “Pageant of the Masters,” a tableaux vivants show that is part of an annual arts festival in Laguna Beach, California, Rolston’s photographic subjects reenact pivotal historical figures and works from art history, from antiquity through 20th century modernism.

Accompanying Laguna Art Museum’s June 27 – September 19, 2021 exhibition of Matthew Rolston’s Art People is a lavishly-illustrated museum catalogue with essays by cultural critic and journalist Christina Binkley, Pageant of the Masters scriptwriter Dan Duling and classical scholar Nigel Spivey, alongside carefully selected images from art history that contextualize the work in the exhibition. The Trade Edition features a luxurious paper slipcase containing the concertina format catalogue, which is folded rather than bound and printed on both sides.

The limited Collector’s Edition is enclosed in a linen-and-inset photographic slipcase with metallic gold and matte white foil stamping on the front and spine and includes a folio with a signed and numbered print.

Book of the Day Posted Jul 16, 2021

Book of the Day > Matthew Rolston: Art People -- The Pageant Portraits (Exhibition Catalogue, Trade Edition)

● Purchase ● ART PEOPLE: THE PAGEANT PORTRAITS is a body of work by photographer and artist Matthew Rolston. This group of photographs furthers Rolston’s investigations into the nature of portraiture and the methods by which society and the human condition are mediated through artwork and art creation. Comprised of emotionally intimate portraits of participants of “Pageant of the Masters,” a tableaux vivants show that is part of an annual arts festival in Laguna Beach, California, Rolston’s photographic subjects reenact pivotal historical figures and works from art history, from antiquity through 20th century modernism.

Accompanying Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition of Rolston’s Art People is a lavishly illustrated museum catalogue with essays by cultural critic and journalist Christina Binkley, Pageant of the Masters scriptwriter Dan Duling and classical scholar Nigel Spivey, alongside carefully selected images from art history that contextualize the work in the exhibition.

The Trade Edition features a luxurious paper slipcase containing the concertina format catalogue, which is folded rather than bound and printed on both sides.