Category Archives: books

Robert Hughes, the eternal tourist of Rome

Posted on by
Reply

Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes’s Rome is eloquent but arbitrary. Illustration: John Tiedemann Source: The Australian

Peter Robb’s most recent book is Street Fight in Naples: A Book of Art and Insurrection.

Rome
By Robert Hughes
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 534pp, $50 (HB)

I knew exactly what I hoped to find, and I did find it, and it was worth every minute of lost time. Instead of exploring the inexhaustible treasures of the Eternal City, I spent the day in a darkened studio watching Federico Fellini re-create some of the same city’s vanished life. The film he was making was called Roma and it was about his own arrival there.

It was an unforgettable day – glorious early summer outside the darkened sound stage – and somewhat mixed in its effects. Adoration of the maestro survived – just –his brusqueness, his bullying, his brutal manhandling of an elderly gay dwarf and even his subsequent films.

Hughes is right in his new book, Rome, to proclaim Fellini’s centrality. From 1950 to 1970, Fellini was the great creative figure of post-war Rome, the imagination’s historian of an ancient capital’s transformation by late capitalism. Continue reading →

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

Posted on by
Reply

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” by Andrew Bolton (Yale University Press, $45)

The go-to event for fashion lovers this summer is the “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which features about a hundred breathtaking examples of McQueen’s designs. This coffee-table book includes photos from the exhibition as well as an introduction analyzing McQueen’s career up to his ascension as the creative director at Givenchy – a career cut short in 2010 when the designer took his own life at age 40. If you haven’t made it to Manhattan yet, hurry: The exhibition runs through July 31.

 

Book showcases work of Pakistani artists

Posted on by
Reply
Book launch
Mona Hauser, Jalal Uddin Ahmad and Sajjad Hader at the launch of ‘Making Waves — Contemporary Art in Pakistan’, which was launched at the XVA Gallery recently.

Dubai: A newly-released book showcasing the work of numerous Pakistani artists aims to chart the development of new art in Asia.

Making Waves — Contemporary Art in Pakistan by Salwat Ali, was launched at the XVA Gallery, Dubai International Finance Centre recently.

The book examines a number of artistic media expressed in various ways, from modern contemporary miniatures, multimedia projects, drawing, painting and sculpture, to print media, video and ceramics.

Common forces

“While new art in Asia resists easy categorisation, most Asian countries — including Pakistan — share common causal forces,” Ali writes in the introduction.

“Informed by Asian anxieties related to histories of colonial domination, independence struggles and post-colonial hiccups, art making is also evolving in an atmosphere of cultural turmoil, where tradition and modernity exist in (un)happy confusion.

“Volatile political conditions, religious constraints, socio-economic crisis, gender inequalities, ethnic strife, violence and state censorship are other significant commonalities.”

Making Waves has been published by the Fomma Trust (Foundation for Museum of Modern Art) based in Karachi.

Alice Johnson, Gulf News, July 1, 2011

Charles Saatchi: the man who reinvented art

Posted on by
Reply
Charles Saatchi

Charles Saatchi: “He is now overshadowed by impulsive enthusiasts with far more money than himself”.
Photograph: James King

I am probably the only person who can truly say that Charles Saatchi saved my life. During the holidays in 1986 I worked as a gallery assistant in Charles’s Boundary Road gallery in northwest London, during the installation of the Richard Serra and Anselm Kiefer exhibition. I got to drill the holes for hooks in the back of the wooden supports of Kiefer paintings. It was nerve-wracking – one false move and there could be a hole in a £1m masterpiece. At the end of every day I swept the gallery clean of the straw that had fallen off these visceral, apocalyptic landscapes, where paint was mixed with earth, grass and photographs.

I was 19 and earned £80 a week. Cranes were used to position Richard Serra’s sculptures in which 1-ton slabs or rolls of rusting steel and lead leaned against each other. These works are quite possibly the most important sculptures of the past 50 years, with their dramatic but abstracted sense of danger, built on the simplest arrangements of materials – leaning, propping and balancing .They could also be lethal: one technician had already been killed installing a Serra in America, and the artist himself had spent months in a wheelchair after another accident.

One day Charles came on a lightning tour of the gallery to see how the installation was going. I and a few “riggers” were holding upright one of the four slabs of One Ton Prop (House of Cards) which leant against each other. As Charles indicated some instant changes he wanted to the position of another work, the head of the installation team motioned the rest of his team to come over. For a moment I was faced with the prospect of holding a ton of lead on my own. “Don’t let that young man hold that all by himself,” Charles said. I remember a number of stronger men rushing to my assistance. That was Charles –  impatient, controlling but also thoughtful towards his serfs. Like an emperor. Continue reading →

The New McCulloch Encyclopedia of Australian Art

Posted on by
Reply
http://www.savah.com.au/images/idnet/meaa.jpg
Author Alan McCulloch, Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs
Genre Art
Publisher Aus Art Editions the Miegunyah Press
RRP $295.0
Aboriginal and emerging artists feature among the 8000 works in the latest edition of a renowned Australian art encyclopedia.

I HAVE IN FRONT OF ME THE third edition of The Encyclopedia of Australian Art, published in 1994. Next to it is the new edition, rebranded as The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art. What are the main differences between the two?

The fourth edition is much thicker and comes in a cardboard slipcase, which, like the encyclopedia itself, is covered in a luscious Tony Tuckson abstraction in dark blues and greys, overprinted with orange lettering. It begs to be picked up and dipped into. There are more than 8000 entries, 1500 of them new.

Three generations of McCullochs have had input into this project: the late Alan (1907-1992), his daughter Susan, and her daughter Emily.The book takes us through the alphabet of Australian artists from Arkley to Zika. But it does far more than that. Different sections also list public and private art galleries; auctions, trusts, and foundations; prizes, awards, and scholarships; art schools and universities. Anyone who has ever edited a magazine or a catalogue will feel for the enormous task that has gone into producing this book. Continue reading →

Rethinking Curating

Posted on by
Reply

Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Leonardo Book Series)

Title: Rethinking curating: art after new media

  • Publisher: The MIT Press; First Edition edition (February 5, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN: 9780262013888
  • US$ 25.99

As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art—but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology, present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems.

Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art. The authors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art’s characteristics. They discuss modes of curating, from the familiar default mode of the museum, through parallels with publishing, broadcasting, festivals, and labs, to more recent hybrid ways of working online and off, including collaboration and social networking. Rethinking Curating offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists’ practice.

 

 

 

 

 

PULLED: A Catalog of Screen Printing

Posted on by
Reply

Pulled: A Catalog of Screen Printing

PULLED: A Catalog of Screen Printing (Princeton Architectural Press, paper, $35), by Mike Perry

Offers scores of beautiful, funny, novel and otherwise alluring typographical, illustrative, decorative and comedic silk-screen prints, produced by more than 40 illustrators and designers, whose styles and processes are as broad as this book is thick.

The word “catalog” in the subtitle is apt. Despite the enticing cover photo showing a hand energetically smearing bubblegum-pink ink as though it were delicious cake frosting, this is not a handbook in the technical sense. The reader will not learn any techniques of screen-printing here. It is show and tell more than see and do. But I guarantee that anyone with a bent for making images will be inspired enough to want to try. Continue reading →

The Story of Eames Furniture

Posted on by
Reply

EAMES PP

The story of Eames Furniture
By Marilyn Neuhart with John Neuhart
Release Date: September 2010
Format: 25.5 x 29.2 cm
Features: 800 Pages, full cover, hardcover, 2 volumes in slipcase
Language: English
ISBN: 978-3-89955-230-0
Catalog Price: €150,00 | $199,00 | £140,00
Shop Price: €150.00

Brimming with images and insightful text, this unique book is the benchmark reference on what is arguably the most influential and important furniture brand of our time. It reveals in unparalleled detail how Charles and Ray Eames as well as a talented team of designers worked to create pieces that still top bestseller lists. The book describes the key role played by the Eames Office’s own development and perfection of production processes for its designs as well as the significance of its relationship with manufacturers. By documenting the creation and spread of these landmark furniture designs, this book also tells the story of how modernism became established in homes and offices throughout the world. Continue reading →

The Louvre: All the Paintings

Posted on by
Reply

click to close

The Louvre: All the Paintings

By Erich Lessing; Contributions by Anja Grebe; Commentaries by Vincent Pomarède; Preface by Loyrette Henri

Hardback , 784 pages

ISBN: 9781579128869 (1579128866)
Published by Black Dog & Leventhal
$75.00(US) $94.00(CAN)

The Louvre is the world’s most visited art museum, with 8.5 million visitors annually, and houses the most celebrated and important paintings of all time. For the first time ever, The Louvre: All the Paintings collects all 2,981 paintings currently on display in the permanent collection in one beautifully curated volume.

Organized and divided into the four main painting collections of the museum— the Italian School, the Northern School, the Spanish School, and the French School— the paintings are then presented chronologically by the artist’s date of birth.

Four hundred of the most iconic and significant paintings are illuminated with 300-word discussions by art historians Anja Grebe and Vincent Pomarède on the key attributes of the work, what to look for when viewing the painting, the artist’s inspirations and techniques, biographical information on the artist, the artist’s impact on the history of art, and more. Continue reading →

F. Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, at 75

Posted on by
Reply

2011-06-09-rickdarke_01.jpgFrank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is 75 years old this year and its director, Lynda Waggoner, is celebrating with a sumptuous new book of essays and photography addressing the residence, its restoration and its landscape.

During the home’s 50th anniversary, Waggoner worked with photographer Christopher Little on a commemorative volume for Edgar Kaufman Jr., son of the original owner. She brought the artist back for the new project 25 years later.

“I realized he has a great sensitivity to the property,” she said. “The house can be a very intimate place, and he knows how to capture that.”

“It was such a treat to go back after 25 years,” Little said. “They gave me a small house on the grounds for six weeks and during each season. I had run of the house.”

He opted for digital photography over film this time around. Once he’d got his lighting right, he mounted his camera on a tripod and shot one image at normal exposure, one overexposed and one underexposed. Then he melded all three together.”It’s the closest you can get to what the eye sees,” he said. “You still see the shadows and highlights, but your perception on a two-dimensional page is what your eyes see in three dimensions.” Continue reading →

Related Posts with Thumbnails