Art Criticism

Softcover. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages, b&w illustrations. A comprehensive look at a controversy that continues to fuel debates about the role of public art in America. Since its installation at and subsequent removal from New York City's Federal Plaza, noted sculptor Richard Serra's Tilted Arc has been a touchstone for debates over the role of public art. Installed in 1981, the 10-foot-high, 120-foot-long curved wall of Cor-Ten self-rusting steel instantly became a magnet for criticism. Art critics in the New York Times and the Village Voice labeled it the city's worst public sculpture, and many denounced it as an example of the elitism associated with art and as an obstacle to the use and enjoyment of the plaza. Harriet F. Senie explores the history of Tilted Arc, including its 1979 commission and the heated public hearings that eventually led to its removal in 1989 (it was dismantled and is currently stored in a government warehouse in Maryland). Analyzing the archive of popular opinion, Senie shows how the sculpture was caught in an avalanche of shifting local and national discussions about public funding for the arts. Clean copy.

Softcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, reprint, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 386 pages, b&w illustrations. The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket. Autobiography of the owner of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres in Paris, a center, between the World Wars, for the best contemporary French writing and for its authors. 536 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 488 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins's most significant paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 284 pages, color and b&w illustrations.Often featuring lighthouses, bridges, or quaint country homes, Thomas Kinkade's soft-focus landscapes have permeated American visual culture during the past twenty years, appearing on everything from Bibles to bedsheets to credit cards. Kinkade sells his work through his shopping-mall galleries, QVC, the Internet, and Christian stores. He is quite possibly the most collected artist in the United States. While many art-world and academic critics have dismissed him as a passing fad or marketing phenomenon, the contributors to this collection do not. Instead, they explore his work and its impact on contemporary art as part of the broader history of American visual culture. They consider Kinkade's imagery and career in relation to nineteenth-century Currier and Ives prints and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the collectibles market and the fine-art market, the Thomas Kinkade Museum and Cultural Center, and "The Village at Hiddenbrooke," a California housing development inspired by Kinkade's paintings. The conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, the curator of the first major museum exhibition of Kinkade's art and collectibles, recounts his experiences organizing that show. All of the contributors draw on art history, visual culture, and cultural studies as they seek to understand Kinkade's significance for both art and audiences. Along the way, they delve into questions about beauty, class, kitsch, religion, and taste in contemporary art. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 288 pages, color & b/w plates, sources, index.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 232 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Black & white and color photographs throughout. City scenes have been chronicled in photographs since the early 1800s, but street photography as traditionally defined has captured a relatively narrow field of these images. Revolutionizing the history of street photography, Unfamiliar Streets explores the work of Richard Avedon (1923-2004), Charles Moore (1931-2010), Martha Rosler (b. 1943), and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), four American photographers whose careers in fashion, photojournalism, conceptual art, and contemporary art are not usually associated with the genre.Bussard's lively and engaging text, a timely response to a growing interest in urban photography, challenges the traditional understanding of street photography and makes original and important connections among urban culture, social history, and the visual arts, constructing a new historical model for understanding street photography. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, this book provides an interpretation of a compelling genre that is as fresh as its consideration of the city streets themselves, sites of commerce, dispossession, desire, demonstration, power, and spectacle.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 3rd Printing, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 426 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Sunfading to dust jacket. Light soiling to textblock edges. Otherwise a very clean, unmarked copy with only minor dust jacket wear. A tight copy. Black and white illustrations throughout.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 316 pages, b&w illustrations. The history, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and pedagogy of the new field of visual culture; current debates and the possibility for future consensus. In recent years, visual culture has emerged as a growing and important interdisciplinary field of study. Visual culture regards images as central to the representation of meaning in the world. It encompasses "high" art without an assumption of its higher status. But despite the current proliferation of studies and programs in visual culture, there seems to be no consensus within the field itself as to its scope and objectives, definitions, and methods. In Visual Culture, Margaret Dikovitskaya offers an overview of this new area of study in order to reconcile its diverse theoretical positions and understand its potential for further research. Clean copy. Uncommon in the hardcover.

Softcover. UK, British Broadcasting Corporation / Penguin Books, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 166 pages, profusely illustrated in b&w. Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictorial, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art. Mild soil to front cover, clean internally.

Hardcover. Zurich, Scheidegger and Spiess, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial cloth, 210 pages, 164 color and 76 b/w illustrations. Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is one the most influential architects of the twentieth century. In the Scandinavian countries, his influence is arguably most pronounced in the writings and art of the Danish experimentalist Asger Jorn (1914-1973). Their collaboration on Le Corbusier's pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition sparked Jorn's lifelong fascination with the great architect and with architecture more broadly as an inherently public form of art. At the same time, Le Corbusier started working in the visual arts and began to move from a rational, technological approach to architecture towards a more poetic, materialist approach. Published in collaboration with the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, What Moves Us? focuses specifically on the reception of Le Corbusier in Scandinavia, with the relationship between Jorn and Le Corbusier as a thematic thread. The book first highlights the architect's change of direction and subsequently takes readers through his influence on the young artist. The book's distinguished contributors explore the relationships that emerged among their artistic theories and practices, including Jorn's later critique of Le Corbusier. Essays also explore the wider influence of Le Corbusier on Scandinavian architecture and urbanization and consider Le Corbusier alongside the Danish architect Jorn Oberg Utzon and the Aarhus Brutalism movement.

Hardcover. London, Paul Elek, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, green cloth, 181 pages. 11 color, 58 black-and-white illustrations. This account of Blake's life discusses his artistic, religious, philosophical, political and sexual ideas; his politics; his compelling myths and truths; his poems and his prophetic books; his artworks and illustrations. Bright, clean copy in a similar dust jacket.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, CA, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 112 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. The Window in Photographs includes more than eighty color plates spanning the history of photography, all drawn from the J. Paul Getty Museum's permanent collection.

Hardcover. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 264 pages. illustrated mainly in color. Black cloth. Brand new copy still in original shrink wrap. Beautifully illustrated dust jacket. Gives an insight to Homers artistic growth trough the eyes of his critics.

Hardcover. US, Conran, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new hardcover in publisher's shrink-wrap. 336 pages. In this endlessly provocative volume, Stephen Bayley, design authority and cultural critic, takes on the female body, analyzing each crook and every curve as a sign, a symbol, and as a designed object. From Aphrodite to the industrialization of the breast, and from pin-ups to the future of sex, WOMAN AS DESIGN is a fascinating mix of design, cultural history, erotica, fashion, and fetishism.

Hardcover. US, Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 348 pages, 169 illustrations. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The depictions and roles of women in the paintings of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) typically give rise to conversations and presumptions about machismo and misogyny. Of course, these artists' portrayals of women cannot be dismissed so easily, and in fact all offer highly nuanced explorations of the theme. This publication explores their depictions of women as more than painterly projections of male longing and desire, treating them as reflections of social and political conflicts and upheavals. Contributions from art historians, sociologists and artists approach the figures of women in these bodies of work from a variety of perspectives: for Picasso, as a catalyst for a confrontation with the artist's own life and history; for Beckmann, as completely independent themes; and for de Kooning, as the force that makes artistic expression itself possible.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, like new in publishers shrinkwrap. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) proudly described his monumental painting Prometheus Bound as first among "the flower of my stock." This singular work demonstrates how Rubens engaged with and responded to his predecessors Michelangelo and Titian, with whom he shared an interest in depictions of physical torment. The Wrath of the Gods offers an in-depth case study of the Flemish artist's creative process and aesthetic, while also demonstrating why this particular painting has appealed to viewers over time. Many scholars have elaborated on Rubens's affinity for Titian, but his connection to Michelangelo has received far less attention. This study presents a new interpretation of Prometheus Bound, showing how Rubens created parallels between the pagan hero Prometheus and Michelangelo's Risen Christ from the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment. Christopher D. M. Atkins expands our understanding of artistic transmission by elucidating how Rubens synthesized the works he saw in Italy, Spain, and his native Antwerp, and how Prometheus Bound in turn influenced Dutch, Flemish, and Italian artists. By emulating Rubens's composition, these artists circulated it throughout Europe, broadening its influence from his day to ours.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Universityof Pennsylvania Press , 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 411 pages, b&w illustrations. A guide to over 1,000 documents relating to the artist and his family. Like new in a dust jacket protected by a mylar cover.

Hardcover. NY, Funk & Wagnalls, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 480 pages. Wyndham Lewis was a modernist painter and writer, and a leader of the Vorticist movement and antagonistic collaborator with Ezra Pound in the London years. Essays in four parts: The 'Blast' Period, World War I and the early twenties, The Trough Between the Wars, The forties and after. Clean copy.