Art Criticism

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 7 1/2" x 10 1/2", twenty-four page exhibition catalog is bound in stapled wrappers and is in VG+ condition. B&W reproductions and photographs. Foreword by William S. Lieberman, Curator of Prints for MOMA.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two Volume Set. Volume I of the set, "Documentation: Reviews" is 485 pages in length and is divided into eight sections, one for each of the original impressionists. Volume II of the set, "Documentation: Exhibited Works" is 300 pages in length and consists of black and white photographic illustrations of the works that were presented at the eight exhibitions, along with annotations and references to the original reviews, as well as other sources of documentation.

Softcover. NY, Picador, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 318 pages. Calvin Tomkins first discovered the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, when he began to look seriously at contemporary art. While gazing at Rauschenberg's painting Double Feature, Tomkins felt compelled to make some kind of literal connection to the work, and it is in that sprit that "for the last forty years it's been [his] ambition to write about contemporary art not as a critic or a judge, but as a participant." Tomkins has spent many of those years writing about Robert Rauschenberg, whom he rapidly came to see as "one of the most inventive and influential artists of his generation." So it seemed natural to make Rauschenberg the focus of Off the Wall, which deals with the radical changes that have made advanced visual art such a powerful force in the world.Off the Wall chronicles the astonishingly creative period of the 1950s and 1960s, a high point in American art. In his in his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and as a pivotal figure linking abstract expressionism and pop art, Rauschenberg was part of a revolution during which artists moved art off the walls of museums and galleries and into the center of the social scene. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st Edition, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 207 pages. Hardcover. Cover boards bound in dark gray cloth, gilt title on spine. Some light fading to covers at top and bottom of spine (shelfwear). Gray endpapers. Dust jacket price-clipped, some light tanning and chipping to edges of dj (see image). Pages clean and unmarked. Foreedge has some light spots of soil and a touch of tanning (see image). Binding tight. Spine straight. Sontag examines a wide range of problems, both aesthetic and moral, raised by the presence and authority of the photographed image in the lives of everyone today. Appendix "A Brief Anthology of Quotations" included.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 182 pages, b&w illustrations. Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural criticism, anthropology, and community activism for an in-depth look at how tourism sites are conceived and represented, and how they affect the places they transform. Critic Andrew Ross calls Lippard "the most surefooted tour guide you could hope for" in her exploration of being a tourist in one's own home, of how advertising and photography define place, of how antique shops function as populist museums, and of the commodification of indigenous cultures. With her characteristic breadth and critical eye, Lippard discusses the political economies of leisure spaces, the tourist's fascination with tragic destinations (such as the sites of massacres and nuclear weapons tests, or Holocaust memorials), and our willingness to let national parks and heritage sites define nature and history. Clae copy.

Hardcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 168 pages. In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Topffer, Gustave Dore, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 318 pages. In Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, Xiaobing Tang studies the art and art theories of the first half of the twentieth century, when modern Chinese art and literature emerged. He argues that the most consequential expression of the avant-garde was the modern woodcut movement that thrived in China in the 1930s. In this innovative study--also the first comprehensive account of this Chinese movement available in English--Tang examines the aesthetic, intellectual, and social appeal of the modern woodcut and places the movement at the intersection of historical events, individual efforts, and competing discourses on art. He also shows how the woodcut movement drew upon international inspiration--from German Expressionism, Soviet wood engravings, and Japanese creative prints.

Softcover. Allworth Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. Ranging from earthworks to conceptual art, this illuminating read offers an integrated view of all the significant artistic developments of one crucial decade, the extraordinary explosion that occurred between 1965 and 1975. The author, a leading art critic, focuses a new lens on this radical movement, showing the nuances that defined Minimalism in its various phases, as characterized by the inflected object, the disintegrated object, the ironic object -then the transition from the object to architecture, space, landscape, cityscape, body, performance, and conceptual art. No other account has documented in such detail the scope and impact of this artistic revolution, which the author argues spanned all mediums and pushed every aesthetic possibility of Minimalism to an extreme.

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art , 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. Painters of Reality, titled after an exhibition held in Milan more than fifty years ago, is the first study in English of this major aspect of Italian art. It builds on the work of the art historian Roberto Longhi. Reexamining the subject in light of copious subsequent scholarship, the authors of this volume contribute major essays that define and discuss naturalism as it appeared in both Lombard paintings and drawings. There is also a fresh consideration of the North Italian predecessors whose influence is apparent either directly or indirectly, in the paintings of Caravaggio. More detailed discussions of the subject center on the precise elements that constituted Leonardo's "hypernaturalism": the important schools of paintings that arose in Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and Milan; and Caravaggio's most notable successors in northern Italy, who kept Lombard realism alive into the eighteenth century.Among the 136 paintings and drawings, many never before seen outside of Italy, are influential drawings by Leonardo and major paintings by Caravaggio. Other acknowledged masters in the history of European art are represented, including Lorenzo Lotto, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Giovanni Battista Moroni, and Giacomo Ceruti. Works also appear from significant but less widely known artists such as Sofonisba, Anguissola, Vincenzo Campi, Moretto da Brescia, and Fra' Galgario.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, In Painting as an Art, which began as the 1984 Andrew Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., philosopher Richard Wollheim transcended the boundaries and habits of both philosophy and art history to produce a large, encompassing vision of viewing art. Wollheim had three great passions--philosophy, psychology, art--and his work attempted to unify them into a theory of the experience of art. He believed that unlocking the meaning of a painting involved retrieving, almost reenacting, the creative activity that produced it.In order to fully appreciate a work of art, Wollheim argued, critics must bring to the understanding of a work of art a much richer conception of human psychology than they have in the past: "Many [critics] . . . make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this came about." Many reviewers have remarked on the insightfulness of the book's final chapter, in which Wollheim contended that certain paintings by Titian, Bellini, de Kooning, and others represent the painters' attempts to project fantasies about the human body onto the canvas. Light fading to dj spine. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 480 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. 378 color and 10 black & white illustrations. Tight copy. While European art forms were widely disseminated, copied, and adapted throughout Latin America, colonial painting is not a derivative extension of Europe. The ongoing debate over what to call it-mestizo, hybrid, creole, indo-hispanic, tequitqui-testifies to a fundamental yet unresolved question of identity. Comparing and contrasting the Viceroyalties of New Spain, with its center in modern-day Mexico, and Peru, the authors explore the very different ways the two regions responded to the influence of the Europeans and their art. A wide range of art and artists are considered, some for the first time.

Hardcover. Boston, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 112 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Featuring eighty-seven photographs, all drawn from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, that span nearly 150 years of image making.

Softcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 381 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Boston, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 112 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Photography as Fiction includes seventy-six color plates illustrating works from the J. Paul Getty Museum's collection that embrace theatricality and are unconcerned with documenting the world as it exists.

Hardcover. Preinceton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2nd pr., 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. "What is abstract art good for? What's the use-for us as individuals, or for any society-of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the past five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. 297 pages; approx. 250 color and bw figures. Remains a nice, sharp and bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Tate, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 208 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Provocative and entertaining, Pop Life examines how artists since the 1980s have cultivated their public persona as a product, and conjured a dazzling mix of media, commerce, and glamour to build their own "brands."

Hardcover. New York, NYUP, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. 208 pages of text followed by a ection of corresponding black & white illustrations. Titian's fame as the greatest colorist in the history of painting has led students of his art to concentrate on problems of style and authenticity rather than on problems of content and meaning. Dr. Panofsky treats this neglected aspect of the Venetian master's work with a wealth of humanistic scholarship, exploring such varied topics as Titian's relationship to the philosophy and literature of his time, his attitude toward the antique, and the reasons behind his unrivaled acclaim as a portraitist. These studies show Titian to have been a man of far richer and more complex culture than hitherto assumed, possessed not only of the supremely gifted hand but of a subtle and poetic mind.Light wear. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Germany, Steidl, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 224 pages. Softcover. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Adieu Saigon covers a varied range of imagery from Saigon, where Depardon photographed two wars and, on visits as recent as 2014, the unrecognizable, globalized city now called Ho Chi Minh. Depardon's work bears witness to a city in transition.

Softcover. Germany, Steidl, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 224 pages. Softcover. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Adieu Saigon covers a varied range of imagery from Saigon, where Depardon photographed two wars and, on visits as recent as 2014, the unrecognizable, globalized city now called Ho Chi Minh. Depardon's work bears witness to a city in transition.

Hardcover. US, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 292 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. Berkeley, CA , University of California Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 283 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Black and white illustrations throughout. This richly detailed study reconceptualizes a striking but enigmatic moment in Rembrandt's art from the 1650s--one of the artist's most prolific and creative periods. Michael Zell identifies a significant theological shift in Rembrandt's use of religious imagery and interprets this shift in light of the unique religious and social conditions of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Rembrandt's biblical art has generally been regarded as the embodiment of a Protestant aesthetic. By looking closely at the artist's relationship with his patron Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and the ideas of a group of "philosemitic" Protestants with whom the rabbi was engaged in an apologetic dialogue, Zell deepens and complicates our understanding of Rembrandt's sacred art from this period.

Hardcover. London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pictorial boards with an acetate dust wrapper, 304 pages. Warhol brought to the art world a unique awareness of the relationship that art might have with popular consumer culture and tabloid news, with celebrity, and with sexuality. Each of these themes is explored through visual dialogues between warhol and some sixty artists, among them John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Luc Tuymans. Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2nd Pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages, with her photo-illustrated dust jacket. Who speaks? Who is silent? Who is seen? Who is absent? These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, how we are seduced into a world of appearances: into a pose of who we are and aren't. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor. In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, Barbara Kruger addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.Barbara Kruger is an artist whose pictures and words engage issues of power, sex, money, difference, and death. Her work has appeared throughout America, Europe, and Japan in galleries, newspapers, magazines, and museums and on billboards, matchbooks, TV programs, t-shirts, postcards, and shopping bags. She has written about television, film, and cultures for Artforum, Esquire, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.

Hardcover. New York, Thames and Hudson, 3rd Revised, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 285 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Minor yellowing to dust jacket edges and spine. Previous owners inscription in pen to top edge of front flyleaf. An otherwise very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. 206 photographs, 16 in color. Follows the developments in the art and science of photography from the invention of the wet-collodion process through the evolution of dry plates.