Imagining Landscapes Paintings By Helen Frankenthaler 1952 1976

This gorgeously illustrated volume offers new perspectives on Helen Frankenthaler’s art, taking a detailed look at her large-scale paintings that allude to landscapes, both real and imagined. Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways. This volume explores references to landscape in Frankenthaler’s paintings over a period spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1952, just prior to her breakthrough to stain painting. Focusing on fourteen works, it examines an extraordinary variety of gesture, from linear drawing to areas of lush, stained color and flatter, more opaque applications of paint. An essay by art historian Robert Slifkin considers the complex evocations of space in Frankenthaler’s works of this period. Richly illustrated with full-color plates, details, and documentary photographs, Imagining Landscapes offers a close and detailed look at the artist’s approach to painting over this twenty-five-year period.

The definitive monograph of Ari Marcopoulos, the renowned photographer whose explicit and startling visual intimacy bridges art and street photography. For nearly four decades, Ari Marcopoulos has broken conventions with his candid and raw style. His photographs documenting subcultures such as skateboarding, snowboarding, and hip-hop; his tendencies to photograph stark landscapes, portraits of artists, and celebrities; and his extremely quiet and intimate photos of his family and friends have all been hugely influential in helping to establish the visual rawness of youth culture, as well as the ephemeral aesthetic of contemporary photography. Ari Marcopoulos: Not Yet is an unprecedented journey through the artist’s celebrated career, from skateboarding and snowboarding to rural landscapes and cityscapes. This volume includes both iconic and never-before-published photographs from the 1980s to now. Each chapter is edited by a different celebrated artist or family member—all close to Marcopoulos—and it is through these personal reflections on the artist’s work that this monograph takes on a deeper level of intimacy, drawing a more complete portrait of his oeuvre.

A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York “The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” ―Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew―and left her mark on―the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg―comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary and musical vogues of the period, Robert Slifkin examines the role of history as both artistic medium and creative catalyst to GustonÕs practice as a painter. Slifkin employs a wealth of visual examples, archival materials, and original scholarship to situate GustonÕs paintings within broader artistic debates of the time, using the cultural movement of Òthe sixtiesÓ as its orienting foreground. This historical framework provides an interface between the notions of time in art and time in the material world. Lively and edifying, SlifkinÕs comprehensive text productively complicates the prescribed traditions of postwar art history and, in turn, shifts our perception of Guston and his place in the domain of modern art.

"Taking Helen Frankenthaler's 1950s New York debut as its starting point, "The heroine Paint": After Frankenthaler, a new publication edited by Katy Siegel, follows Frankenthaler's own painting over the years, expanding its focus to include the immediate social and artistic context of Frankenthaler's work, as well as tracing artistic currents as they move outwards in different directions over the decades. The book collects six scholarly essays, six short texts from contemporary artists, and reprints of historical writing, interweaving these voices with a visual chronology that locates key works from performances, publications, and cultural ephemera from over seven decades."--Publisher description.

The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.