SUMMER READING LIST

Robert Motherwell: Open, Robert Motherwell (ed. Mel Gooding)

Robert Motherwell: Open is the first examination of the painter’s Open series, which preoccupied him from 1967 until the last years of his life. Pared down and minimal, these paintings differ greatly from his more dynamic and monumental Elegies series, for which he is perhaps best known. Containing many previously unpublished paintings as well as works in public collections, this monograph–the most comprehensive and best-illustrated book on Motherwell currently in print–introduces a series of texts by critics and art historians John Yau, Robert Hobbs, Matthew Collings, Donald Kuspit, Robert Mattison, Mel Gooding and Saul Ostrow. 21 Publishing, $65.

Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, James Rosenquist

From James Rosenquist, one of our most iconic pop artists—along with Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein—comes this candid and fascinating memoir. Unlike these artists, Rosenquist often works in three-dimensional forms, with highly dramatic shifts in scale and a far more complex palette, including grisaille and Day-Glo colors. A skilled traditional painter, he avoided the stencils and silk screens of Warhol and Lichtenstein. His vast canvases full of brilliant, surreally juxtaposed images would influence both many of his contemporaries and younger generations, as well as revolutionize twentieth-century painting. This is James Rosenquist’s story in his own words—captivating and unexpected, a unique look inside the contemporary art world in the company of one of its most important painters.

Knopf/Doubleday Publishing, $50.

Gerhard Richter, A Life in Painting, Gerhard Richter (ed. Dietmar Elger)

Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations. Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come. University of Chicago Press, $45.

Luc Tuymans, Luc Tuymans (ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn)

Luc Tuymans is one of today’s most widely admired painters, a continuation of the great tradition of Northern European painting and an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. Published in conjunction with the artist’s first full-scale American survey, this is without question the authoritative publication on Tuymans. It features approximately 75 key works from 1978 to the present, and is accompanied by essays analyzing the painter’s main concerns, with particular attention paid to his working process and his adaptation of source materials. Helen Molesworth examines themes of sinister banality, Joseph Leo Koerner writes on iconophobia and iconophilia, Ralph Rugoff considers the nature of visual experience in light of Tuymans’ recent work, and Bill Horrigan examines cinematic sources. This book is not only the most comprehensive survey of Tuymans’ career to date, but also the most thorough chronology of his artistic development. Wexner Center for the Arts, $60.

Kiki Smith Photographs, Kiki Smith
This book surveys a generous selection by Kiki Smith of her never-before-seen photographs along with previously published photos selected by the author. Part survey, part artist s book, this long-awaited look at the full range of Kiki Smith’s photography allows that body of work to
be recognized as an essential part of her working process and of the acclaimed body of work that includes her sculpture, installations, drawings, prints, and books. Over the three decades of her career, Smith has experimented with photography as a working tool, a means of personal expression, and simply as a medium in which she can explore space, composition, color, and texture. Smith’s selection of unseen photos for this book parallels the four concerns discussed in Elizabeth Brown’s essay studio process, reflecting and constructing identity, making stories, and recording her own artworks and allows us to intimately share
her unique vision. Prestel, $49.95.

Deborah Butterfield, Deborah Butterfield (ed. Robert Gordon)

Deborah Butterfield transforms selected pieces of scrap iron and found wood into majestic, life-size horse sculptures that are, as art historian Wayne L. Roosa has written, “simultaneously, like ancient, noble archaeological remains, skeletal and grand.” This elegant and lyrical volume presents a retrospective look at this important American artist, whose early works fashioned from wood and sticks caused a sensation at the 1979 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. An insightful essay by the noted author and horsewoman Jane Smiley sensitively captures the depth of Butterfield’s passion for horses both living and sculpted. John Yau, poet and art critic, adds a formal analysis of the artist’s work, and a selection of poems by the late, noted poet Vicki Hearne, a close friend of Butterfield’s, evokes the world of horses. Author Robert Gordon has followed the artist’s career for a quarter century and brings unique insight to her body of work. The first major monograph on this heralded sculptor, the book is timed to coincide with exhibitions at various galleries across the country and a major retrospective at the Yellowstone Museum.

Abrams, $40

The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, Don Thompson (paperback)

Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored. This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.

Palgrave Macmillan, $17