Alexander Nemerov

ekphrasis

 is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past?

In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life. Beginning with the photo album of a former Japanese kamikaze pilot, which is reproduced in this volume, Nemerov transports the reader into a different world through his engagement with the photographs and the construction of a narrative around them.

 expands what we traditionally associate with ekphrastic writing. The kind of writing that can enliven a work of art is also the kind of writing that makes the past appear in vivid color and deep feeling. In the end, this timely piece of writing opens onto fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues to live in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Here, Nemerov’s constant awareness of the power of language to make an experience—seen or remembered—become real reminds us that great ekphrastic writing is at the heart of every effective description.

Summoning Pearl Harbor

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Texts by K. Heymer, J. Heynen, and M. Kliege

The American artist Sherrie Levine realises in her works the artistic praxis of appropriating, repeating and varying famous earlier artworks. At the same time in doing so she creates her own new oeuvre. Beyond the mere copy she further develops the works conceptually and with historical clichés, presenting it to the viewer for reconsideration.

Sherrie Levine is a photographer, painter, and sculptor and is celebrated above all in the United States. When we first consider her works we think of the imitation and interpretation of the reference works, but our conclusions about the copy soon disappear in favor of a new, autonomous original. The volume shows over 50 works “after” artists like Duchamp, Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh, and Mondrian, from whose masterpieces Sherrie Levine has created something new. In addition art experts place her work in context, for example with regard to her choice of subject or her methods of reproduction.

Sherrie Levine: After All

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Gary Carrion-Murayari

Massimiliano Gioni

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Frances Stark

Lynne Tillman

Texts by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Frances Stark, and Lynne Tillman. Conversation with the artist and Massimiliano Gioni

This thorough, multifaceted assessment of Raymond Pettibon's entire career to date includes nearly 700 images, contributions from important figures in the art-historical and cultural fields, and a recent interview with the artist. Beginning with childhood drawings, the book moves through to his mature work, which embraces both high and low culture.

The book includes ink drawings, paintings, wall drawings, comics, videos, and more, spanning half a century, from the time Pettibon was a child to contemporary work, which takes inspiration from literature, politics, sports, art history, and sexuality. It also features a title on the front cover and spine that was hand lettered by the artist and nearly 200 never-before-published works and items of ephemera.

The book accompanies major survey exhibitions at the New Museum, New York and Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, The Netherlands in 2017.

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Okwui Enwezor

Emma Enderby

María Belén Sáez de Ibarra

Anna Schneider

Edited by Okwui Enwezor and Anna Schneider. Introduction by Okwui Enwezor. Texts by Emma Enderby and Anna Schneider. Conversation with the artist by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra

With a body of powerful paintings, dynamic installations, and hauntingly poetic video works, Oscar Murillo has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s leading voices. Published on the occasion of Murillo’s 2017 solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, this volume––the first dedicated overview of his astonishing career to date––presents the artist’s multifaceted practice from every angle.

Born in Colombia, Murillo became widely recognized in his early twenties for his large-scale paintings that drew freely on both personal as well as art-historical references and influences. Since then, Murillo has been consistently interested in approaches to art making that are not rooted in the dominant Western value system, while remaining guided by his own aesthetic, rather than political messages or other, more reductive narratives. With numerous exhibitions at major museums and galleries, as well as ambitious projects at lesser-known exhibition spaces in Anyang (South Korea), Baku (Azerbaijan), Marrakech (Morocco), and Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), Murillo puts his politics of inclusivity to work without needing to make the work itself overtly political. In positioning himself between worlds—the art world, his family and community, peripheral spaces he seeks to inhabit—Murillo has made room for a new visual language, one that draws as easily and subversively on his personal narratives and the narratives around the places he has visited, as it does on traditional vocabularies of painting, installation, and sculpture.

With an introduction by Okwui Enwezor and new scholarship by Anna Schneider and Emma Enderby, this publication offers critical insight into Murillo’s complex, vibrant body of work that continually offers enriching, powerful observations of the world around us.

Oscar Murillo

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rachel Corbett

Damion Searls

By Rainer Maria Rilke. Introduction by Rachel Corbett. Translated by Damion Searls

Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating 

, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous 

, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. While the latter has become a global phenomenon, with millions of copies sold in many different languages, the present volume has been largely overlooked.

In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Rilke’s constant warmth, his ability to sense in advance his correspondent’s difficulties and propose solutions to them, and his sensitivity as a person and an artist come across in these charming and honest letters.

Writing during his aged years, this volume paints a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, through the perspective of hindsight, and continued to embrace his openness towards other creative individuals. With an introduction by Rachel Corbett, author of 

You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin

 (2016), this book is a must-have for Rilke’s admirers, young and old, and all aspiring artists.

Letters to a Young Painter

Texts by Joaquin Barríendos and Lauren Hinkson

Albers in "the promised land of abstract art”: the little-known influence of Mexico

“Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art,” Josef Albers wrote to his former Bauhaus colleague Vasily Kandinsky in 1936. 

 reveals the profound link between the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica and Albers’s abstract works on canvas and paper. With his wife, the artist Anni Albers, Albers toured pre-Columbian archeological sites and monuments during his twelve or more trips to Mexico and other Latin American countries between 1935 and 1968. On each visit, Albers took black-and-white photographs of pyramids, shrines, sanctuaries, and landscapes, which he later assembled into rarely seen photo collages. The resulting works demonstrate Albers’s continued formal experimentation with geometry, this time accentuating a pre-Columbian aesthetic.

 brings together photographs, photo collages, prints, and significant paintings from the 

 (1950–1976) series from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Two scholarly essays, an illustrated map, and vivid color reproductions of paintings and works on paper illuminate this little-known period in the influential artist’s practice.

Josef Albers in Mexico

A painting by Giorgio Morandi titled Natura morta (Still Life), dated 1956.

David Leiber

Text by Laura Mattioli. Contributions by John Baldessari, Lawrence Carroll, Vija Celmins, Mark Greenwold, Liu Ye, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexi Worth, and Zeng Fanzhi. Foreword by David Leiber

One of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi created works that continue to exert their mysterious power on viewers worldwide.

This publication focuses on the period from 1948 to 1964, during which Morandi developed and refined his investigations of serial, reductive, and permutational forms and compositions, a body of work that has had a profound influence on twentieth-century art and painting. Included here are five of the ten iconic “yellow cloth” paintings from 1952, a series featured prominently in the historic 1998 exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and numerous late paintings by the Italian master. Lavishly reproduced, these immersive plates draw attention to the idiosyncratic perspectival and color-driven decisions that give the work its abstract power. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2015 exhibition of Morandi’s paintings from this period at David Zwirner, New York—which, according to 

, represent “lucid perfection, at once cerebral and impassioned.” It marked the first major presentation of the artist’s late work in America since the acclaimed 2008 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In addition to an essay by Laura Mattioli and a foreword by David Leiber, who organized the exhibition, this catalogue includes a fantastic array of contributions by contemporary artists: John Baldessari, Lawrence Carroll, Vija Celmins, Mark Greenwold, Liu Ye, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexi Worth, and Zeng Fanzhi. They offer their personal responses to Morandi’s work and to the Zwirner exhibition in particular. Working in different media across many disciplines, this diverse list of contributors is a testament to the reach of Morandi’s paintings and their influence on contemporary art.

Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings

Yve-Alain Bois

David Gray

Lisa Le Feuvre

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois, David Gray, and Lisa Le Feuvre

This new publication marks the first comprehensive survey of a seminal body of work that helped make Fred Sandback into the internationally celebrated artist he has become known as today.

This catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in the fall of 2016, takes its lead from a 1987 mid-career presentation of Sandback’s work at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, also called 

. With a mixture of archival imagery of the sculptures in situ in Münster, and new photography of these works installed at Zwirner, this publication is both a historical document and a source of renewed attention to this body of work. It also features an expanded selection of sculpture, going beyond what was presented in the 1987 and 2016 exhibitions, to include key examples of vertical constructions spanning Sandback’s career.

New scholarship by Yve-Alain Bois revisits his leading argument that was put forth in his essay for the 2005 Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein catalogue about the power of Sandback’s immateriality—its ability to linger in our memories—in the context of the vertical constructions. Lisa Le Feuvre, a longtime scholar of sculpture, offers a more historical treatment of the show in relation to the artist’s writings and other works. Also included is a text by David Gray, who responds to Marianne Stockebrand’s original essay about the Münster installation; he reveals the dialogues around Sandback’s practice at the time and helps us reconstruct the way the influence of his vertical works has continued to grow in the thirty years since.

Fred Sandback: Vertical Constructions

Alice Michel

Jeff Nagy

There are many myths about the artist Edgar Degas—from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant, to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than 

, a short memoir published by Alice Michel, who purportedly modeled for Degas.

Never before translated into English, the text’s original publication in 

 in 1919, shortly after the artist’s death, has been treated as an important account of the master sculptor at work. We know that Alice was writing under a pseudonym, but who the real person behind this account was remains a mystery—to this day nothing is known about her. Yet, the descriptions seem too accurate to be ignored, the anecdotes too spot-on to discount; even the dialogue captures the artist’s tone and mannerisms.

What is found in these pages is at times a woman’s flirtatious recollection of a bizarre “artistic type” and at others a moving attempt to connect with a great, often tragic man. The descriptions are limpid, unburdened; the dialogue is lively and intimate, not unlike reading the very best kind of gossip, with world-historical significance. Here in these dusty studios, Degas is alive, running hands over clay, complaining about his eyes, denigrating the other artists around him, and whispering salaciously to his model. And during his mood swings, we see reflected the model’s innocence and confusion, her pain at being misunderstood and finally rejected. It is an intimate portrait of a moment in a great artist’s life, a sort of 

 in which his model (whoever she may be) does not emerge unscathed.

Degas and His Model

Edward A. Vazquez

Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.

Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.

Aspects: Fred Sandback's Sculpture

Nicholas Fox Weber

Manuel Cirauqui

T’ai Smith

By Anni Albers. Contributions by Manuel Cirauqui and T'ai Smith. Afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber

The classic book on the art and history of weaving—now expanded and in full color.

Written by one of the twentieth century’s leading textile artists, this splendidly illustrated book is a luminous meditation on the art of weaving, its history, its tools and techniques, and its implications for modern design. First published in 1965, 

 bridges the transition between handcraft and the machine-made, highlighting the essential importance of material awareness and the creative leaps that can occur when design problems are tackled by hand.

With her focus on materials and handlooms, Anni Albers discusses how technology and mass production place limits on creativity and problem solving, and makes the case for a renewed embrace of human ingenuity that is particularly important today. Her lucid and engaging prose is illustrated with a wealth of rare and extraordinary images showing the history of the medium, from hand-drawn diagrams and close-ups of pre-Columbian textiles to material studies with corn, paper, and the typewriter, as well as illuminating examples of her own work.

Now available for a new generation of readers, this expanded edition of 

 updates the book’s original black-and-white illustrations with full-color photos, and features an afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber and essays by Manuel Cirauqui and T’ai Smith that shed critical light on Albers and her career.

New Expanded Edition

Anni Albers: On Weaving

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Hilton Als

Jeremy Lewison

By Hilton Als. Foreword by Jeremy Lewison

Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists, and more, Alice Neel created forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues.

, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel’s approach, the selection looks at those whose portraits are often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; “what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered,” Als writes.

The publication, which opens with a foreword by Jeremy Lewison, advisor to The Estate of Alice Neel, explores Neel’s interest in the diversity of uptown New York and the variety of people amongst whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress, and author Alice Childress; the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr.; the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse; alongside more anonymous individuals of a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman, and a local kid who ran errands for Neel.

In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective. A contemporary and personal approach to the artist’s oeuvre, Als’s project is “an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing.”

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibitions of Neel’s paintings and drawings at David Zwirner, New York, and Victoria Miro, London.

Alice Neel: Uptown

Billy Sullivan

Mimi Thompson

Stanley Whitney

John Yau

Text by John Yau. Interview with Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan by Mimi Thompson

Al Taylor began his studio practice as a painter and although he is more widely known for the three-dimensional works he started making in 1985, the artist maintained that his constructions weren’t “at all about sculptural concerns; [they come] from a flatter set of traditions.” Throughout his career, whether he worked on canvas, drawings and prints, or sculpture, the creative process of Taylor’s oeuvre was fundamentally grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in spring 2017, 

 is the first book to focus exclusively on the artist’s works on canvas, featuring a selection of rarely seen paintings created between 1971 and 1980.

New scholarship by poet and art critic John Yau examines the visual relationships that connect Taylor’s paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects, while also reflecting on the art world in New York City during the 1970s. In addition, a conversation conducted by Mimi Thompson between renowned painters Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan—all of whom knew Taylor well during his lifetime—provides insight into his reputation as an “artist’s artist.” Twenty-six paintings are at the heart of this catalogue—embodying the subtleties of reduction and restraint, they nonetheless have hints of the idiosyncratic playfulness that would come to characterize Taylor’s later works. In some canvases, the artist delineates spatial perspectives by incorporating the wall in shaped compositions where a single color often dominates; elsewhere, it is the interaction of his color juxtapositions and fluid paint application that energize the canvas. Both painterly and sculptural in their address, these works deviate from the usual tropes of abstraction to uniquely engage space, perception, and possess a lyrical rhythm.

This new publication reveals and validates the importance of Al Taylor’s paintings both within his own practice and in the context of twentieth-century abstraction.

Al Taylor: Early Paintings

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn

By Jean-Claude Lebensztejn. Translated by Jeff Nagy

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, 

, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France’s best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti.

—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company—the author takes the reader through a semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene located directly above Cimabue’s 

 from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn’s careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar who looks like he is about to urinate through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film 

, for example, and Marlene Dumas’s 1996–1997 homage to Rembrandt’s pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn’s prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matter entertaining.

In this short and poignant cultural history, readers not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time. The first widely distributed book of Lebensztejn’s in English, 

 is simultaneously published in France by Éditions Macula.

Pissing Figures 1280–2014

Brenda Danilowitz

A superb facsimile of the only known notebook of legendary artist Anni Albers, this publication offers insight into the methodology of a modern master.

Beginning in 1970, Anni Albers filled her graph-paper notebook regularly until 1980. This rare and previously unpublished document of her working process contains intricate drawings for her large body of graphic work, as well as studies for her late knot drawings. The notebook follows Albers's deliberations and progression as a draftsman in their original form. It reveals the way she went about making complex patterns, exploring them piece by piece, line by line in a visually dramatic and mysteriously beautiful series of geometric arrangements.

An afterword by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, contextualizes the notebook and explores the role studies played in the development of her work.

Anni Albers: Notebook 1970–1980

A detail from a painting by Steven Shearer, titled The Collector's Visit, dated 2019.

Steven Shearer, The Collector's Visit, 2019

Conversation between Steven Shearaer and Jim Lewis

The exhibition, which spans Steven Shearer’s prolific 20-year career working in a variety of media, brings together paintings, drawings, collages and poems to demonstrate the constantly evolving nature of the artist’s practice. Shearer’s work draws upon a visual lexicon of portraiture and representation of the body, often using found imagery that he collects and archives as source material. Through this process, contemporary imagery is distilled into the tradition of portraiture revealing affinities between various modes of figuration throughout history to the present.

Shearer consistently returns to the found imagery he collects to use as the subject matter of his collage works, which incorporate images lifted from various fan magazines as well as from the web. These references often reflect not only his own personal experience of growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, but also a collective memory of the visual and verbal landscape of suburban and teenage alienation.

Cover of the book Steven Shearer published by The Brant Foundation in 2025

Steven Shearer

This groundbreaking book re-evaluates the work of Alice Neel, one of the most renowned American portrait painters of the 20th century

This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel’s (1900-1984) celebrated paintings of people, still life, and cityscapes. Featuring around seventy paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, all of which provided an important precedent for the veracity and raw emotional intensity of her figurative works. Neel is renowned for her visual acuity and psychological depth, and her portraits and nude paintings of friends, family, strangers, and prominent cultural figures alike convey an incredibly consistent intimacy regardless of the relationship to her subject.

The accompanying essays trace the trajectory of Neel’s artistic language as it evolved alongside contemporaneous trends in the New York City art world and examine the manner in which her own work figured into the social and cultural contexts of her time. Created over a sixty-year period, Neel’s oeuvre offers a remarkably expressive document of the specific milieus she navigated through and ultimately transcends the marker of time altogether.

Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Yayoi Kusama

Akira Tatehata

Text by Akira Tatehata. Poem by Yayoi Kusama

Widely recognized as one of the most popular artists in the world, Yayoi Kusama has shaped her own narrative of postwar and contemporary art. Minimalism and Pop art, abstraction and conceptualism coincide in her practice, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, room-sized and outdoor installation, the written word, films, fashion, design, and architectural interventions. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama briefly studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking happenings, events, and exhibitions. Now in her late 80s, Kusama is entering one of the richest creative periods of her life. Immersed in her studio six days a week, Kusama has spoken of her renewed dedication to creating art over the past years: “[N]ew ideas come welling up every day….Now I am more keenly aware of the time that remains and more in awe of the vast scope of art.”

 documents the artist's most recent exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which marked the US debut of 

, an all-white, domestic interior that viewers are invited to cover with dot stickers of various sizes and colors. Taking 

 as its centerpiece, this catalogue reveals, in vivid large-scale plates, the transformation of the space from a clean white interior to a stunningly saturated room, with ceilings, walls, and furniture covered in myriad multicolored stickers put there by viewers over the course of the exhibition. The catalogue also includes beautiful reproductions of Kusama's new large-format paintings from 

 series. Ranging from bright and densely pixelated forms, to umber figures with darker blues and muted oranges, these paintings demonstrate the artist's striking command of color, and her exceptional control over balance and contrast. Bold brushstrokes hover between figuration and abstraction; vibrant, animated, and intense, these paintings introduce their own powerful pictorial logic, at once contemporary and universal. The catalogue continues with a selection of new, large 

 sculptures, a form that Kusama has been exploring since her studies in Japan in the 1950s, and which gained prominence in the 1980s, continuing to remain an essential part of her practice. Made of shiny stainless steel and featuring painted dots or dot-shaped perforations that recall 

, these immersive works seem created on human scale, with the tallest measuring 70 inches (178 cm). Vibrant plates capture how color, shape, size, and surface merge in these sculptures and mesmerize the viewer. Texts include a "Hymn to Yayoi Kusama" by art critic and poet Akira Tatehata and a poem by the artist herself.

Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Alex Needham

, Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) chronicles East London’s art scene and nightlife of the early 2000s, as well as his friendship with collaborator and artist Conor Donlon. The book sees Donlon’s appearance and style changing, as well as his backdrops: a 2003 demonstration against George W. Bush’s state visit; a picnic at the park after an opening at Tillmans’s exhibition space Between Bridges; the bright yellow walls of Tillmans and Donlon’s home; long-gone LGBT clubs The Ghetto and The Joiners’ Arm; and quieter moments spent talking in the studio and around town.

Tillmans’s photographs are at once intimate and emblematic of a flourishing arts era, where both artists’ work gained momentum. 

 culture editor Alex Needham introduces the work with an essay about Donlon’s initial role as Tillmans’s assistant, contextualizing the artists’ collaboration and the inception of London independent bookstore Donlon Books in 2008.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Conor Donlon

Kay Heymer

Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans

 continues the artist’s questioning of traditional ideas of originality and authorship, developed over four decades, and her interest in the deconstruction of images and objects from the past in order to create new relationships with contemporary audiences today. Through repetition, duplication and restatement, this series not only re-examines the central and ongoing concerns of Levine’s artistic practice but also revisits one of the most prominent subjects of her oeuvre – the work of Walker Evans.

I–XXIV 

Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans

Paul Gauguin

Donatien Grau

By Paul Gauguin. Translated with an introduction by Donatien Grau

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much of art criticism, revealing not only how wrong critics’ interpretations have been, but also what it would mean to approach art properly—to really look.

Long out of print, this new translation by Donatien Grau includes an introduction that situates the essay within Gauguin’s written oeuvre, as well as explanatory notes. This text sheds light on Gauguin’s conception of art—widely considered a predecessor to Duchamp—and engages with many issues still relevant today: history, novelty, criticism, and the market. His voice feels as fresh, lively, sharp in English now as it did in French over one hundred years ago. Through Gauguin’s final piece of writing, we see the artist in the full throes of passion—for his work, for his art, for the art of others, and against anyone who would stand in his way.

As the inaugural publication in David Zwirner Books’s new 

 sets a perfect tone for the books to come. Poised between writing, art, and criticism, Gauguin brings together many different worlds, all of which should have a seat at the table during any meaningful discussion of art. With the express hope of encouraging open exchange between the world of writing and that of the visual arts, David Zwirner Books is proud to present this new edition of a lost masterpiece.

Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter

Michael Fried

Poems by Michael Fried. Photographs by James Welling

Michael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, 

Fried’s passion, lyricism, and humor, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J. M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art. Along the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete.

 breaks ground for Fried by combining the eighty poems—a mix of lyrical and prose poetry—with over thirty photographs, most of them made, all of them selected, by renowned American photographer James Welling. More often than not, the photographs stand in oblique relation to the poems, as complementary pieces of a mesmerizing whole.

Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s urging in “Self-Reliance”—“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events”—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet’s tragic loss of memory, from exemplary works such as Edgar Degas’s 

, and Adolf Menzel’s drawings, from the lives of figures such as Edouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age. 

is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wide-ranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader/viewer in its spell from first page to last.

“Ever alert within the shifting frames of his forms, Michael Fried\s poems persistently surprise the real, which he rides for all it’s worth. His poetry takes shape along the fault lines of experience, as raw material in the margins of our idea of the major. Candor and calamity, tenderness and intelligent irreverence—that’s the 

—Peter Cole, 2007 MacArthur Fellow, has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He is the author of 

Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

Promesse du Bonheur

Eva Badura-Triska

Veit Loers

Bernhard Riff

Texts by Eva Badura-Triska, Veit Loers, and Bernhard Riff

During the 1990s, Franz West’s work moved in new and innovative stylistic directions, as his career was solidified through important international exhibitions. This publication delves into this significant decade in an effort to contextualize the evolution of West’s singular practice.

The 1990s proved critical in the development of the idiosyncratic style for which West is still known today. His key innovations from this period—which included the addition of exuberant color to his papier-mâché forms, the incorporation of furniture both as art object and as social incubator, and the inclusion of work by other artists in his own installations—resulted in dynamic, frequently interactive installations that helped to expand the possibilities of sculpture and the ways in which art is experienced. Produced on the occasion of David Zwirner’s 2014 exhibition in New York, this fully illustrated publication gives an in-depth overview of the decade, arguably the most important of the artist’s lengthy career. It features essays by noted West scholars Eva Badura-Triska and Veit Loers, as well as a personal account by Bernhard Riff on video collaborations made with the artist throughout the 1990s.

Franz West: The 1990s

Marcel Proust

Jennie Feldman

By Marcel Proust. Afterword by Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat. Translated by Jennie Feldman

Long overlooked in Proust’s posthumously published writings, 

, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but contains the seeds of his later work.

Proposed in 1895 by Proust to the newspaper 

 (it was rejected), this essay is much more than a straightforward piece of art criticism. It is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.

Published for the first time as a stand-alone volume and newly translated, this edition, part of the David Zwirner Books 

 series, aims to introduce a wider audience to one of Proust’s most important and influential works in Western literature. “For the true artist,” as Proust writes, “as for the natural scientist, every 

 is interesting, and even the smallest muscle has its importance.” The same could be said of the author’s own work—every essay has its own crucial place in the formation of his groundbreaking oeuvre.

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