Bill Traylor, Photograph by Horace Perry, Courtesy Alabama State Council on the Arts

Texts by Valérie Rousseau and Debra Purden

Born into slavery around 1853-4 on a cotton plantation in Benton, Alabama, Traylor has become one of the most important self-taught artists of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most celebrated African-American artists, along with Thorton Dial and William Edmondson. The story of Bill Traylor's life and work is a remarkable one. It is a story that deserves attention both nationally and internationally.

This publication, generously illustrated with full-page high-quality reproductions, provides a close examination of Traylor's recurrent themes, composition schemes, favored iconography, and contextual information related to the artist's biography, creative process and tools, visual environment, and artistic mindset.

Each artwork is considered in a context beyond that of an isolated image and in response to one another, forming a series of intricate and consistent narratives, intriguingly cinematic in its development. The elements of Traylor's biography are the anchors of an individual mythology. Instead of merely being a basic depiction, the subject becomes a visual statement structuring Traylor's mind, bringing together hidden symbols from Kongo Vodou, Hoodoo, Southern Baptist, Freemasonry, and Blues sources, as well as layers of references: slavery, uncensored violence in the Jim Crow era, and turbulence within the black enclave known as 'Dark Town' in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bill Traylor

Michael Rooks

Allegra Pesenti

Lawrence Rinder

Robert Storr

Randall Suffolk

Text by Michael Rooks. Contributions by Allegra Pesenti, Lawrence R. Rinder, and Robert Storr. Foreword by Randall Suffolk

 is the first major exhibition in the United States of work by the late American artist Al Taylor and represents nearly two decades of his career with sculptures, drawings, and prints that together reveal the polyglot nature of Taylor’s visual language and the reciprocity in his practice among drawing, constructing objects, printmaking, and observing. Works produced in one medium triggered the continuation of Taylor’s thought process in another or led to separate but related avenues of exploration across media. This mutual exchange resulted in elusive images and objects that offer propositions that often seem more scientific in nature than artistic, engendered by a process through which Taylor sought to realize works that might “create their own logic.” His voracious and omnivorous curiosity about the most quotidian things transformed these subjects into hypotheses for a series of unlikely and humorous observations grounded in the physicality of the real world. The fully illustrated catalogue includes essays by Michael Rooks, the High Museum’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; Allegra Pesenti, Associate Director of the Hammer Museum and Senior Curator of UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; Lawrence Rinder, Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and Robert Storr, artist, critic, curator, and professor of painting and printmaking at Yale University.

Al Taylor: What Are You Looking At?

Jarrett Earnest

The most comprehensive portrait of art criticism ever assembled, as told by the leading writers of our time.

In the last fifty years, art criticism has flourished as never before. Moving from niche to mainstream, it is now widely taught at universities, practiced in newspapers, magazines, and online, and has become the subject of debate by readers, writers, and artists worldwide.

Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, 

 offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing. These thirty in-depth conversations chart the role of the critic as it has evolved from the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring artists and writers alike. John Ashbery recalls finding Rimbaud’s poetry through his first gay crush at sixteen; Rosalind Krauss remembers stealing the design of October from Massimo Vignelli; Paul Chaat Smith details his early days with Jimmy Durham in the American Indian Movement; Dave Hickey talks about writing country songs with Waylon Jennings; Michele Wallace relives her late-night and early-morning interviews with James Baldwin; Lucy Lippard describes confronting Clement Greenberg at a lecture; Eileen Myles asserts her belief that her negative review incited the Women’s Action Coalition; and Fred Moten recounts falling in love with Renoir while at Harvard.

Jarrett Earnest’s wide-ranging conversations with critics, historians, journalists, novelists, poets, and theorists—each of whom approach the subject from unique positions—illustrate different ways of writing, thinking, and looking at art.

 Hilton Als, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Yve-Alain Bois, Huey Copeland, Holland Cotter, Douglas Crimp, Darby English, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Dave Hickey, Siri Hustvedt, Kellie Jones, Chris Kraus, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Molly Nesbit, Jed Perl, Barbara Rose, Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl, Barry Schwabsky, Paul Chaat Smith, Roberta Smith, Lynne Tillman, Michele Wallace, and John Yau.

Interviews with Art Critics

What it Means to Write About Art 

Sherry Turner DeCarava

Photographs by Roy DeCarava. Text by Langston Hughes. Afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava

“The people in these photographs had no walls up. They just accepted me and permitted me to take their photographs without any self-consciousness.” —Roy DeCarava

 is a “poem” about ordinary people, about teenagers around a jukebox, about children at an open fire hydrant, about riding the subway alone at night, about picket lines and artist work spaces. This renowned, life-affirming collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw, knew, and felt deeply about life in their city.

Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through the lives of those around her, we imagine the babies born, families in struggle, children yet flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and worldly eyes, expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states, “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision. The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” the photographs bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality, to a resolution that stands with the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in 

, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955, the book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history and ongoing importance of this book.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (softcover)

Christian Viveros-Fauné

In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics, 

 illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises.

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art

, renowned critic, curator, and writer Christian Viveros-Fauné has picked fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s 

 (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each piece, Viveros-Fauné paints a picture of the context in which each work was created, the artist’s background, and the historical impact of each contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso’s 

 and its place at the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer’s 

 (1977–1979), which still stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real worlds they engage with.


Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, 

 delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150 years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality and racism, and the challenges of technology.

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art 

A detail of an artwork by Michaël Borremans titled The Commuter II dated 2022

Portrait of Michaël Borremans, 2025. Photo by Charlie De Keersmaecker 

Michael Bracewell

Spotlight Series

The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, 

 highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence.

Known for his ability to recall classical painting, both through technical mastery and subject matter, Borremans’s depiction of the uncanny, the perhaps secret, the bizarre, often surprises, sometimes disturbs the viewer. In this series of work, children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness.

In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. He writes, “The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both English-only and 

Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

In 2017, Chris Ofili photographed chain-link fences throughout the island of Trinidad in order to explore notions of beauty, community, liberation, and constraint. This series of arresting images—“pocket photography,” as described by the artist—is the first body of photography ever published by Ofili. Through these entrancing black-and-white photographs, the artist engages with the diverse sources that inspired his critically acclaimed 

 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017.

Since moving to Trinidad in 2005, Ofili has continued to engage with the surrounding environment and culture, which has found its way into many of his colorful paintings. In these deceivingly simple black-and-white photographs, he captures a wide cross section of Trinidad as he highlights the encounter between natural and man-made settings, and the different aesthetic possibilities each brings out in the other. In focusing on a ubiquitous and seemingly unremarkable piece of equipment, Ofili is able to comment on our interactions with space and each other, using a near-universal subject as the fence slices the sky, melds into a tree, frames a basketball game, or reveals an opening.

In a new essay by the critically acclaimed author of 

Island People: The Caribbean and the World

 (2016), Joshua Jelly-Schapiro charts the history of chain-link fences; focusing on a selection of Ofili’s photographs, he then begins to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.

Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost 

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Richard Shiff

The quest for discovery through looking is the driving force of Bridget Riley’s work, as she has written: “More than anything else I want my paintings to exist on their own terms. That is to say they must stealthily engage and disarm you. There the paintings hang, deceptively simple—telling no tales as it were—resisting, in a well-behaved way, all attempts to be questioned, probed or stared at and then, for those with open eyes, serenely disclosing some intimations of the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.”

This publication unfolds along the lines of Riley’s 2018 exhibition at David Zwirner, London. Beginning with an exploration of black-and-white equilateral triangles, Riley leads the viewer into an awareness of the ways in which a surface—wall or canvas—can affect a seemingly simple form: the triangle. While she demonstrates these subtle changes, Riley manipulates this form by bending its sides. At first sight the viewer may experience this as a breaking apart, but as one continues to look, serpentine movements appear, or large shadowy triangles, which advance and recede. These paintings constantly reinvent themselves through looking.

Riley is revisiting and developing works which she initiated over fifty years ago, as is shown here by the inclusion of 

(1962/1965) in the exhibition. This diamond formation of discs, which graduates in tone from white to black and back again, offers a lead-in to her new body of work. In 

series, Riley recalls a group of subtly shaded colors used this time in discs. While the compositions remain fundamentally the same, the play of colors changes every time.

The exhibition ends with a surprisingly spacious wall painting that offers the viewer many delights, not least among them a dance of fugitive white lights. Here, Riley disarms the viewer, encouraging us once again in an adventure of discovery. In his essay, Richard Shiff explores Riley’s ability to give new life to basic forms as she invites the audience, any audience, to help participate in the painting.

Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings 2014–2017

This title is out of print and available in a limited number of copies. Browse a selection of rare books 

Over the course of his 30-year career, Thomas Ruff has approached every genre of photography and coolly reinvented it.

One of the greatest artists to use photography in the 21st century, Ruff came of age in the 1980s alongside Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth, in what was to become known as the Düsseldorf School.

Creating photographic images on the scale of history painting but with a cool hyperrealism, Ruff moves from the micro to the macro, from portraying friends to picturing the cosmos. He also oscillates between the laboratory and the archive, experimenting with digital technologies to create photograms with virtual objects and rescuing discarded press photographs to reveal lost histories.

This substantial Ruff overview accompanies a major retrospective survey at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and contains all of his most renowned series, including portraits, disasters, sky and cityscapes, internet nudes, photograms, manga images, magnetically generated images, and found press photographs.

Thomas Ruff

This title is out of print and available in a limited number of copies. Browse a selection of rare books 

This richly illustrated publication accompanies Rose Wylie’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery exhibition 

, which includes paintings and works on paper dating from the late 1990s to the present day, some never previously exhibited. Wylie creates paintings of visually compelling images that she encounters on a day-to-day basis, finding inspiration in a variety of sources: personal memories, art history, contemporary cinema, sport, news and celebrity stories. Driven by a relentless curiosity and instilled with wit, her paintings propose new perspectives on the world and the plethora of images that make up our collective cultural memory.

Alongside plates of all paintings in the exhibition, this publication expands upon Wylie’s practice and presents images of additional paintings, works on paper and preparatory drawings from her new series based on Hyde Park. This catalogue features an introductory text by Curator Melissa Blanchflower. Writer Barry Schwabsky offers a dialogue on the nature and objectives of painting. Artists Tal R and Alvaro Barrington have written instinctive and poetic responses to Wylie’s unique approach to image and mark-making, whilst Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has contributed a fictional text in three parts set in Hyde Park, that loosely take images in Wylie’s paintings and their potential for narrative as touchstones.

Rose Wylie: Quack Quack

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Laura Hoptman

Udo Kultermann

Catherine Taft

Akira Tatehata

Texts by Akira Tatehata, Laura Hoptman, Udo Kultermann, and Catherine Taft

An updated edition of the acclaimed monograph, celebrating one of the most iconic and revolutionary artists of our time.

"Yayoi Kusama transcended the art world to become a fixture of popular culture, in a league with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Keith Haring." —

Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama's subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

Revised and Expanded Edition

Yayoi Kusama

Phong Bui

Edited by Jarrett Earnest and Lucas Zwirner. Introduction and portraits by Phong Bui

 has been a platform for artists, academics, critics, poets, and writers in New York and abroad. The monthly journal’s continued appeal is due in large part to its diverse contributors, many of whom bring contrasting and often unexpected opinions to conversations about art and aesthetics. No other publication devotes as much space to the artist’s voice, allowing ideas to unfold and idiosyncrasies to emerge through open discussion.

Since its inception, cofounder and artistic director Phong Bui and the 

’s contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for 

. This volume brings together for the first time a selection of sixty of the most influential and seminal interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha. While each interview is important in its own right, offering a perspective on the life and work of a specific artist, collectively they tell the story of a journal that has grown during one of the more diverse and surprising periods in visual art. There is no unified style or perspective; 

’s strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference.

Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent 

 contributor, with Lucas Zwirner, the book includes an introduction to the project by Phong Bui as well as many of the hand-drawn portraits he has made of those he has interviewed over the years. This combination of verbal and visual profiles offers a rare and personal insight into contemporary visual culture.

 Vito Acconci, Ai Weiwei, Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Conner, Alex Da Corte, Rosalyn Drexler, Keltie Ferris, Simone Forti, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Suzan Frecon, Coco Fusco, Robert Gober, Leon Golub, Ron Gorchov, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Sheila Hicks, David Hockney, Roni Horn, House of Ladosha, Alfredo Jaar, Bill Jensen, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Matvey Levenstein, Nalini Malani, Brice Marden, Chris Martin, Jonas Mekas, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Nozkowski, Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Ernesto Pujol, Martin Puryear, Walid Raad, Dorothea Rockburne, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Robert Ryman, Dana Schutz, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Turrell, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, Yan Pei-Ming, and Lisa Yuskavage

Special thanks to Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, for their support of 

Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail

Tell Me Something Good

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

Elaine de Kooning

Colm Toibin

Introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber. Texts by Josef Albers, Elaine de Kooning, and Colm Tóibín

Using minimal means—paint straight from the tube, applied meticulously with a palette knife—and a focused selection of colors, Josef Albers’s sustained, serial investigation into rhythm, mood, and spatial movement is explored in this lavishly produced catalogue that looks solely at his respective grey and yellow paintings, exploring two distinct color palettes pervasive to his oeuvre.

Highlighting the rich diversity of effects Albers drew from a narrow range of colors, this publication centers around the groundbreaking 

 (1950), the inaugural painting in the series that would occupy the artist until his death in 1976. The pairing of two palettes—black, white, and grey and an array of yellows—stems in part from Albers’s 1964 series of lithographs, 

, which brought together these two opposing color sets in a single portfolio. Together they address the limitless possibilities the artist found in color and form in relation to light. The impossible simultaneity of “midnight” and “noon” moreover speaks to Albers’s transcending of what he called “factual facts” in favor of the play of perception and illusion possible in art.

Opening with an introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, that contextualizes these works and their color palettes, this volume also includes Albers’s own writing on 

. Additionally, Elaine de Kooning’s historic text and Colm Tóibín’s recent writing explore this body of work from different perspectives and time periods. Published on the occasion of exhibitions at David Zwirner’s New York and London galleries in 2016 and 2017, this beautifully illustrated publication looks at one of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century.

Josef Albers: Midnight and Noon

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.

All Books