Synopses & Reviews
With a searing body of work ranging from drawings and films to prints, tapestries, and sculptures, William Kentridge (b. 1955) has offered a fresh and distinctive glimpse of the daily lives of South Africansand#151;both during the apartheid regime and after its collapse. This extraordinary catalogue, produced in close collaboration with the artist, investigates the five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the course of his career:
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- Soho and Felix: works featuring Kentridgeand#8217;s best-known characters, the businessman Soho Eckstein and his alter ego, the anxiety-ridden Felix Teitlebaum.
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- Ubu and the Procession: inspired by Ubu Roi, these projects reflect the excitement, conflict, and rapid social changes in post-apartheid South Africa.
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- Artist in the Studio: an examination of Kentridgeand#8217;s practice and his emergence as an installation artist.
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- The Magic Flute: work related to the artistand#8217;s set designs for Mozartand#8217;s opera.
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- The Nose: Kentridgeand#8217;s most recent production, including work inspired by his staging of the Shostakovich opera for New Yorkand#8217;s Metropolitan Opera in spring 2010.
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Kentridge has created a DVD especially for this publication; it includes fragments from significant film projects (both known and newly completed) as well as commentary that sheds further light on the artistand#8217;s work.
Review
"[Surrealist Ghostliness] is an important addition to the literature on surrealism and modern art, very well written and an extremely interesting and engaging read."and#8212;Rob Harle, Leonardo Journal
Review
andquot;Conley offers a richly argued discussion, speculative and articulate, that usefully contributes to our reading of the 'long Surrealism'.andquot;andmdash;Robert Radford, Burlingtonand#160;Magazine
Synopsis
American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark body of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which appropriate the writings of African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston. In subsequent bodies of work, Ligon has dealt with a wide range of material, including images and slogans related to early civil rights demonstrations and the Million Man March, as well as runaway slave notices, Richard Pryor jokes, and 1970s coloring books targeted at African-American children.
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, created in close collaboration with the artist, is the first in-depth presentation of his art, including paintings, photography, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings. Essays by high-profile contributors explore Ligon's working methods and related topics such as literature and democracy, slave narratives, music, comedy, race, and sexuality, all of which situate the artist within a broader cultural context and greatly advance the understanding and renown of this pioneering American artist.
Synopsis
In this study of surrealism and ghostliness, Katharine Conley provides a new, unifying theory of surrealist art and thought based on history and the paradigm of puns and anamorphosis. In
Surrealist Ghostliness, Conley discusses surrealism as a movement haunted by the experience of World War I and the repressed ghost of spiritualism. From the perspective of surrealist automatism, this double haunting produced a unifying paradigm of textual and visual puns that both pervades surrealist thought and art and commemorates the surrealistsand#8217; response to the Freudian unconscious. Extending the gothic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century, the surrealists inaugurated the psychological century with an exploration of ghostliness through doubles, puns, and anamorphosis, revealing through visual activation the underlying coexistence of realities as opposed as life and death.
Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassaand#239; and Salvador Daland#237;, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the centuryand#8217;s most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.
Synopsis
A landmark publication focusing on both Rivera and Kahlo during a critical year in each of their careers
Synopsis
This book delves into a tumultuous and highly productive year during which Rivera created one of his most accomplished mural cycles and Kahlo, almost unnoticed, developed her her own artistic identity.and#160;
Synopsis
From April 1932 through March 1933, Diego Rivera (1886andndash;1957)and#160;and Frida Kahlo (1907andndash;1954)and#160;spent a dramatic and pivotal sojourn in Detroit. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression and amid labor protests in the city, Rivera created his
Detroit Industry murals, one of the most important and accomplished works of art made in the United States in the 20th century, for the Detroit Institute of Arts. Kahlo, meanwhile, developed her own artistic identity almost unnoticed, emerging with an oeuvre of extraordinarily expressive work.
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For this highly anticipated catalogue, Mark Rosenthal and a team of scholars have written essays that examine the artists, the city of Detroit in this period, and the commissioning of the murals by Edsel Ford, the patron, and William Valentiner, then director of the Detroit Institute. Riveraandrsquo;s cartoons for the murals, which have not been exhibited in decades, are highlighted here along with new archival research conducted by Riveraandrsquo;s grandson, Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera. Featuring more than 100 color illustrations of works by both artists, this book presents Detroit as a profoundly important place for the artistic development of Rivera and Kahlo.
About the Author
Scott Rothkopf is curator and Adam D. Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director, both at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hilton Als is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Okwui Enwezor was dean of the San Francisco Art Institute. Thelma Golden is director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University. Bennett Simpson is associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Franklin Sirmans is curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.