Alison M. Gingeras

Guy Bourdin (1928–1991) created some of the most challenging and seductive fashion photography of the last century. He worked for French Vogue for over 30 years, from 1955–1987, and his images filled the pages of international fashion magazines during the 1970s and 1980s in groundbreaking campaigns for Charles Jourdan, Bloomingdales and Dior. His high-glamour, yet often surreal work revolutionized the genre of fashion photography, presenting fashion as the luxurious embellishment rather than the subject of his photographs, which foreground dark fantasies of lust, consumption and desire. Bourdin's legacy can still be seen in the work of photographers such as Stephen Meisel and Helmut Newton. This accessible monograph is the perfect introduction to his work.

A look at the dark, symbolic work of Polish painter Aleksandra Waliszewska alongside historical artworks that influence her. Painter Aleksandra Waliszewska creates densely narrative, art historically saturated oil and gouache paintings. Waliszewska’s pictorial universe is populated by supernatural characters and dark themes: devils, vampires, satanic creatures, possessed girls, apocalyptic scenes, bloodthirsty zombies, and other incarnations of the living dead. These characters are situated in dystopian urban landscapes, lost highways, deserted suburbs, gloomy housing estates, swamps, and other sites associated with the Eastern European landscape. Drawing from the specifically Slavic histories of the Upiór (the living dead), Waliszewska claims her artistic and conceptual descendance from premodern art and Symbolist works of the late 19th and early 20th century from Nordic, Baltic, and Eastern European regions. The Dark Arts presents a dense visual narrative, reproducing over a hundred images of Waliszewska’s in juxtaposition with dozens of historical paintings and sculptures. Shifting away from the dominant figures of French and Austrian artists, this revisionist look at Symbolism through an Eastern and Baltic lens will introduce a wider audience to a rich and relatively understudied field of visual culture.

A revealing look at the evolution of male iconography in the work of one of the foremost painters of his generation.Since raising the ire of the early-1990s arts establishment with his deliberately provocative portrayals of women, John Currin has been best known for his brazen, militantly incorrect female iconography. Yet Currin has represented a range of masculine identities throughout his career as well.This volume is the first to focus exclusively on this aspect of his work, examining the evolution of his equally provocative depictions of men. It ranges from little-known early works on paper and a series of kitschy paintings of men with beards to signature eccentric figures such as the elderly reader in the painting 2070 (2005) and his more baroque genre scenes featuring male couples. Published to accompany the exhibition John Currin: My Life as a Man at the Dallas Contemporary, it offers a revealing new assessment of Currin's pictorial examinations of sexual politics.